Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the greatest thinkers of the last century. He is considered worldwide as one of the most influential literary theorists as his writings, especially Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, inspired scholars working in diverse disciplines: Jacques Attali, Ioan Petru Culianu, Victor Ieronim Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch. In this classic of Renaissance studies, Bakhtin concerns himself with the openness of Gargantua and Pantagruel; however, the book itself also serves as an example of such openness. The scholar pinpoints a very important subtext: carnival which Bakhtin describes as a social institution. It is associated with collectivity. Those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd; the people are rather seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization. Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque in literature to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of popular culture. In the carnival, social hierarchies of everyday life – their solemnities and pieties and etiquettes as well as all ready-made truths – are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. Thus, fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell). It is not to be construed that the liberation from all authority and sacred symbols is an ideology to be believed and held as a creed.