According to this:

For the literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is both the description of a historical phenomenon and the name he gives to a certain literary tendency. Historically speaking, Bakhtin was interested in great carnivals of medieval Europe. He saw them as occasions in which the political, legal and ideological authority of both the church and state were inverted, albeit temporarily, during the anarchic and liberating period of the carnival.

The carnival was not only liberating because for that short period the church and state had little or no control over the lives of the revellers—although Terry Eagleton points out this would probably be ‘licensed’ transgression at best—but its true liberating potential can be seen in the fact that set rules and beliefs were not immune to ridicule or reconception at carnival time; it ‘cleared the ground’ for new ideas to enter into public discourse. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest that the European Renaissance itself was made possible by the spirit of free thinking and impiety that the carnivals engendered.

{See also: placeless living, new nomadism, rebirth of capitalism after economic crash (maybe Larouche was right about the Grateful Dead?)}