François Rabelais
(French: c. 1494 – 9 April 1553) was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs. His best known work is Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Although the place or date of his birth is not reliably documented, and some scholars put it as early as 1483,[1] it is probable that François Rabelais was born in November 1494 near Chinon, Indre-et-Loire, where his father worked as a lawyer.[2] La Devinière in Seuilly, Indre-et-Loire, is the name of the estate that claims to be the writer's birthplace and houses a Rabelais museum.
Rabelais was first a novice of the Franciscanorder, and later a friar at Fontenay-le-Comte, where he studied Greek and Latin, as well as science, philology, and law, already becoming known and respected by the humanists of his era, including Guillaume Budé. Harassed due to the directions of his studies, Rabelais petitioned Pope Clement VII and was granted permission to leave the Franciscans and enter the Benedictine order at Maillezais, where he was more warmly received.[3]
Later he left the monastery to study at the University of Poitiers and University of Montpellier. In 1532, he moved to Lyon, one of the intellectual centres of France, and not only practiced medicine but edited Latin works for the printer Sebastian Gryphius. As a doctor, he used his spare time to write and publish humorous pamphlets which were critical of established authority and stressed his own perception of individual liberty.
Using the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais minus the cedille on the c), in 1532 he published his first book, Pantagruel, that would be the start of his Gargantua series. In this book, Rabelais sings the praises of the wines from his hometown of Chinon through vivid descriptions of the "eat, drink and be merry" lifestyle of the main character, Pantagruel, and his friends. Despite the popularity of his book, both it and his prequel book on the life of Pantagruel's father Gargantua were condemned by the academics at the Sorbonne for their unorthodox ideas and by the Roman Catholic Church for their derision of certain religious practices. Rabelais's third book, published under his own name, was also banned.
With support from members of the prominent du Bellay family, Rabelais received the approval from King François I to continue to publish his collection. However, after the king's death, Rabelais was frowned upon by the academic elite, and the French Parliament suspended the sale of his fourth book.
Rabelais traveled frequently to Rome with his friend Cardinal Jean du Bellay, and lived for a short time in Turin with du Bellay's brother, Guillaume, during which François I was his patron. Rabelais probably spent some time in hiding, threatened by being labeled a heretic. Only the protection of du Bellay saved Rabelais after the condemnation of his novel by the Sorbonne. du Bellay would again help Rabelais in 1540 by seeking a papal authorization to legitimize two of his children (Auguste François, father of Jacques Rabelais, and Junie). Rabelais later taught medicine at Montpellier in 1534 and 1539.
Between 1545 and 1547, François Rabelais lived in Metz, then a free imperial city and a republic, to escape the condemnation by the University of Paris. In 1547, he became curate of Saint-Christophe-du-Jambet and of Meudon, from which he resigned before his death in Paris in 1553.
There are diverging accounts of Rabelais' death and his last words. According to some, he wrote a famous one sentence will: "I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor", and his last words were "I go to seek a Great Perhaps". One last words reference work provides at least four distinct historical claims to his last words (and additional variations of these) – While many include the phrase "un grand peut-être" ("a Great Perhaps") – all are listed as "doubtful" due to lack of documentation. Additionally some sources examined for Rabelais’ last words cite Cardinal du Bellay; others cite Cardinal de Chatillon creating further confusion.
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The life of this celebrated French writer is full of obscurities. He was born at Chinon in Touraine in 1483, 1490, or 1495. According to some his father was an apothecary, according to others a publican or inn-keeper. He began his studies with the Benedictines and finished them with the Franciscans near Angers. He became a Franciscan in the convent of Gontenay-le-Comte, where he remained fifteen years and received Holy orders. But the spirit of his order not being favourable to the studies then esteemed by the Renaissance and for which he himself displayed great aptitude, he left the convent. Through the mediation of Bishop Geoffroy d'Estissac he secured pardon from Clement VII, who authorized him to enter the Benedictine abbey of Maillezais. In 1530 he was at Montpellier as a medical student, and the following year professor of anatomy at Lyons and head physician at the hospital of Pont-du-Rhône. At Lyon he was much in the society of Dolet and Marot, and became the father of a child who died young
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French humorist, born at Chinon on the Vienne in the province of Touraine. The date of his birth is wholly uncertain: it has been put by tradition, and by authorities long subsequent to his death, as 1483, 1490, and 1495. There is nothing in the positive facts of his life which would not suit tolerably well with any of these dates; most 17th-century authorities give the earliest, and this also accords best with the age of the eldest of the Du Bellay brothers, with whom Rabelais was (perhaps) at school. In favor of the latest it is urged that, if Rabelais was born in 1483, he must have been forty-seven when he entered at Montpellier, and proportionately and unexpectedly old at other known periods of his life. In favor of the middle date, which has, as far as recent authorities are concerned, the weight of consent in its favor, the testimony of Guy Patin (1601-1672), a witness of some merit and not too far removed in point of time, is invoked. The only contribution which need be made here to the controversy is to point out that if Rabelais was born in 1483 he must have been an old man when he died, and that scarcely even tradition speaks of him as such.
With regard to his birth, parentage, youth, and education everything depends upon this tradition, and it is not until he was according to one extreme hypothesis thirty-six, according to the other extreme twenty-four, that we have solid testimony respecting him. In the year 1519, on the 5th of April, the François Rabelais of history emerges. The monks of Fontenay le Comte bought some property (half an inn in the town), and among their signatures to the deed of purchase is that of François Rabelais. Before this all is cloudland. It is said that he had four brothers and no sisters, that his father had a country property called La Devinière, and was either an apothecary or a tavern-keeper. Half a century after his death De Thou mentions that the house in which he was born had become a tavern and then a tennis-court. It still stands at the corner of a street called the Rue de la Lamproie, and the tradition may be correct. An indistinct allusion of his own has been taken to mean that he was tonsured in childhood at seven or nine years old; and tradition says that he was sent to the convent of Seuilly. From Seuilly at an unknown date tradition takes him either to the university of Angers or to the convent school of La Baumette or La Basmette, founded by good King René in the neighborhood of the Angevin capital. Here he is supposed to have been at school with the brothers Du Bellay, with Geoffroy d'Estissac and others. The next stage in this (so far as evidence goes, purely imaginary) career is the monastery of Fontenay le Comte, where, as has been seen, he is certainly found in 1519 holding a position sufficiently senior to sign deeds for the community, where he, probably in 1511, took priest's orders, and where he also pursued, again certainly, the study of letters, and especially of Greek, with ardor. From this date he becomes historically visible. The next certain intelligence which we have of Rabelais is somewhat more directly biographical. The letters of the well-known Greek scholar Budaeus, two of which are addressed to Rabelais himself and several more to his friend and fellow monk Pierre Amy, together with some notices by André Tiraqueau, a learned jurist, to whom Rabelais rather than his own learning has secured immortality, show beyond doubt what manner of life the future author of Gargantua led in his convent. The letters of Budaeus show that an attempt was made by the heads of the convent or the order to check the studious ardor of these Franciscans; but it failed, and there is no positive evidence of anything like actual persecution, the phrases in the letters of Budaeus being merely the usual exaggerated Ciceronianism of the Renaissance. Some books and papers were seized as suspicious, then given back as innocent; but Rabelais was in all probability disgusted with the cloister -- indeed his great work shows this beyond doubt. In 1524, the year of the publication of Tiraqueau's book above cited, his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac procured from Pope Clement VII an indult, licensing a change of order and of abode for Rabelais. From a Franciscan he became a Benedictine, and from Fontenay he moved to Maillezais, of which Geoffroy d'Estissac was bishop. But even this learned and hospitable retreat did not apparently satisfy Rabelais. In or before 1530 he left Maillezais, abandoned his Benedictine garb for that of a secular priest, and, as he himself puts it in his subsequent Supplicatio pro Apostasia to Pope Paul III, "per seculum diu vagatus fuit." For a time the Du Bellays provided him with an abode near their own château of Langey. He is met at Montpellier in the year just mentioned. He entered the faculty of medicine there on the 16th of September and became bachelor on the 1st of November, a remarkably short interval, which shows what was thought of his acquirements. Early in 1531 he lectured publicly on Galen and Hippocrates, while his more serious pursuits seem to have been chequered by acting in a morale comédie, then a very frequent university amusement. Visits to the خles d'Hières, and the composition of a fish sauce in imitation of the ancient garum, which he sent to his friend Étienne Dolet, are associated, not very certainly, with his stay at Montpellier, which, lasting rather more than a year at first, was renewed at intervals for several years.

French Renaissance writer, a Franciscan monk, humanist, and physician, whose comic novels Gargantua and Pantagruel are among the most hilarious classics of world literature. François Rabelais' heroes are rude but funny giants traveling in a world full of greed, stupidity, violence, and grotesque jokes. The true target of his satire was the feudal and the ecclesiastical powers, and the world of the learned. Rabelais' books were banned by the Catholic Church and later placed on The Index librorum prohibitorumon (the Index of Forbidden Books).
"Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf's skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney's bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer's lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains." (from Gargantua, 1534)
François Rabelais was born in 1484 (or 1483, 1490, 1495) near the town of Chinon in western France. His father Antoine Rabelais owned vineyards there. According to some sources he was a lawyer, according to others an apothecary or inn-keeper. Little is known about Rabelais' youth and time at the Abbaye de Seuillé, where he was sent. He was a novice at the Convent of La Baumette, where the brothers de Bellay may have been among his fellow students. He became a member of the Franciscan convent at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Lower Poitou, and by 1521 he had taken holy orders. At the fair of Fontenay-le-Comte Rabelais heard stories which stirred his imagination, and he later wrote in Gargantua: "He went to see the jugglers, tumblers, mountebanks, and quacksalvers, and considered their cunning, their shifts, their somersaults and smooth tongue, especially of those of Chauny in Picardy, who are naturally great praters, and brave givers of fibs, in matter of green apes." After the ecclesiastical authorities of the Sorbonne started to confiscate Greek books, Rabelais petitioned Pope Clement VII. He received permission to leave the Franciscan order and join the Benedictines.
In the monasteries Rabelais had studied Greek, Latin, law, astronomy, and ancient Greek medical texts, which had been ignored for centuries. He left the Abbaye de Maillezais without permission and started to study medicine, possibly with the Benedictines in their Hôtel Saint-Denis in Paris, and then in Montpellier. In 1530 he became bachelor of medicine.
At Montpellier Rabelais lectured on the ancient physicians, Hippocrates and Galen. He made public dissections of human bodies and was a specialist in the new disease, syphilis, and hysteria. Rabelais also invented devices for the treatment of hernia and fractured bones and published his own editions of Hippocrates' Aphorisms and Galen's Ars parva. In 1532 he was a physician at Hôtel-Dieu, a general hospital in Lyons. In the same year he published his famous comedy, Pantagruel, under the pen name Alcofribas Nasier – an anagram of Rabelais's real name. It dealt with the early years of Pantagruel, the son of Gargantua, and introduced the cunning rogue Panurge, an Everyman, who became Pantagruel's companion. Rabelais took the character of Gargantua from a booklet, which was sold in Lyons, and depicted the adventures of a giant famous in oral folk tradition. The city was at that time the cultural center of France and famous for its international book trade. It was claimed that at one Lyons fair more copies of the booklet were sold than Bibles in nine years. Pantagruel was followed by Gargantua (1534). The books were highly successful, but condemned by the Sorbonne and the Parliament.
In Lyon Rabelais fathered a son, Théodule, who died at the age of two. He went to Rome as physician to his friend and patron Bishop Jean du Bellay. Du Bellay was the bishop of Paris, who was later appointed cardinal. In Rome Rabelais made archeological and botanical studies. During the following years he visited the city several times. In 1536 he entered the monastery of Saint Maur-les-Fossés. The pope allowed him to practise medicine and in 1537 Rabelais received his doctor's degree. He lectured on medicine and in 1539 he served as the medical advisor of Guillaume du Bellay in Turin. King Francis I of France (1494-1547) gave a license to print the third book of the Gargantua-Pantagruiel series, Le Tiers Livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel (1546), which was dedicated to Margaret of Navarre, the King's sister. At Court the party in favour of toleration was strong. Marguerite of Navarre and Jean and Guillaume de Bellay had been willing to help those who had trouble with religious authorities, and the King supported moderate policies. He had also tried to defend Erasmus (1466-1536), the famous humanist and scholar, against the attacks of theologians. In Gargantua Rabelais gave his support to the humanist ideal of King Francis I.
Le Tiers Livre (The Third Book) was published under Rabelais' own name, and again condemned in spite of the royal licence. In it Panurge wonders if he should marry, and starts with Pantagruel a voyage to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle for an answer. The king had been Rabelais' protector, but as the king's health was declining, Rabelais fled to Metz, where for a while he practised medicine. Although French booksellers were not able to publish "heretical" works, they went on selling and printing books by Rabelais and other writers simply dropping their addresses from the title page. In Pantagruel Rabelais wrote: "Printing likewise is now in use, so elegant and so correct that better cannot be imagined, although it was found out but in my time by divine inspiration, as by a diabolical suggestion on the other side was the invention of ordnance."
In 1547 René du Bellay gave Rabelais the curacy of Saint-Christophe-du-Jambet, though he probably did not reside there. Later he was also given the curacy of Mendon, near Paris – he was known as "the curate of Meudon". The fourth book in the series, Le Quart Livre de Pantagruel, was published in 1552; a partial edition of the Quart livre had appeared in Lyons in 1549. Before his death, Rabelais acquired a new powerful enemy: he was denounced by John Calvin, and thus he had angered both Catholics and Protestants. Rabelais died probably on April 9, 1553, in Paris. There have been doubts about the authenticity of the fifth book, Cinquisme Live (1564), where Panurge and his friends arrive at the temple of the Holy Bottle. The five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel were first published together in English by J. Martin in 1567. The fifth book was first printed without the name of the place, and the in 1565 at Lyons by Jean Martin.