François Rabelais

François Rabelais was a Franciscan and then a Benedictine monk who left the cloister for medicine, lectured on Hippocrates at Montpellier, practised in Lyons, and published under an anagram of his name the five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the adventures of two giants, father and son, through education, war, marriage and a voyage to the oracle of the Bottle. The books are learned, obscene and enormous, a comedy of appetite in a language of invented words, and the Sorbonne condemned each as it appeared. The abbey of Thélème, whose rule is do what you will, is the humanist ideal in a sentence. He died a parish priest.