Francois Rabelais

François Rabelais (, , ; born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553) was a French writer who has been called the first great French prose author.

A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he attracted opposition from both John Calvin and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, diplomat, and Catholic priest, later he became better known as a satirist, for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.

Both ecclesiastical and anticlerical, Christian and a freethinker, a doctor and a bon vivant, the multiple facets of his personality sometimes seem contradictory.

Caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation, Rabelais treated the great questions of his time in his novels.

Assessments of his life and work have evolved over time depending on dominant paradigms of thought.

Rabelais admired Erasmus and like him is considered a Christian humanist.

He was critical of medieval scholasticism, lampooning the abuses of powerful princes and popes, opposing them with Greco-Roman learning and popular culture.

Rabelais is widely known for the first two volumes relating the childhoods of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel written in the style of bildungsroman, his later works—the Third Book (which prefigures the philosophical novel) and the Fourth Book are considerably more erudite in tone.

His literary legacy is such that the word Rabelaisian designates something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism".

By 1520, he was at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou where he became friends with Pierre Lamy, a fellow Franciscan, and corresponded with Guillaume Budé, who observed that he was already competent in law.

Following Erasmus' commentary on the original Greek version of the Gospel of Luke, the Sorbonne banned the study of Greek in 1523, believing that it encouraged "personal interpretation" of the New Testament.

As a result, both Lamy and Rabelais had their Greek books confiscated.

Frustrated by the ban, Rabelais petitioned Pope Clement VII (1523–1534) and obtained an indult with the help of Bishop Geoffroy d'Estissac, and was able to leave the Franciscans for the Benedictine Order at Maillezais.

At the Saint-Pierre-de-Maillezais abbey, he worked as a secretary to the bishop—a well-read prelate appointed by Francis I—and enjoyed his protection.

Around 1527 he left the monastery without authorization, becoming an apostate until Pope Paul III absolved him of this crime, which carried with it the risk of severe sanctions, in 1536.

Until this time, church law forbade him to work as a doctor or surgeon.

J. Lesellier surmises that it was during the time he spent in Paris from 1528 to 1530 that two of his three children (François and Junie) were born.

After Paris, Rabelais went to the University of Poitiers and then to the University of Montpellier to study medicine.

In 1532 he moved to Lyon, one of the intellectual centres of the Renaissance, and began working as a doctor at the hospital Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon.

During his time in Lyon, he edited Latin works for the printer Sebastian Gryphius, and wrote a famous admiring letter to Erasmus to accompany the transmission of a Greek manuscript from the printer.

Gryphius published Rabelais' translations and annotations of Hippocrates, Galen and Giovanni Manardo.

In 1532, under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais), he published his first book, Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, the first of his Gargantua series, primarily to supplement his income at the hospital.

The idea of basing an allegory on the lives of giants came to Rabelais from the folklore legend of les Grandes chroniques du grand et énorme géant Gargantua, which were sold by colporteurs and at the fairs of Lyon as popular literature in the form of inexpensive pamphlets.

The first edition of an almanac parodying the astrological predictions of the time called Pantagrueline prognostications appeared for the year 1533 from the press of Rabelais' publisher François Juste.

It contained the name "Maître Alcofribas" in its full title.

The book became popular, along with its 1534 prequel, which dealt with the life and exploits of Pantagruel's father Gargantua, and which was more infused with the politics of the day and overtly favorable to the monarchy than the preceding volume had been.

The 1534 re-edition of Pantagruel contains many orthographic, grammatical, and typographical innovations, in particular the use of diacritics (accents, apostrophes, and diaereses), which was then new in French.

Mireille Huchon ascribes this innovation in part to the influence of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia on French letters.

In 1537 he returned to Montpellier to pay the fees to obtain his licence to practice medicine (April 3) and obtained his doctorate the following month (May 22).

Upon his return to Lyon in the summer, he gave an anatomy lesson at Lyon's Hôtel-Dieu using the corpse of a hanged man, which Etienne Dolet described in his Carmina.

It was through his work and scholarship in the field of medicine that Rabelais gained European fame.

From 1537, they were printed at the end of Juste's editions of Pantagruel.

Pantagruelism is an "eat, drink and be merry" philosophy, which led his books into disfavor with the theologians but brought them popular success and the admiration of later critics for their focus on the body.

This first book, critical of the existing monastic and educational system, contains the first known occurrence in French of the words encyclopédie, caballe, progrès, and utopie, among others.

The popular almanacs continued irregularly until the final 1542 edition, which was prepared for the "perpetual year".

In 1623, Jacques Bruneau de Tartifume wrote that Rabelais began his life as a novice of the Franciscan Order of Cordeliers, at the Convent of the Cordeliers, near Angers; however there is no direct evidence to support this theory.

According to a tradition dating back to Roger de Gaignières (1642–1715), François Rabelais was the son of seneschal and lawyer Antoine Rabelais and was born at the estate of La Devinière in Seuilly in modern-day Indre-et-Loire near Chinon in Touraine, where a Rabelais museum can be found today.

The exact dates of his birth (c. 1483–1494) and death (1553) are unknown, but most scholars accept his likely birthdate as being 1483.

His education was likely typical of the late medieval period: beginning with the trivium syllabus that included the study of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic before moving on to the quadrivium, which dealt with arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.