Putting the 'Haute' Back into the 'Haute Dame de Paris': The Politics and Performance of Rabelais's Radical Farce1

Coming to terms with the episode led to a pair of imaginative readings by Carla Freccero, who compared the Parisian Lady to Anita Hill, and François Rigolot, who found in her a type of figura Christi.10 In Jean-Claude Carron's introduction to the proceedings of the conference that brought together these two surprising, divergent interpretations, he explains that, for Freccero, The traditional eagerness to laugh and to find textual value at the expense of women is an uncomfortably familiar and misogynist reaction, and furthermore that, Rabelais's antifeminism, like that of some modern male critics [she referred specifically to Wayne Booth's reading of this episode], is fueled by the same repressive, reactionary principles that led to the Hill/ Thomas hearings.