ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 examines King Edward and the Shepherd (c. 1400–1450), arguing that this politicised, fifteenth-century comic tale amalgamates the medieval carnival with the complaint literature and radical insurgent demands of the period. The commoner’s Bakhtinian, carnivalesque feast creates an inverting ‘world turned upside down’, in which hierarchy is suspended and deconstructed. The king emerges here as a proto-panoptical spy, while the court is identified with corruption, oppression, and alterity amid the commoner’s containment.
