Gargantua and Pantagruel

Gargantua and Pantagruel stands unique among the world's literature for its robust exuberance and monstrous exaggeration. Rabelais (c. 1494-1553), a monk who also qualified as a Bachelor of Medicine, was persecuted by both religious and civil authorities for its publication. As he chronicles the fantastic adventures of the two giants, a series of caricatures emerges, depicting the church hierarchy, schools and universities, theologians, lawyers, and philosophers. The impression received is of the conflict of two ages overlapping: the new age of humanism, research, and individualism, and the former one of the fixed world-order of the schoolmen. J.M. Cohen has translated nine volumes for the Penguin Classics, and has edited several anthologies.