Chapter 13, Chapter 5 - The Grotesque Image of the Body Concludes and Chapter 6 - Images of the Material Bodily Lower Stratum Summary and Analysis

Chapter 6 begins with the author making at least some effort to explain how well Rabelais' first novel clarifies the Medieval and Renaissance periods of European history. Women are brought up immediately. Women are linked with the Underworld, partly due to the mysteries of the womb and of child birth, and therefore with death. Women are also associated with it in terms of it being a reference to all that is politically subdominant: the farm workers, the playing children, the women tending families are all somehow subjected to the leadership of the society's most dominant figures. In the Christian and patriarchal world these are...