François Rabelais (UK: RAB-ə-lay, US: -⁠LAY, French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁablɛ]; born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553) was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs.

Both Ecclesiastical and anticlerical, Christian and a free thinker, a doctor and a bon vivant, the multiple facets of his personality sometimes seem contradictory. Caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation, Rabelais treated the great questions of his time in his novels. Assessments of his life and work have evolved over time depending on dominant paradigms of thought.

Rabelais admired Erasmus and is considered a Christian humanist. He was critical of medieval scholasticism, lampooning the abuses of powerful princes and popes, opposing them with Greco-Roman learning and popular culture. His taste for popular satire led John Calvin to attack Rabelais in 1550.

Known most widely for the first two volumes relating the childhoods of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel in the style of bildungsroman, Rabelais' later work in the Third Book and the Fourth Book prefigures the philosophical novel and the parodic epic.

His literary legacy is such that the word Rabelaisian designates something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism".