Rabelais hid humanist fire inside giant belly laughs
François Rabelais (born 1483–1494, died 1553) is often called the first great French prose writer—a Renaissance Greek scholar whose comic giants angered John Calvin and the Catholic hierarchy alike. In his lifetime he was better known as a doctor, diplomat and priest than as a satirist.
Tradition puts his birth at La Devinière near Chinon, son of the lawyer Antoine Rabelais; most scholars accept 1483. By 1520 he was a Franciscan at Fontenay-le-Comte, corresponding with the humanist Guillaume Budé. When the Sorbonne banned Greek study in 1523, fearing private readings of the New Testament, his Greek books were confiscated. With Bishop Geoffroy d'Estissac's help he won papal leave to switch to the Benedictines at Maillezais, then around 1527 walked out altogether and stayed technically an apostate until Pope Paul III absolved him in 1536.
He studied medicine at Poitiers and Montpellier and in 1532 became a doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyon, where he edited Hippocrates and Galen for the printer Sebastian Gryphius and wrote an admiring letter to Erasmus. That year, partly to top up his hospital pay, he published Pantagruel under the anagram Alcofribas Nasier, borrowing giants from cheap folk pamphlets sold at Lyon's fairs. He took his medical doctorate in May 1537.
Protectors kept him alive. He travelled to Rome as physician and secretary to Jean du Bellay, who in 1534 was trying to stop the Pope excommunicating Henry VIII. When the Affair of the Placards in 1535 prompted a ban on printing, he vanished from Lyon for months. The Sorbonne condemned Gargantua and Pantagruel in 1543 and banned the Third Book in 1546, so he lay low in Metz, a free imperial city, before taking parishes at Meudon and elsewhere in 1547.
His early giant books follow their heroes through childhood; the Third Book anticipates the philosophical novel and the Fourth, of 1552, is more learned still. Their eat, drink and be merry philosophy delighted readers and gave the language the adjective Rabelaisian, for gross, robust humour and extravagant caricature.
Source: François Rabelais
