Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais

Feb 2020 · Masterpiece Book 132 · LA CASE Books · AI-narrated by Archie (from Google)

About this audiobook

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And Sayings Of Gargantua And His Son Pantagruel. The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.

About the author

François Rabelais (Uborn 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.