rabelais

In French I'm currently working my way through Voltaire's Micromégas (which is short) but it's a hundred and some years after Rabelais and the prose is really concrete.

Tell me about the France of Rabelais or Villon, the Italy of Machiavelli, even the plague-ridden London of Shakespeare, the China of the Tang.

Shakespeare is from around the same time period as Rabelais in OP.

I don't know if Rabelais counts as urban fantasy.

* Fiction Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel.

I'm not talking about the grammar (which is simply different in English despite a couple centuries of attempts to make it fit into Latin), or the degree of nuance Cervantes or Rabelais can extract from their linguistic milieu.

I have not been able to find it in any author before Erasmus Darwin (who was late enough to have written, in his Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, on the prospects for the spread of civilisation to New South Wales), though one might suspect the Encyclopedists or Rabelais as more likely originators of the idea.

Gutenberg's version of Rabelais is a very old translation, but I append a sample anyway: Going from Bourges, he came to Orleans, where he found store of swaggering scholars that made him great entertainment at his coming, and with whom he learned to play at tennis so well that he was a master at that game.

I could almost say "science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme", but Rabelais actually wasn’t willing to say what it is generally thought it means nowadays.

My native tongue is French, so in my case it was Rabelais' "Gargantua" (~1500) and "La Chanson de Roland" (~1100).

A very popular French author from the 16th century (Rabelais) once said "rire est le propre de l'homme" (only humans laugh); this sentence is taught in school here in France and repeted constantly; it's considered both insightful and obvious (which is a contradiction in itself; what's obvious and undisputable shouldn't be very interesting).

Just like Rabelais, the apparent casual tone of the language is actually quite a lot of work.

After a while, I could read almost fluently Rabelais' prose; it was immensely funny, coarse and impudent.

Rabelais is probably more like modern French than Shakespeare is like modern English.