The song "Pantagruel's Nativity" is inspired by the books of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais.
Ashbee wrote two utopian novels influenced by Morris, From Whitechapel to Camelot (1892) and The Building of Thelema (1910), the latter named after the abbey in François Rabelais' book Gargantua and Pantagruel.
The first known appearance of the term is in the 16th century novel The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel by François Rabelais.
In France, Rabelais in the mid-16th century in his Gargantua and Pantagruel makes this practice explicit, stating that,
The name of the chamber derives from the giantess Gargamelle in the works of François Rabelais; she was Gargantua's mother.
In 1532, 'Hôtel-Dieu' appointed former Franciscan/Benedictine monk-turned-doctor and great Humanist François Rabelais, who would write his Gargantua and Pantagruel during his tenure here.
The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer François Rabelais, who famously wrote in Pantagruel: "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" ("la moitié du monde ne sait pas comment l'autre vit").
Rabelais's main work of this nature is the Gargantua and Pantagruel series, which contain a great deal of allegorical, suggestive messages.
It is a group similar to the Thelemites (people who subscribe to the philosophy of Thelema) who base themselves on François Rabelais' Abbey of Thelema in Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Gargantua and Pantagruel, a series of novels authored by François Rabelais
François Rabelais mentions Vermont in the prologue to Book IV of Gargantua and Pantagruel, as one of a group of the most famous singers of the age, performing a bawdy song for Priapus.
The number of sibyls so depicted could vary, sometimes they were twelve (See, for example, the Apennine Sibyl), sometimes ten, e.g. for François Rabelais, “How know we but that she may be an eleventh Sibyl or a second Cassandra?” Gargantua and Pantagruel, iii.
The 16th century French satirical writer François Rabelais, in Chapter XIII of Book 1 of his novel-sequence Gargantua and Pantagruel, has his character Gargantua investigate a great number of ways of cleansing oneself after defecating.
The most notable French novels of the first half of the century are François Rabelais’s masterpieces Pantagruel, Gargantua and their sequels.
He became friends around this time with a fellow physician, François Rabelais, who later wrote La vie de Gargantua et Pantagruel in which Rondelet is satirised under the thinly disguised alias of "Rondibilis".