Gargantua and Pantagruel (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) » (1st Edition)

Born sometime around 1483, in the west of France, Rabelais was a man of vast and profound learning. There were few areas in European society and culture that did not arouse Rabelais' interest, and he made his mark in areas as diverse as medicine, law, botany, and politics. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he became a secular priest, without the permission of church authorities, and had two children, François and Junie, with a widow. Rabelais went to study medicine in Montpelier, the foremost medical university in France, and even though he left for Lyons without having finished his medical studies, he was named doctor of one the largest hospitals in France in 1532. Always on the move and insatiably curious, Rabelais spent time in Italy before he died in 1553 in Paris.

Some books are good for you, and some books are fun to read, but few books are both; Rabelais' novels are among these few. A cornucopia of jokes, unforgettable characters, filth, sex, philosophy, and religion, Rabelais' novels create our cultural DNA while they make us laugh. When we laugh at the mythical giants Pantagruel and Gargantua and their companions we laugh at ourselves. All the while we are following the heroes and their friends and enemies as they react to the burgeoning world of modern nation states, modern science, modern law, and modern forms of religion, we can see how we have become what we are today. Without Rabelais and his contemporaries Cervantes and Shakespeare, modernity would not exist as we know it.