Thanks in no small measure to the sixteenth-century French poet laureate Pierre de Ronsard, the adjective "gaillard" and its derivatives ("gaillardise" and "gaillardement") emerged to join the most semantically loaded and etymologically enigmatic words of the early modern French language. To the various meanings traceable to the term's Gallo-Roman and Celtic origins and faithfully recorded in the near-contemporary dictionaries, the Pléiade leader adds the ideas of nimble-wittedness, civility, and playfulness inspired by the Aristotelian moral concept of "eutrapelia." The present study not only exposes previously undetected yet copious textual evidence for this association, but it also reveals how Ronsard's eutrapelia-enhanced gaillardise shapes the rhetorical strategies at work in his polemical poetry and, further, contributes to his career-long ambition to bring definition to the "French" identity
