Francois Rabelais

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François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk, and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, with a penchant for grotesque and bawdy jokes and songs. Rabelais became a novice of the Franciscan order, and later a friar at Fontenay-le-Comte in Western France, where he studied Greek and Latin as well as science, philology, and law. Later he left the monastery to study medicine at the University of Poitiers and at the University of Montpellier. In 1532 he moved to Lyon, one of the intellectual centers of the Renaissance, and in 1534 began working as a doctor at the hospital Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon. Rabelais resigned from the curacy in January 1553 and died in Paris later that year. Because of his literary power and historical importance, Western literary critics consider him one of the great writers of world literature and among the creators of modern European writing.