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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Rabelais accomplish the grotesque degradation of his target in the prologue to the Third Book?
(a) By declaring the targets to be empty-headed.
(b) By accusing the targets of paganism and crimes against the Church.
(c) By declaring the targets incapable of the basest bodily functions.
(d) By insulting the targets' mothers.

2. To what does Bakhtin compare the various cries of Paris?
(a) A roaring storm.
(b) A howling wolf.
(c) A sobbing child.
(d) A crowded kitchen.

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

4. In the Prologue of the Third Book, to which contemporary events does Rabelais allude?
(a) The Black Death.
(b) The defense of France against Charles V.
(c) The defeat of the French and Spanish fleets by Admiral Nelson.
(d) The Norman Invasion.

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

6. In Rabelais' time, why was the meaning of debasement often ambivalent?
(a) Because the head is quite separate from all the other parts of the body, spiritually and materially.
(b) Because the person saying the insult never means it seriously.
(c) Because the decaying or excretory organs are closely located to the regenerative genital organs.
(d) Because the debased person may choose to deflect the debasement.

7. Bakhtin considers "thrashing" ambivalent, rather than strictly negative, because:
(a) The act of thrashing is done out of kindness.
(b) The one who is thrashed is also decorated and celebrated.
(c) The act of thrashing is done to punish the individual.
(d) The one who is thrashed explicitly agrees to the act.

8. What are the "Catchpoles" of which Rabelais writes?
(a) Vegetables which require being strung to a pole in order to grow.
(b) Animals sent into the wild as sacrifices.
(c) People who earn money by allowing others to beat them.
(d) Materials used to build large meeting-houses.

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

10. Rabelais' description of Alcibiades reflects:
(a) The abuse/praise dynamics of the marketplace.
(b) The good/evil dichotomy of mankind.
(c) The image of Rabelais himself.
(d) The idea that ancient philosophies were incorrect.

11. In Rabelais' time, jurons, or profanities and oaths, were most often concerned with:
(a) Marketplace vendors who cheated their customers.
(b) Family ties, such as one's in-laws.
(c) Sacred themes, such as saints and relics.
(d) Monarchs who subjugated their people.

12. What does Bakhtin consider the most indispensable element of folk culture?
(a) Death rituals.
(b) Marriage.
(c) Fables.
(d) Carnival.

13. The figure of the Physician in the Fourth Book is closely connected with:
(a) Thought and spirit.
(b) Alchemy.
(c) Heresy.
(d) Death and birth.

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. How, according to Bakhtin, does the current Russian literary criticism approach Rabelais' works?

2. What event that Rabelais relates does he assert is the origin of the name of the city of Paris?

3. How are abusive and praiseful words reflective of grotesque realism?

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

5. What common fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literary device does Bakhtin identify in the Prologue to the Third Book?

(see the answer keys)

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