Francois Rabelais

Francois Rabelais (1493 - 1553) - French writer, one of the greatest European satiric humanists of the Renaissance era, the glorified author of satirical stories about Gargantua and Pantagruel. The European philologists put Francois Rabelais in one rank with Shakespeare. The writer’s contemporary, Doctor Pierre Boulanger, said, “Descendants would think that he was a clown and a buffoon... wrongly. Possessing profound intellect, he ridiculed mankind, its reckless whims and vanity of its hopes...”