evidence: These carnivals were attacks on authority and a means for popular renewal. As Bakhtin writes, in the introduction to his book, Carnival is people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is festive life. Festivity is a peculiar quality of all comic rituals and spectacles of the Middle Ages. All these forms of carnival were also linked externally to the feasts of the Church. (One carnival did not coincide with any commemoration of sacred history or of a saint but marked the last day before Lent, and for this reason was called Mardi Gras….Even more significant is the genetic link of these carnivals with ancient pagan festivities, agrarian in nature, which included the comic element in their rituals.