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.