Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (1564)

Our word for the monstrously huge comes from this book's giant, and Rabelais earns it. Gargantua is born bellowing for drink, eats entire herds at a sitting, and as a boy works through everything to wipe himself with before pronouncing a live gosling the finest. Yet Rabelais warns in his prologue that the book is a Silenus box, grotesques painted outside and something precious sealed within, and to read it is to pry that box open: beneath the noise and the bawdry a humanist philosophy keeps surfacing. A petty king called Picrochole goes to war over stolen cakes, and the farce sharpens into a study of how paranoia governs. The Abbey of Thélème, Gargantua's utopia, runs on a single rule, _Do what thou wilt_. And the long quest to the Oracle of the Divine Bottle ends with one word of counsel for living: Drink. Rabelais had to coin the word Pantagruelism for what his giants practice, because no smaller term could hold a wisdom that refused to part the body from the soul, or the laugh from the argument.