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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Clowns and fools are:
(a) Everyday representatives of the folk and of Carnival.
(b) Restricted to entertaining the royal court.
(c) Present only at large fairs or gatherings.
(d) Prisoners forced to entertain others.

2. How, according to Bakhtin, does the current Russian literary criticism approach Rabelais' works?
(a) By reviving their content in new, twentieth-century forms.
(b) By sharing them with an eager public.
(c) By denouncing them as counterproductive to the ongoing Russian Revolution.
(d) By trying to correctly interpret the source of the cultural laughter within them.

3. How did the French Romanticists respond to Rabelais' works?
(a) With disgust and negative criticism.
(b) With an appreciation of, and interest in, the grotesque.
(c) With complete understanding of Medieval and Renaissance culture.
(d) They ignored Rabelais completely.

4. Why, according to Bakhtin, does Rabelais treat excrement ambivalently?
(a) Because it is intermediate between earth and body.
(b) Because it is evidence of humankind's presence on the earth.
(c) Because its purpose was a mystery in the Renaissance.
(d) Because it exclusively connotes badness or evil.

5. Why are Rabelais' billingsgate elements considered "coarse and cynical" by most scholars?
(a) These elements express a deep distrust of contemporary society.
(b) Many scholars interpret them only in a modern context.
(c) Many scholars believe that Rabelais himself was bitter from publication disputes.
(d) The Latin derivations of his scatological vocabulary mean "cynical."

6. Comic rituals in Medieval and Renaissance Europe were:
(a) All that which linked the living to the dead.
(b) Necessary to mercantile transactions.
(c) Freed of the trappings of religious dogma and mysticism.
(d) Taboo in all settings but the royal court.

7. How does Bakhtin interpret the relevance of the cries of Paris to Renaissance France?
(a) The cries combine the reality of practical life with festive utopian universalism.
(b) The cries negate the revitalization of the marketplace.
(c) The cries were the people's only method of exchanging ideas.
(d) The cries suggest a deep discontent in the Parisian populace.

8. During the "feast of fools" and the "feast of the ass," laughter:
(a) Was regulated by the town fools and farmers.
(b) Was encouraged even in church.
(c) Was forbidden because of the sacredness of the festival.
(d) Was forbidden everywhere but the marketplace.

9. What are examples of carnivalesque victims?
(a) Blushing virgins and old maids.
(b) Debased clowns and slaughtered oxen.
(c) Stray dogs and street orphans.
(d) Peasants and tax collectors.

10. Why does Friar John beat thousands of men in his abbey?
(a) As a show of force to deter invaders.
(b) Another Friar challenged him.
(c) To save the abbey's vineyards.
(d) To save France from atheism.

11. The purpose of "travesty" in folk festivals was to:
(a) Irreversibly denigrate everything it could.
(b) Indicate the importance of travel to an individual's self-development.
(c) Reassert traditional definitions of social and spiritual life.
(d) Call upon something serious and make it amusing.

12. To what does Veselovsky compare Rabelais?
(a) A village boy.
(b) A pious priest.
(c) An elderly scholar.
(d) An ironfisted dictator.

13. Curses in Renaissance folk culture tended to focus most closely upon the victim's:
(a) Mind.
(b) Body.
(c) Family.
(d) Spirit.

14. The verbal interactions between the Renaissance marketplace hawker and the crowd were above all:
(a) Timid and quiet.
(b) Free and frank.
(c) Abusive and derogatory.
(d) Distantly suggestive.

15. Bakhtin connects Medieval "seriousness" most closely to:
(a) Inspiration and hope.
(b) Feasting, spectacles, and sex.
(c) Fear, weakness, and violence.
(d) Scholarly activities.

Short Answer Questions

1. In the Prologue of the Third Book, to which contemporary events does Rabelais allude?

2. What were "street cries"?

3. The combination of solemnity and joking in the tone of the Prologue to the Third Book indicates:

4. In the Renaissance, bodily excretions were closely associated with:

5. In the seventeenth century, the decline of laughter as a primary force in folk culture resulted from:

(see the answer keys)

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