Accounts of the natural world circulating throughout Europe were so terrifying and fantastic that François Rabelais, the French friar and physician turned popular author, enthusiastically satirized them in his comic epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, which appeared as a series of books beginning in 1532. Rabelais mocked the unreliable accounts by the revered figures of antiquity with his own farcical version of exotic lands and the strange creatures to be found there.
