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Rabelais Study GuideFrançois RabelaisFrançois Rabelais born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553) was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs. Ecclesiastical and anticlerical, Christian and considered by some as a free thinker, a doctor and having the image of a "bon vivant", the multiple facets of his personality sometimes seem contradictory. Caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation, Rabelais showed himself to be both sensitive and critical towards the great questions of his time. Subsequently, the views of his life and work have evolved according to the times and currents of thought. Admirer of Erasmus, handling parody and satire, Rabelais fights for tolerance, peace, an evangelical faith and the return to the knowledge of ancient Greco-Roman, beyond the "Gothic darkness" that characterizes the Middle Ages, taking up the theses of Plato to counter the excesses of Aristotelianism. He attacks the abuses of princes and men of the Church, and opposes to them on the one hand evangelical humanist thought, and on the other hand popular culture, bawdy, "joking", marked by the taste of wine and games, thus manifesting a humble and open Christian faith, far from any ecclesiastical weight. He shared with Protestantism the criticism of scholasticism and monasticism, but the religious reformer John Calvin also attacked him in 1550. The Life of Gargantua and of PantagruelThe Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais, telling the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay, and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words [...] into the French language". Reading QuizzesThe TextGargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. In English. Project Gutenbarg. La Vie Très Horrificque du Grand Gargantua Père de Pantagruel. Original French. http://abu.cnam.fr Background and SummaryIntroduction aux Oeuvres de Rabelais. Renaissance-France.Org Rabelais et ses éditeurs par H. Emile Chevalier. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lisieux Back to the schedule page. Programs and information provided by hcexres@prismnet.com. |