Medieval: Feast of Fools

 

"In a feast of fools (festuih follorum) celebrated at Autun in the beginning of the fifteenth century an ass was led in triumph into the church accompanied by a crowd of people in disguises and grotesque dresses chanting a song in praise of the animal. At the feast of the conards of Rouen which enjoyed great celebrity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the abbot as he was called rode about the town in a grotesque costume on an ass while the crowd of followers indulged in coarse and burlesque songs which like those of the ancient Saturnalia raked up all the scandal of the past year." -Wright, Thomas ed. The archaeological album: or, Museum of national antiquities (159).






Engraving: Feast of Fools by Pieter Bruelgel
http://www.pieter-bruegel.co.uk/gallery/pages/fools.htm 

Elements of the Feast of Fools:

• Election of Bishop or Abbot of Fools
• Dancing in church and on the streets
• Procession
• Mock Mass with Backwards Vestments, Masks, Cross-Dressed Clergy, Card Playing, Bawdy Songs and sometimes cursing instead of blessing the congregation (Burke 192).

My lord, who is here present
Gives you 20 baskets of toothache
And to all you others also
Gives a red bum. - 'Indulgences' proclaimed in the south of France (Burke 192).

The Feast of Fools was a church festival, although later the church would condemn such unruly practices.

"As an integral part of life, religion was both subjected to burlesque and unharmed by it. In that annual Feast of Fools at Christmas time, every rite and article of the church no matter how sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominis festi, or lord of the revels, was elected from the inferior clergy... whose day it was to turn everything topsy-turvy" -Barbara Tuchman (Pandian 559).

What Tuchman points out above is especially significant in her recognition that the church was unharmed by such burlesquing of its rituals. By reversing power and mocking solemnity, in election of a leader from among the lower orders, in its sheer silliness, the Feast of Fools, like other inversion practices, actually confirmed the "natural" order of power. By giving reversal ritualized significance within the context of an annual festival, the roles of power that are enacted the rest of the year are in fact confirmed as the norm. Curiously, the prevalence of these festivals seems to relate directly to the growing power of the Church, not against it.

A Medieval "steam-valve" explanation:
"We do these things in jest and not in earnest as the ancient custom is, so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate." - French Clerics, 1444 (Burke 202).

Actual validation of power stuctures through inversion:

"What is maximized at the symbolic level through inversion in the ritual context is minimized at the social level...This type of opposition and disjunction between the ritual and social domains makes it possible to understand how and why authority structures are validated through the enactment of symbolic inversions in the rituals," (Pandian 561-62).

LORDS OF MISRULE in ART

Artist Uncredited | from mangesmangi.blogspot.com

1842 Engraving | The Illustrated London News | The Victorian Web

Feast of Fools, early 17th c. | Flemish School | Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Collection

Yet another description of the Feast of Fools:
 

In practice and in intention it was a parodic blasphemy of the Holy Mass, a devil's mass. The altar was desecrated as a table for eating and drinking and playing dice, a mock service was performed, in which instead of the "Kyrie," the "Allelujah," and the "Gratias Deo," the attendance brayed "he-haw, he-haw," and finally an ass was brought into the church and venerated as the most sacred. A record of the cathedral of Sens informs us that the signal for the commencement of this black mass was the moment when, in the ordinary solemn service, the words were read: "He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and the meek." At this moment the lower clergy jumped up, shouted these words again and again, threw the higher clerics out of the church and took over for as long as the feast lasted. They put masks on, brought bottles out, ate and gambled, brayed and elected officers with titles as bishop and pope, duke and king. - Zucker, The Image of the Clown (313).



Feast of Fools by Rima Staines
used with Artist Permission

 

Eventually, the Feast was no longer supported by Church Authorities. But the spirit of revelry remained and became privately organized in the form of professional guilds.

"When the spirit of folly was no longer welcome within the doors of the church, it moved outside and was manifested in a secular form. In France, this resulted in the creation of amateur fool societies, the sociétés joyeuses  ("joyful societies"), whose members devoted themselves to providing the same brand of irreverent fun. A large number of these groups existed throughout France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of them professional guilds that counted revelry among their social activities...

"These sociétés joyeuses followed in the tradition of the Feast of Fools, electing a King of Fools to celebrate Twelfth Night and other festive holidays and staging their own burlesque ceremonials, as well as mock processions characterized by loud, cacophonous music. The spirit of parody and role reversal so evident in the ecclesiastical celebrations reappeared in the sermon joyeux, a travesty of the church sermon, which mimicked its pedantic structure, frequent Latin citations, and majestic conclusions...These amateur fool societies also performed satirical clown plays called sotties, which portrayed everyone, from the lowly peasant to the king himself, as a sot (fool)," (Townsen 9)
 

For a look at theatrical patronage in different times, visit the work of Jared Culverhouse here.