François Rabelais

François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553) was a French physician, humanist and writer. He entered a Franciscan house as a young man, moved to the Benedictines when his Greek studies drew suspicion, and left the cloister to study medicine at Montpellier, afterward practicing in Lyon and accompanying Cardinal Jean du Bellay to Rome. Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), published under an anagram of his name, were condemned by the Sorbonne but protected by Francis I; the Third and Fourth Books followed in the 1540s and 1550s. His giants, his obscenity, his learning and his laughter made him the great comic writer of the French Renaissance.