Rabelais, François (1494?-1553)

Rabelais, François (1494?-1553)

French scholar, humanist, physician, and satirist, early in his career a member first of the Franciscan order and then of the Benedictine order.

He is famous for his robust and outspoken burlesque Gargantua and Pantagruel, satirizing contemporary religion, pedantry, politics, and social institutions, exalting nature, empiricism, and characteristic Renaissance variety and richness, and showing evidence of derivations from numerous source-books of the author's day. This work was published as follows: Les Grandes et Inestimables Chroniques du Grand et Enorme Géant Gargantus ( 1532), a chapbook; Pantagruel ( 1533), later Book II of the work in its best-known form; La Vie Inestimable du Grand Gargantua, Père de Pantagruel ( 1534), later Book I; Book III (1546); Book IV (1552), condemned by the Sorbonne and prohibited from sale; Isle Sonnante ( 1562) and Le Cinquième et dernier Livre des Faits et Dits Héroïques du Bon Pantagruel ( 1564), constituting Book V and considered by some scholars to be of doubtful authenticity, although it is believed that an outline prepared by the author was used for it.

Rabelais took his Master's and Doctor's degrees in medicine and divided his time between his practice as a physician and a second profession of editing and publishing books. His great work contributed in an important degree to the development of the French language, more than 600 words having been added through it to the Vocabulary of the modern language of France. Rabelais is considered to have influenced most Montaigne, Moliere, Blaise Pascal, Anatole France, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne.