Béroalde de Verville

François Béroalde de Verville was born in Paris on April 27, 1556. He grew up in a learned Protestant family, and during the French Wars of Religion his family fled to Geneva, where he is said to have studied medicine before eventually returning to Paris.

He wrote across several forms, including fiction, poetry, and learned prose, and is usually placed in the late French Renaissance. His best-known work is Le Moyen de parvenir, a witty, unruly, often bawdy book that later readers connected with the comic freedom of Rabelais.

Béroalde de Verville later settled in Tours, where he became a canon of Saint-Gatien Cathedral and remained there until his death in October 1626. That unusual path—from humanist and religious exile to physician, man of letters, and churchman—gives his work its curious blend of scholarship, satire, and imaginative excess.