Gargantua and Pantagruel

Rabelais’s riotous, scabrous and often scatological fantasy of life among the monks and friars of sixteenth-century France remains a satirical and comic classic, a great broth of a book in which every conceivable literary form is parodied and every human desire satirized. But under the comedy there is a serious purpose, for Rabelais also espouses a positive view of life in which tolerance, goodness, understanding and wisdom are opposed to the vices of dogmatism, pride and cruelty. The text is here presented in the classic translation by Urquhart and Motteux.