Desire against the law

The churches and manuscripts of medieval Europe incessantly juxtapose imagery depicting sacred themes with likenesses of the crudest and basest nature. This book examines such contrasts in six major works of pre-1350 Spanish literature, arguing that medieval writers and artists subscribed to the classical belief that one must introduce the contrary of a concept in order to explain it fully. To explain this play of opposites, the author draws on the contrast between Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, which embodies and portrays the realm of desire, and the domain of the law, which imposes the social and behavioral restraints upon which civilized conduct is based.