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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 15, Chapter 6 - Images of the Material Bodily Lower Stratum.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What do wine and oil symbolize in Rabelais' novel?
(a) Free, festive speech versus religious piety and seriousness.
(b) Hard harvest work in the vineyards and olive groves.
(c) Since both are flammable, they symbolize hellfire.
(d) Sickness and hangovers versus a useful cooking ingredient.

2. How is a "prophetic riddle" game carnivalesque in nature?
(a) It focuses on gaiety and humor.
(b) It is always sung in a rhymed singsong tone.
(c) It stresses the destruction of the established order and hierarchy of society.
(d) It stresses the importance of feasting and drinking.

3. How does the Lord of Basche contrive to bring Catchpoles to his castle?
(a) By celebrating Mass.
(b) By celebrating mock weddings.
(c) By giving away his possessions.
(d) By offering people absolution from their sins.

4. Which side of the Renaissance debate about the nature of women and wedlock did Rabelais tend to take?
(a) The Gallic tradition.
(b) The English tradition.
(c) The Roman tradition.
(d) The Idealizing tradition.

5. Carnival allowed:
(a) The endurance of the propriety expected of all social classes.
(b) The upper class to oppress relentlessly the lower class.
(c) The peasants to sell their crops without paying taxes.
(d) The mixing of real and unreal, fantasy and fact.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Bakhtin define "folly" as it relates to festivity?

2. Why, according to Bakhtin, does Rabelais treat excrement ambivalently?

3. What is the theme of "cuckoldry"?

4. What in Rabelais' novel is a travesty of Gospel miracles?

5. To what are "swabs" most closely related?

(see the answer key)

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