François Rabelais

François Rabelais was a French writer of the Renaissance, born sometime between 1483 and 1494 and dead in 1553. Most scholars accept 1483 as his likely birth year. A tradition places his birth at La Devinière in Seuilly, near Chinon in Touraine, as the son of Antoine Rabelais, a seneschal and lawyer. In his own day, Rabelais was known not only as an author but also as a physician, scholar, diplomat, Greek scholar, and Catholic priest. Later readers came to know him above all as a satirist with a taste for the grotesque and for characters larger than life.

Rabelais lived during the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation, and that conflict shaped the way his books handled the great questions of his time. He admired Erasmus and, like Erasmus, is considered a Christian humanist. He was critical of medieval scholasticism, and he mocked abuses by powerful princes and popes. This made him a difficult figure for both sides of the religious divide. He attracted opposition from Protestant theologian John Calvin as well as from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

His education was likely typical of the late medieval period, beginning with grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, then moving to arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. By 1520 he was at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, where he became friends with the Franciscan Pierre Lamy and corresponded with Guillaume Budé, who noted that Rabelais was already competent in law. In 1523, after Erasmus’s work on the Greek Gospel of Luke, the Sorbonne banned the study of Greek, fearing that it encouraged personal interpretation of the New Testament. Rabelais and Lamy had their Greek books confiscated. Rabelais then petitioned Pope Clement VII and, with help from Bishop Geoffroy d’Estissac, left the Franciscans for the Benedictine Order at Maillezais, where he worked as the bishop’s secretary.

Around 1527 Rabelais left the monastery without authorization and was later absolved by Pope Paul III in 1536. He studied medicine at Poitiers and Montpellier, then moved in 1532 to Lyon, one of the intellectual centers of the Renaissance, where he worked as a doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon. In Lyon he edited Latin works for the printer Sebastian Gryphius and prepared translations and annotations of Hippocrates, Galen, and Giovanni Manardo. In 1537 he returned to Montpellier to obtain his medical license and doctorate, then gave an anatomy lesson in Lyon using the corpse of a hanged man. His medical work and scholarship brought him European fame.

In 1532, using the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram of François Rabelais, he published Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, the first of his Gargantua series. The idea of using giants came from popular pamphlets about the giant Gargantua sold at fairs in Lyon. A 1534 prequel told the life and exploits of Pantagruel’s father, Gargantua. Rabelais also wrote Pantagrueline Prognostications, a parody of astrological almanacs. The first two giant books became his best-known works, while The Third Book and The Fourth Book took on a more learned tone. His writing gave rise to the word “Rabelaisian,” meaning gross robust humor, extravagant caricature, or bold naturalism. His words still carry force because they join learning with bodily comedy, faith with argument, and laughter with a sharp eye for human folly.