Rabelais, François

(ca. 1483-1553)

   writer

   The details of the life of François Rabelais, who was born in La Devinière, near Chinon, are little known. Certain critics think he was born in 1494. In late 1510, he was a novice in the Franciscan monastery of La Baumette, near Angers, and in 1520 or 1521, he became a priest and Franciscan friar minor at the monastery of Puy-Saint-Martin in Fontenay-le-Comte, where he completed his theological studies and, with special permission, also those in law. Joining the Benedictine order in 1524, he accompanied the bishop of Geoffroy d'Estissac on his work at Poitiers. Between 1528 and 1530, he wore the habit of a secular priest and had two children from a liaison with a Parisian widow. Earning a degree in medicine at the university of Montpellier in 1530, he became a physician in lyon in 1532. The same year, Rabelais translated and edited Giovanni Manardi's Epistolae medicinales, the Hippocratis et Galeni libri aliquot, and the Testamentum Cuspii, writing to Erasmus that he recognized him as his "spiritual father," and published his own first great work, Pantagruel, under the name Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais). After the publication of his Pan-tagruélinePrognostication (1533), Rabelais, in the following year, accompanied Cardinal jean de bellay to Italy then, returning to Lyon, published consecutively the Topographia antiquae Romae of Morliani and his own work, Gargantua, the story of Panta-gruel's father. Along with Pantagruel, this work had a prodigious success, although both were condemned by the sorbonne. Having regularized his situation in regard to the church, Rabelais made a second journey to Rome with de Bellay (1532-36) and was named chapter canon of the abbey of Saint-Maur-des-Fosses. He then returned to Montpellier (1537), where he practiced medicine. The condemnation of his first two novels did not stop Rabelais from publishing Tiers Livre (1546), under royal patronage. But after the death of King Francis i in 1547, Rabelais's writings were again condemned and he had to flee to Metz, where he served as city clerk. When he again visited Rome with de Bellay (1547-49), the first 11 chapters of his Quart Livre were published in Lyon (1548), with the entire edition appearing only in 1552, having been censured by the church. During the interval, john Calvin, in his Traité des scandales (1550), vehemently attacked Rabelais. The authorship of a final work, Cinquième Livre, published between 1562 and 1564, has been contested, and it seems that the book is not actually the work of Rabelais. In sum, Rabelais's writings are a great expression of 16th-century humanism. A genius, he was an antiquarian, a defender of the spirit of social justice, a pacifist who supported only defensive war, and a physician. He gave satirical expression to the philosophical and political concerns of his contemporaries through an incomparably rich and comic vocabulary, and he filled the French language with neologisms that are still in use today.