Rabelais died in the early 1550s, probably on 9 April 1553.

The Quart Livre was, like Rabelais's previous volumes, promptly attacked by the Sorbonne, but thanks to the author's fame and connections the censors could not prevent publication. The latter printed it immediately, perhaps to the annoyance of Rabelais, who did not produce the final version until January 1552. In 1548 he returned to Rome at the request of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, along the way leaving an incomplete draft of the Quart Livre with his publisher in Lyon. Given the controversy it excited, Rabelais judged it prudent once again to leave town, taking refuge this time in Metz. After twelve years of intermittent exile and silence, Rabelais published, in 1546, the Tiers Livre. He spent a great deal of time in Italy in the late 1530s and early 1540s, often with members of the powerful du Bellay family, who continued to protect him. Gargantua was in its turn both successful and highly controversial Rabelais chose, in the increasingly dangerous politico-religious climate of the mid-1530s, to publish less and to avoid France as much as possible. Nonetheless, Rabelais's patrons shielded him well enough that he could follow up on Pantagruel's success by publishing Gargantua in late 1534 or early 1535. The book's considerable commercial success did not keep it (or Rabelais's subsequent works) from being condemned by the Sorbonne, whose faculty of theology acted as the church's office of censorship. In the fall of 1532, Rabelais published a very different sort of text: Pantagruel, the first of the comic works to which he owes his fame. There he took up a position at a hospital, began a correspondence with Desiderius Erasmus, and published several medical texts. By the early 1530s, having first left the Franciscans for the Benedictines, and then left monastic life entirely to become a secular priest, he was a prominent physician living in Lyon, the cultural (and publishing) capital of France at that time.

By 1521 he had become a priest and acquired the reputation of being both an excellent scholar of Greek and a troublemaker, as his Franciscan superiors confiscated his Greek books. 1510), studied both theology and law, and frequented or corresponded with leading humanist scholars of the day. As a young man Rabelais joined the Franciscans (c.

He was born near Chinon, in the Loire valley, and refers affectionately to the region in his work. Little is known about Rabelais's early life even the year of his birth remains uncertain.

Rabelais and his world