Bakhtin’s concept of a medieval carnival and “carnival attitude”, set out mainly in the book on Rabelais (1940; 1965), was often criticized for the absence or lack of medieval texts cited by the author of the book in support of his concept (A.Y. Gurevich, M.L. Gasparov, a book by the French medievalist D. Bute about medieval parody, many others). In the proposed study, an attempt will be made to show the thoroughness of the views of M.M. Bakhtin to a medieval carnival and “carnivalization” on such material of “laughter literature” that Bakhtin most likely did not know, or was mentioned in his book about Rabelais, but which he did not understand in detail for objective reasons. Within the framework of the article, one French fabliau of the XIV century “The Three Ladies of Paris” will be analyzed, which plays up the motives of a carnival overturn, a material bodily lower stratum and in which a Parisian tavern, acquiring more specific features, is still depicted ambivalently as in the songs of the vagantes.
Keywords
M.M. Bakhtin; medieval carnival; parody; “Les trois dames de Paris”.