The two decades during which Rabelais wrote his four books of Pantagruel (1532-52) were a period of great religious ferment and strife. Framed by the dissemination of influential works by Erasmus and Luther in the 1520s and the outbreak of the Wars of Religion in 1562, these years witnessed the rise of biblical humanism and severe repressions by the Faculty of Theology in Paris (the Sorbonne), the creation of a Reformed Church in France and the convocation of the Council of Trent, and a Gallican crisis that nearly ended twelve centuries of papal authority in France. Rabelais's own personal experience placed him at the very center of this ferment. As a Franciscan monk in themonastery of Le Puy-Saint-Martin at Fontenay-le-Comte (before 1520-24) who ran afoul of his order for studying the language of the Greek New Testament, as a Benedictine monk at Maillezais in Poitou (1524-26?) who somehow incurred the charge of apostasy after leaving his monastery to study medicine in Paris and Montpellier, as a secular priest at the Abbey of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés which he himself helped to secularize (1536), as the holder of several benefices (Saint-Maur, Saint-Christophe-du-Jambet, Saint-Martin de Meudon), and as a doctor to Cardinal Jean du Bellay in his diplomatic missions to Rome, Rabelais was as familiar as anyone could be with all aspects - theological, institutional, political - of the religious currents and conflicts of his time.