ABSTRACT
Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary analysis of French author François Rabelais is often considered a paradigm shift in medieval literary theory. A Russian historian, literary scholar, and cultural theorist, Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World recovered Rabelais’s writings from obscurity by interpreting them in the context of medieval carnival—those Saturnalian folk festivals that celebrated the inversion of the normative standards and social hierarchies of everyday medieval life. As a result, Bakhtin not only rescued Rabelais from the misunderstanding of literary critics, but also provided an extremely cogent analysis of the carnivalesque and its central importance to medieval social life.
