Details of Rabelais's life are sparse and difficult to interpret. He was the son of Antoine Rabelais, a rich Touraine landowner and a prominent lawyer who deputized for the lieutenant-général of Poitou in 1527. After apparently studying law, Rabelais became a Franciscan novice at La Baumette (1510?) and later moved to the Puy-Saint-Martin convent at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou. By 1521 (perhaps earlier) he had taken holy orders.

Rabelais early acquired a reputation for profound humanist learning among his contemporaries, but the elements of religious satire and scatological humour in his comic novels eventually left him open to persecution. He depended throughout his life on powerful political figures (Guillaume du Bellay, Margaret of Navarre) and on high-ranking liberal ecclesiastics (Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Bishop Geoffroy d'Estissac, Cardinal Odet de Châtillon) for protection in those dangerous and intolerant times in France.

Rabelais was closely associated with Pierre Amy, a liberal Franciscan humanist (humanism) of international repute. In 1524 the Greek books of both scholars were temporarily confiscated by superiors of their convent, because Greek was suspect to hyperorthodox Roman Catholics as a “heretical” language that opened up the original New Testament to study. Rabelais then obtained a temporary dispensation from Pope Clement VII and was removed to the Benedictine house of Saint-Pierre-de-Maillezais, the prior of which was his bishop, Geoffroy d'Estissac. He never liked his new order, however, and he later satirized the Benedictines, although he passed lightly over Franciscan shortcomings.

Rabelais studied medicine, probably under the aegis of the Benedictines in their Hôtel Saint-Denis in Paris. In 1530 he broke his vows and left the Benedictines to study medicine at the University of Montpellier, probably with the support of his patron, Geoffroy d'Estissac. Graduating within weeks, he lectured on the works of distinguished ancient Greek physicians and published his own editions of Hippocrates' (Hippocrates) Aphorisms and Galen's (Galen Of Pergamum) Ars parva (“The Art of Raising Children”) in 1532. As a doctor he placed great reliance on classical authority, siding with the Platonic school of Hippocrates but also following Galen and Avicenna. During this period an unknown widow bore him two children (François and Junie), who were given their father's name and were legitimated by Pope Paul IV in 1540.

After practicing medicine briefly in Narbonne, Rabelais was appointed physician to the hospital of Lyon, the Hôtel-Dieu, in 1532. In the same year, he edited the medical letters of Giovanni Manardi, a contemporary Italian physician. It was during this period that he discovered his true talent. Fired by the success of an anonymous popular chapbook, Les Grandes et inestimables cronicques du grant et énorme géant Gargantua, he published his first novel, Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel, roy des Dipsodes (1532; “The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes”), under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an obvious anagram of his real name). Pantagruel is slighter in length and intellectual depth than his later novels, but nothing of this quality had been seen before in French in any similar genre. Rabelais displayed his delight in words, his profound sense of the comedy of language itself, his mastery of comic situation, monologue, dialogue, and action, and his genius as a storyteller who was able to create a world of fantasy out of words alone. Within the framework of a mock-heroic, chivalrous romance, he laughed at many types of sophistry, including legal obscurantism and hermeticism, which he nevertheless preferred to the scholasticism of the Sorbonne. One chapter stands out for its sustained seriousness, praising the divine gift of fertile matrimony as a compensation for death caused by Adam's fall. Pantagruel borrows openly from Sir Thomas More's Utopia in its reference to the war between Pantagruel's country, Utopia, and the Dipsodes, but it also preaches a semi-Lutheran doctrine—that no one but God and his angels may spread the gospel by force. Pantagruel is memorable as the book in which Pantagruel's companion, Panurge, a cunning and witty rogue, first appears.

Though condemned by the Sorbonne in Paris as obscene, Pantagruel was a popular success. It was followed in 1533 by the Pantagrueline Prognostication, a parody of the almanacs (almanac), astrological predictions that exercised a growing hold on the Renaissance mind. In 1534 Rabelais left the Hôtel-Dieu to travel to Rome with the bishop of Paris, Jean du Bellay (Bellay, Jean du). He returned to Lyon in May of that year and published an edition of Bartolomeo Marliani's description of Rome, Topographia antiquae Romae. He returned to the Hôtel-Dieu but left it again in February 1535, upon which the authorities of the Lyon hospital appointed someone else to his post.

La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua (“The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua”) belongs to this period. The second edition is dated 1535; the first edition was probably published in 1534, though it lacks the title page in the only known copy. In Gargantua Rabelais continues to exploit medieval romances mock-heroically, telling of the birth, education, and prowesses of the giant Gargantua, who is Pantagruel's father. Much of the satire—for example, mockery of the ignorant trivialization of the mystical cult of emblems and of erroneous theories of heraldry—is calculated to delight the court; much also aims at delighting the learned reader—for example, Rabelais sides with humanist lawyers against legal traditionalists and doctors who accepted 11-month, or even 13-month, pregnancies. Old-fashioned scholastic pedagogy is ridiculed and contrasted with the humanist ideal of the Christian prince, widely learned in art, science, and crafts and skilled in knightly warfare. The war between Gargantua and his neighbour, the “biliously choleric” Picrochole, is partly a private satire of an enemy of Rabelais's father and partly a mocking of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, and the imperial design of world conquest. Gargantua commands the military operations, but some of the exploits are carried out by Frère Jean (the Benedictine). Though he is lean, lecherous, dirty, and ignorant, Frère Jean is redeemed by his jollity and active virtue; for his fellow monks are timorous and idle, delighting in “vain repetitions” of prayers. Gargantua's last major episode centres on the erection of the Abbey of Thélème, a monastic institution that rejects poverty, celibacy, and obedience; instead it welcomes wealth and the well-born, praises the aristocratic life, and rejoices in good marriages.

After Gargantua, Rabelais published nothing new for 11 years, though he prudently expurgated his two works of overbold religious opinions. He continued as physician to Jean du Bellay, who had become a cardinal, and his powerful brother Guillaume, and in 1535 Rabelais accompanied the cardinal to Rome. There he regularized his position by making a “supplication” to the pope for his “apostasy” (i.e., his unauthorized departure from the Benedictine monastery); the pope issued a bull freeing Rabelais from ecclesiastical censure and allowing him to reenter the Benedictine order. Rabelais then arranged to enter the Benedictine convent at Saint-Maur-les-Fossés, where Cardinal Jean du Bellay was abbot. The convent was secularized six months later, and Rabelais became a secular priest, authorized to exercise his medical profession.

In May 1537 Rabelais was awarded the doctorate of medicine of Montpellier; and he delivered, with considerable success, a course of lectures on Hippocrates' Prognostics. He was at Aigues-Mortes in July 1538 when Charles V met the French king Francis I, but his movements are obscure until he followed Guillaume du Bellay to the Piedmont in 1542. Guillaume died in January 1543, and to Rabelais his death meant the loss of an important patron. That same year Geoffroy d'Estissac died as well, and Rabelais's novels were condemned by the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris. Rabelais sought protection from the French king's sister Margaret, queen of Navarre, dedicating to her the third book of the Gargantua-Pantagruel series, Tiers livre des faits et dits héroïques du noble Pantagruel (1546; “Third Book of the Heroic Deeds and Words of the Noble Pantagruel”). Despite its royal privilège (i.e., license to print), the book was immediately condemned for heresy by the Sorbonne, and Rabelais fled to Metz (an imperial city), remaining there until 1547.

The Tiers livre is Rabelais's most profound work. Pantagruel has now deepened into a Stoico-Christian inerrant sage; Panurge, a lover of self and deluded by the devil, is now an adept at making black seem white. Panurge hesitates: Should he marry? Will he be cuckolded, beaten, robbed by his wife? He consults numerous prognostications, both good Platonic ones and less reputable ones—all to no effect because of his self-love. He consults a good theologian, a Platonic doctor, and a Skeptic philosopher approved of by the learned giants, but his problem is not treated by the judge Bridoye, who—like Roman law in cases of extreme perplexity—trusts in Providence and decides cases by casting lots. Panurge trusts in no one, least of all in himself. It is therefore decided to consult the oracle of the Dive Bouteille (“Sacred Bottle”), and the travelers set out for the temple. The Tiers livre ends enigmatically with a mock eulogy in which hemp is praised for its myriad uses.

From 1547 onward, Rabelais found protection again as physician to Cardinal Jean du Bellay and accompanied him to Rome via Turin, Ferrara, and Bologna. Passing through Lyon, he gave his printer his incomplete Quart livre (“Fourth Book”), which, as printed in 1548, finishes in the middle of a sentence but contains some of his most delightful comic storytelling. In Rome Rabelais sent a story to his newest protector in the Guise family, Charles of Lorraine, 2nd Cardinal de Lorraine; the story described the “Sciomachie” (“Simulated Battle”) organized by Cardinal Jean to celebrate the birth of Louis of Orléans, second son of Henry II of France.

In January 1551 the Cardinal de Guise presented him with two benefices at Meudon and Jambet, though Rabelais never officiated or resided there. In 1552, through the influence of the cardinal, Rabelais was able to publish—with a new prologue—the full Quart livre des faits et dits héroïques du noble Pantagruel (“Fourth Book of the Heroic Deeds and Words of the Noble Pantagruel”), his longest book. Despite its royal privilège, this work, too, was condemned by the Sorbonne and banned by Parlement, but Rabelais's powerful patrons soon had the censorship lifted. In 1553 Rabelais resigned his benefices. He died shortly thereafter and was buried in Saint-Paul-des-Champs, Paris.

In 1562 there appeared in Lyon the Isle sonante, allegedly by Rabelais. It was expanded in 1564 into the so-called Cinquiesme et dernier livre (“Fifth and Last Book”). This work is partly satirical, partly an allegory; the Sacred Bottle—the ostensible quest of the Quart livre—is consulted, and the heroes receive the oraculous advice: “drink” (symbolizing wisdom?). This work cannot be by Rabelais as it stands. Some scholars believe it to be based on his (lost) drafts, while others deny it any authenticity whatsoever.

Rabelais's purpose in the four books of his masterpiece was to entertain the cultivated reader at the expense of the follies and exaggerations of his times. If he points lessons, it is because his life has taught him something about the evils of comatose monasticism, the trickery of lawyers, the pigheaded persistence of litigants, and the ignorance of grasping physicians. Rabelais was a friar with unhappy memories of his monastery; his father had wasted his money on lengthy litigation with a neighbour over some trivial water rights; and he himself was earning his living by medicine in an age when the distinction between physician and quack was needle-fine. Though it is an entertainment, therefore, Gargantua and Pantagruel is also serious. Its principal narrative is devoted to a voyage of discovery that parodies the travelers' tales current in Rabelais's day. Rabelais begins lightheartedly; his travelers merely set out to discover whether Panurge will be cuckolded if he marries. A dozen oracles have already hinted at Panurge's inevitable fate, yet each time he has reasoned their verdict away; and the voyage itself provides a number of amusing incidents. Yet, like Don Quixote's, it is a fundamentally serious quest directed toward a true goal, the discovery of the secret of life.

Intoxication—with life, with learning, with the use and abuse of words—is the prevailing mood of the book. Rabelais himself provides the model of the exuberant creator. His four books provide a cunning mosaic of scholarly, literary, and scientific parody. One finds this in its simplest form in the catalog of the library of St. Victor, in the list of preposterous substantives or attributes in which Rabelais delights, and in the inquiry by means of Virgilian lots into the question of Panurge's eventual cuckoldom. But at other times the humour is more complicated and works on several levels. Gargantua's campaign against King Picrochole (book 1), for instance, contains personal, historical, moral, and classical points closely interwoven. The battles are fought in Rabelais's home country, in which each hamlet is magnified into a fortified city. Moreover, they also refer to the feud between Rabelais the elder and his neighbour. They also comment on recent historical events involving France and the Holy Roman Empire, however, and can even be read as propaganda against war, or at least in favour of the more humane conduct of hostilities. On yet another level, Rabelais's account of this imaginary warfare can be taken as mockery of the classical historians: Gargantua's speech to his defeated enemy (book 1, chapter 50) echoes one put into the mouth of the Roman emperor Trajan by Pliny the Younger.

Despite these complex levels of reference, Rabelais was not a self-conscious writer; he made his book out of the disorderly contents of his mind. As a result it is ill-constructed, and the same thoughts are repeated in Gargantua that he had already set down in Pantagruel; the nature of an ideal education, for example, is examined in both books. Moreover, the main action of the story, which arises from the question of Panurge's intended marriage, only begins in the third book. The first, Gargantua, throws up the enormous contradiction that has made the interpretation of Rabelais's own intellectual standpoint almost impossible. On the one hand we have the rumbustious festivities that celebrate the giant's peculiarly miraculous birth and the “Rabelaisian” account of his childish habits; and on the other a plea for an enlightened education. Again, the brutal slaughter of the Picrocholine wars, in which Rabelais obviously delights, is followed by the utopian description of Thélème, the Renaissance ideal of a civilized community. Pantagruel follows the same pattern with variations, introducing Panurge but omitting Frère Jean, and putting Pantagruel in the place of his father, Gargantua. In fact the characters are not strongly individualized. They exist only in what they say, being so many voices through whom the author speaks. Panurge, for instance, has no consistent nature. A resourceful and intelligent poor scholar in Pantagruel, he becomes a credulous buffoon in the third book and an arrant coward in the fourth.

The third and fourth books pursue the story of the inquiry and voyage, and in them Rabelais's invention is at its height. The first two books contain incidents close in feeling to the medieval fabliaux, but the third and fourth books are rich in a new, learned humour. Rabelais was a writer molded by one tradition, the medieval Roman Catholic, whose sympathies lay to a greater extent with another, the Renaissance or classical. Yet when he writes in praise of the new humanist ideals—in the chapters on education, on the foundation of Thélème, or in praise of drinking from the “sacred bottle” of learning or enlightenment—he easily becomes sententious. His head is for the new learning, while his flesh and heart belong to the old. It is in his absurd, earthy, and exuberant inventions, which are medieval in spirit even when they mock at medieval acceptances, that Rabelais is a great, entertaining, and worldly wise writer.