Rabelais, Francois (ca. 1483–1553)

Author and physician whose satires Gargantua and Pantagruel have survived as some of the most celebrated writings of Renaissance France. Born in the Loire Valley region of Touraine, Rabelais was the son of a lawyer. As a boy he became a novice monk and was educated at a Franciscan monastery and later became secretary to Geoffrey d'Estissac. He acquired a wideranging knowledge of science, philosophy, medicine, and ancient Greek and Latin. After leaving the monastery he trained as a physician at the University of Montpellier, where he became a lecturer in the classical medical science of Galen and Hippocrates. In 1532 he became a physician in Lyons, where he also worked as an editor and translator of Latin works. In the same year he published the first volume of his Pantagruel. Two years later appeared Gargantua, a work in which the events occur before those of Pantagruel and which as a result is always published as the first of the two volumes.

In fear of the reaction to these satires, Rabelais signed the works as Alcofrybas Nasier, an anagram of his name. In his lengthy novels Rabelais satirized contemporary writings as well as the medieval chivalric romance by describing the outrageous history of a family of giants. The books treat the subjects of religion, war, and the new humanistic thinking that was sweeping away medieval habits of mind and replacing them with the classically inspired philosophies of the Renaissance. As thinly disguised attacks on traditional scholarship and the intolerance of the church, Rabelais risked his career as well as his life by writing at a time when the Protestant Reformation was sweeping through central Europe but the Catholic hierarchy was still firmly in control in France.

Undaunted by the disapproval of the authorities, Rabelais continued expanding his work. In 1546 he brought out a Third Volume, this time signing his real name to the book, which suffered immediate condemnation from the scholarly authorities of the University of Paris. This book offers an account of the character named Panurge. A fourth volume came out in 1548, in which Rabelais described the unfortunate Papefigues, who had fallen victim to the Papimanes—a reference to the tyranny of the Catholic Papacy.