What is the past – and what can we really know about it? This is the big question Febvre explores in this 1942 text. Relying on his groundbreaking technique championing ‘problem-based history,’ Febvre focuses on sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais to answer one controversial question: Was Rabelais really one of France’s first atheists?

Febvre conducted thorough research on Rabelais and the times he lived in to challenge this accepted view. He studied the mindsets of the day and concluded that Rabelais was not – indeed could not have been– a non-believer because it would have been impossible for a man to conceive of a world without God in that time and place.