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Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in "Gargantua and Pantagruel"

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There is a very detailed description of the change in style, showing that Rabelais was tamed by the need to be more refined when he joined a royal court trip to Italy as a physician. Rabelais mentioned an Italian novel, Orlando furioso (1516) by Ludovico Ariosto, in the Prologue of the 1534 edition of Pantagruel. The heterogeneity of an amazing mixture of styles including popular culture praised by Bakhtin was considered vulgar, representative of a common, ignorant and mindless menial horde that Rabelais quickly learned to disdain, as was the newly honorable style for nobles of that time. There was a Peasant's War of 1524/25 which was hostile to those in power, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation added to condemnation of moral license which the Catholic church began to consider pagan practices. This book is a scholarly attempt to defend some attitudes "that escaped Bakhtin entirely. I can't say that I am altogether happy to have noticed it myself." (p. 136, n. 37).