Béroalde de Verville

Born in Paris in 1556, François Béroalde de Verville was a French Renaissance novelist, poet, and intellectual. He came from a learned Protestant family, and his early life was shaped by the religious conflicts of the time; after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, he spent time in Geneva, where he studied in a strongly humanist environment.

Béroalde de Verville wrote across many genres, including fiction, poetry, moral and philosophical works, and highly original mixtures of all three. He is best known for Le Moyen de parvenir (often dated around 1610), a strange, comic, talkative book that has often been described as Rabelaisian for its bawdy humor, abundance, and delight in ideas.

His work has attracted readers interested in the more experimental side of Renaissance literature: learned but playful, skeptical but energetic, and often hard to pin down. He died in 1626, leaving behind a body of writing that feels both deeply rooted in its era and unexpectedly modern in spirit.