Gargantua and Pantagruel

The brilliant and vivacious moral tales of Rabelais (c. 1471–1553) highlight human errors with their mischievous and frequently vulgar humour while fusing the real world with carnivalesque fantasy to force us to take a new look at things. In Gargantua a juvenile giant is saved and transformed into a sophisticated Christian knight after being educated by paternal stupidity elderly cronies and syphilitic teachers who reduce him to laughable insanity. To portray the bookish son of Gargantua who develops into a Renaissance Socrates divinely directed in his wisdom and his foolish self-loving sidekick Panurge Rabelais spoofed false stories of chivalry and satirised the law theology and academia in Pantagruel and its three sequels.