Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais 1484(?)-1553(?) A Franciscan monk turned Benedictine, he abandoned the cloister in 1530 and began to study medicine at Montpellier. Two years later he wrote his first work, Pantagruel, which revealed his genius as a storyteller, satirist, propagandist and creator of comic situations and characters. In 1534 he published Gargantua, a companion to Pantagruel, which contains some of his best work. It mocks old-fashioned theological education, and opposes the monastic ideal, contrasting it with a free society of noble Evangelicals. Following an outburst of repression in late 1534, Rabelais abandoned his post of doctor at the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons and despite Royal support his book Tiers Livre was condemned. His last work, and his boldest, Quart Livre was published in 1551 and he died two years later.


M. A. Screech is a Fellow of All Souls College and Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Fellow of the British Academy, He is a world-renowned Renaissance scholar who has published widely on Rabelais, Montaigne and Erasmus. He has translated Montaigne's Essays for Penguin.

The unfettered exuberance of 'Gargantua and Pantagruel, ' the storms of phenomenal life it offers for our inspection, the honor it gives to the deformed, the cloacal, and the profane aspects of existence are at the very heart of Rabelais' genius. But the author of this fantasia on the lives of a father-and-son pair of giants was one of the most magnificent and magnificently learned products of the Renaissance; and he also represents, as well as any of its other great figures, that era's love of the human body and its exaltation of the human in the face of the divine.