François Rabelais

François Rabelais (c. 1483–1494 – 1553) was a French writer often regarded as the first major prose author in the French language. A humanist and Greek scholar of the French Renaissance, he drew criticism from both the Protestant reformer John Calvin and the Catholic Church hierarchy. During his lifetime, he was most recognized as a physician, scholar, diplomat, and Catholic priest, but he is now better known as a satirist for his grotesque imagery and outsized characters. Writing amid the religious and political upheavals of the Reformation, his novels engaged with the pressing issues of his era. Born on the estate of La Devinière in Seuilly, near Chinon in Touraine (now Indre-et-Loire), Rabelais was the son of Antoine Rabelais, a seneschal and lawyer. His birth year is uncertain, though most scholars favor 1483. His early education likely followed the late medieval pattern: first the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic), then the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). By 1520, he was a Franciscan at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, where he befriended fellow Franciscan Pierre Lamy and corresponded with the scholar Guillaume Budé, who noted Rabelais’s competence in law. When the Sorbonne banned Greek study in 1523—fearing it encouraged personal interpretation of the New Testament—Rabelais and Lamy had their Greek books confiscated. Frustrated, Rabelais petitioned Pope Clement VII and, with help from Bishop Geoffroy d’Estissac, obtained permission to transfer to the Benedictine Order at Maillezais, where he served as secretary to the bishop. Around 1527, Rabelais left the monastery without authorization, becoming an apostate until Pope Paul III absolved him in 1536. Church law had previously barred him from practicing medicine or surgery. J. Lesellier suggests that while in Paris from 1528 to 1530, two of his three children (François and Junie) were born. He then studied medicine at the Universities of Poitiers and Montpellier. In 1532, he moved to Lyon—a Renaissance intellectual hub—and worked as a doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. There, he edited Latin works for printer Sebastian Gryphius, wrote an admiring letter to Erasmus, and published translations and annotations of Hippocrates, Galen, and Giovanni Manardo. In 1537, he returned to Montpellier to obtain his medical license (April 3) and his doctorate (May 22). Back in Lyon that summer, he gave an anatomy lesson using a hanged man’s corpse, an event described by Etienne Dolet. His medical work brought him European renown. In 1532, under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of his name), Rabelais published *Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes*, the first of his Gargantua series, to supplement his hospital income. The idea of using giants came from the popular folklore of *Les Grandes chroniques du grand et énorme géant Gargantua*, sold as cheap pamphlets at Lyon fairs. A parody almanac, *Pantagrueline prognostications*, appeared for 1533 from publisher François Juste, featuring the name “Maître Alcofribas.” These almanacs continued irregularly until the final 1542 edition, prepared for the “perpetual year”; from 1537, they were printed at the end of Juste’s editions of *Pantagruel*. The philosophy of “Pantagruelism”—an eat, drink, and be merry outlook—drew theological disapproval but popular success and later critical admiration for its focus on the body. This first book, critical of monastic and educational systems, contains the first known French uses of words such as *encyclopédie*, *caballe*, *progrès*, and *utopie*. Its popularity led to a 1534 prequel covering the life and exploits of Gargantua. Rabelais’s later works—the Third Book, which anticipates the philosophical novel, and the Fourth Book—are more erudite in tone.