Feast of Fools
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| + | "This [[Feast of Fools]] had, however, its designed effect, and contributed perhaps more to the extermination of those Heathens than all the collateral aids of fire and fword, which were not either spared in the persecution of them ; but, as there is hardly a greater absurdity in the world, nor a more common one, than the continuance of customs after the original cause of them has ceased, the people, long after the cessation of any apparent political necessity for such drolls, remained so captivated with the merriment of them, the grosser the better for them, that, the primary object of them being vanished, the jest began to threaten a recoil on the clergy itself who had instituted them."--''[[Essay to Retrieve the Ancient Celtic]]'' (1768) by John Cleland | ||
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| + | [[Image:Friar John and Panurge.jpg|thumb|right|200px|[[Friar John]] and [[Panurge]] give the ''[[Blason and contreblason du couillon]]'' by [[François Rabelais|Rabelais]]]] | ||
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| - | :''[[Les Enfants-sans-Souci]]'' | ||
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| - | The '''Lord of Misrule''', known in [[Scotland]] as the '''Abbot of Unreason''' and in [[France]] as the ''Prince des Sots'', was an officer appointed by lot at [[Christmas]] to preside over the [[Feast of Fools]]. The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pagan tradition of [[Saturnalia]]. The Church held a similar festival involving a [[Boy Bishop]]. The celebration of the Feast of Fools was outlawed by the [[Council of Basel]] that sat from 1431, but it survived to be put down again by the Catholic [[Mary I of England|Queen Mary I]] in England in 1555. | ||
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| - | While mostly known as a [[United Kingdom|British]] holiday custom, the appointment of a Lord of Misrule comes from antiquity. In ancient [[Rome]], from the 17th to the 23rd of December, a Lord of Misrule was appointed for the feast of [[Saturnalia]], in the guise of the good god [[Saturn (mythology)|Saturn]]. During this time the ordinary rules of life were turned topsy-turvy as masters served their slaves, and the offices of state were held by slaves. The Lord of Misrule presided over all of this, and had the power to command anyone to do anything during the holiday period. This holiday seems to be the precursor to the more modern holiday, and it carried over into the Christian era. | ||
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| - | On January 1, A.D. [[400]], [[Asterius of Amasia|Asterius]], [[bishop of Amasea]] in Pontus ([[Amasya Province|Amasya, Turkey]]) preached a sermon against the Feast of [[Kalends|Calends]] ("this foolish and harmful delight") that tells a lot about the Lord of Misrule in [[Late Antiquity]]. The New Years feast included children arriving at each doorstep, exchanging their gifts for reward: | ||
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| - | <blockquote> | ||
| - | "This festival teaches even the little children, artless and simple, to be greedy, and accustoms them to go from house to house and to offer novel gifts, fruits covered with silver tinsel. For these they receive, in return, gifts double their value, and thus the tender minds of the young begin to be impressed with that which is commercial and sordid." | ||
| - | :::::: --Asterius, in ''"Oratio 4: Adversus Kalendarum Festum"'' | ||
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| - | </blockquote> | ||
| - | It contrasted with the Christian celebration held, not by chance, on the adjoining day: | + | The '''Feast of Fools''' (Latin: ''festum fatuorum'', ''festum stultorum'') is the name given to a specific [[feast day]] celebrated by the [[clergy]] in [[Europe]], initially in Northern [[France]], but later more widely. Its later reception history has considerably obscured modern understandings of the nature and meaning of this celebration, which originated in proper liturgical observance, and has more to do with other examples of medieval [[liturgical drama]] than with either the earlier pagan (Roman) feasts of [[Saturnalia]] and [[Kalends]] or the later bourgeois lay [[sotie]]. |
| - | <blockquote> | + | |
| - | "We celebrate the birth of Christ, since at this time God manifested himself in the flesh. We celebrate the Feast of Lights (Epiphany), since by the forgiveness of our sins we are led forth from the dark prison of our former life into a life of light and {{nowrap|uprightness." --Asterius, ''"Oratio 4"''}} | + | |
| - | </blockquote> | + | |
| - | Significantly, for Asterius the Christian feast was explicitly an entry from darkness into light, and although no conscious solar nature could have been expressed, it is certainly the renewed light at midwinter, which was celebrated among Roman pagans, officially from the time of [[Aurelian]], as the [[Sol Invictus|"festival of the birth of the Unconquered Sun"]]. Meanwhile throughout the city of Amasea, although entry into the temples and holy places had been forbidden by the decree of [[Theodosius I]] (391), the festival of gift-giving when "all is noise and tumult" in "a rejoicing over the new year" with a kiss and the gift of a coin, went on all around, to the intense disgust and scorn of the bishop: | + | |
| - | <blockquote> | + | |
| - | This is misnamed a feast, being full of annoyance; since going out-of-doors is burdensome, and staying within doors is not undisturbed. For the common vagrants and the jugglers of the stage, dividing themselves into squads and hordes, hang about every house. The gates of public officials they besiege with especial persistence, actually shouting and clapping their hands until he that is beleaguered within, exhausted, throws out to them whatever money he has and even what is not his own. And these mendicants going from door to door follow one after another, and, until late in the evening, there is no relief from this nuisance. For crowd succeeds crowd, and shout, shout, and loss, | + | |
| - | </blockquote> | + | ==Context== |
| + | The central idea seems always to have been a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity and impunity is briefly conferred on those in a subordinate position. In the views of later commentators, this makes the medieval festival a successor to the Roman [[Kalends]] of January, although there is no continuity between the two celebrations. | ||
| - | Honest farmers coming into the city were likely to be jeered at, spanked and robbed. Worse, | + | Many of the most colourful descriptions of the medieval festival are a result of centuries of misunderstandings and unscholarly conflations of events widely dispersed in time and place; many rely on the condemnations of later writers, which either exaggerate or deliberately misreport what was basically an orderly -- it not always fully scripted -- liturgical celebration with some dramatic elements. The involvement of inversion (subdeacons occupying the roles normally fulfilled by higher clergy) and the '[[fool]]s' symbolised orthodox biblical ideas of humility (e.g. the last being first) and becoming a 'fool for Christ' (1 Corinthians 4:10). |
| - | <blockquote>"Even our most excellent and guileless prophets, the unmistakable representatives of God, who when unhindered in their work are our faithful ministers, are treated with insolence." For the soldiers, they spend all their wages in riot and loose women, see plays perhaps, "for they learn vulgarity and the practices of actors". | + | |
| - | Their military discipline is relaxed and slackened. They make sport of the laws and the government of which they have been appointed guardians. For they ridicule and insult the august government. They mount a chariot as though upon a stage; they appoint pretended lictors and publicly act like buffoons. This is the nobler part of their ribaldry. But their other doings, how can one mention them? Does not the champion, the lion-hearted man, the man who when armed is the admiration of his friends and the terror of his foes, loose his tunic to his ankles, twine a girdle about his breast, use a woman's sandal, put a roll of hair on his head in feminine fashion, and ply the distaff full of wool, and with that right hand which once bore the trophy, draw out the thread, and changing the tone of his voice utter his words in the sharper feminine treble? | + | In the Middle Ages, particularly in France, the Feast of Fools was staged on or about the [[Feast of the Circumcision]], January 1. It is related to certain other liturgical dramas, such, for example, as the [[Feast of the Ass]], the [[Play of Daniel]], and the [[Office of the Star]]. So far as the Feast of Fools had an independent existence, it seems to have grown out of a special "festival of the subdeacons", which [[John Beleth]], a liturgical writer of the twelfth century and an Englishman by birth, assigns to the day of the Circumcision. He is the earliest to draw attention to the fact that, as the deacons had a special celebration on St Stephen's day December 26, the priests on St John the Evangelist's day December 27, and again the choristers and mass-servers on the [[Feast of the Holy Innocents]] on December 28, so the subdeacons were accustomed to hold their feast about the same time of year, but more particularly on the festival of the Circumcision. |
| - | </blockquote> | + | |
| - | However, according to the anthropologist [[James Frazer]], there was a darker side to the Saturnalia festival. In [[Durostorum]] on the [[Danube]] (modern [[Silistra]]), Roman soldiers would choose a man from among them to be the Lord of Misrule for thirty days. At the end of that thirty days, his throat was cut on the altar of Saturn. Similar origins of the British Lord of Misrule, as a sacrificial king (a ''temporary king'', as Frazer puts it) who was later put to death for the benefit of all, have also been recorded. If such a practice were even play-acted at Amasea, we can be sure we would have heard about it from the bishop. | + | ==Official condemnation== |
| + | The Feast of Fools and the almost blasphemous extravagances in some instances associated with it were constantly the object of sweeping condemnations of the medieval Church. On the other hand, some Catholic writers have thought it necessary to try to deny the existence of such abuses. One interpretation that reconciles this contradiction is that, while there can be no question that Church authorities of the calibre of [[Robert Grosseteste]] repeatedly condemned the licence of the Feast of Fools in the strongest terms, such firmly rooted customs took centuries to eradicate. It is certain that the practice lent itself to serious abuses, whose nature and gravity varied at different epochs. It should be said that among the thousands of European liturgical manuscripts the occurrence of anything which has to do with the Feast of Fools is extraordinarily rare. It never occurs in the principal [[liturgical book]]s, the [[missal]]s and [[breviaries]]. There are traces occasionally in a prose or a trope found in a [[gradual]] or an [[antiphonary]]. It would therefore seem there was little official approval for such extravagances, which were rarely committed to writing. | ||
| - | References to Frazer's view of this ancient sacrifice were made in the 1973 film ''[[The Wicker Man (1973 film)|The Wicker Man]]''. | + | With a view to checking the abuses committed in the celebration of the Feast of Fools on New Year's Day at [[Notre-Dame de Paris]] in the twelfth century, the celebration was not entirely banned, but the part of the "[[Lord of Misrule]]" or "Precentor Stultorum" was restrained, so that he was to be allowed to intone the prose "Laetemur gaudiis", and to wield the precentor's staff, but this before the first Vespers of the feast, not during it. During the second Vespers, it had been the custom that the precentor of the fools should be deprived of his staff when the verse in the [[Magnificat]], ''Deposuit potentes de sede'' ("He has put down the mighty from their seat") was sung. Hence the feast was hence often known as the "Festum `Deposuit'". [[Eudes de Sully]] allowed the staff to be taken at that point from the mock precentor, but laid down that the verse "Deposuit" not be repeated more than five times. There was a similar case of a legitimised Feast of Fools at Sens about 1220, where the whole text of the office has survived. There are many proses and interpolations (''farsurae'') added to the ordinary liturgy, but nothing much unseemly. This prose or ''conductus'', was not a part of the office, but only a preliminary to Vespers. In 1245 [[Cardinal Odo]], the papal legate in France, wrote to the Chapter of Sens Cathedral demanding that the feast be celebrated with no un-clerical dress and no wreaths of flowers. |
| - | While the medieval and later Roman custom of a Lord of Misrule as a master of revels, a figure of fun and no more than that, is most familiar, there does seem to be some indication of an earlier and more unpleasant aspect to this figure. Frazer recounts: | + | The Feast of Fools was finally forbidden under the very severest penalties by the [[Council of Basel]] in 1431 and a strongly worded document issued by the theological faculty of the [[University of Paris]] in 1444; numerous decrees of provincial councils followed. The Feast of Fools was roundly condemned by early Protestants, and among Catholics it seems that the abuse had largely disappeared by the time of the [[Council of Trent]], though instances of festivals of this kind survived in France as late as 1644. |
| - | <blockquote> | + | |
| - | We are justified in assuming that in an earlier and more barbarous age it was the universal practice in ancient Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn prevailed, to choose a man who played the part and enjoyed all the traditionary privileges of Saturn for a season, and then died, whether by his own or another's hand, whether by the knife or the fire or on the gallows-tree, in the character of the good god who gave his life for the world. | + | |
| - | </blockquote> | + | |
| - | ==References== | + | [[Victor Hugo]] recreated a picturesque account of a Feast of Fools in his 1831 novel ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]'', in which [[Quasimodo]] serves as King of Fools. In the Disney adaption Quasimodo attends the festival by accident and meets Esmeralda who was also take part in the festival. After Quasimodo is crowned the king of fools he is been tormented by the crowd thanks to Frollo's soldiers. Phoebus was disgusted at the treatment and begs Frollo to stop it but he refuses. Esmeralda seeing this was enraged, frees Quasimodo and puts the torture to a stop. |
| - | * [[Asterius of Amasia]], AD 400, ''Asterius of Amasea: Sermons'' (1904 edition) pp. 111-129, "Sermon 4: On the Festival of the Calends" from Latin ''"Oratio 4: Adversus Kalendarum Festum"'' transcribed by Roger Pearse, Ipswich, UK, 2003. | + | |
| + | ==See also== | ||
| + | *[[Play of Daniel]] | ||
| + | *[[Feast of the Ass]] | ||
| + | *[[liturgical drama]] | ||
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"This Feast of Fools had, however, its designed effect, and contributed perhaps more to the extermination of those Heathens than all the collateral aids of fire and fword, which were not either spared in the persecution of them ; but, as there is hardly a greater absurdity in the world, nor a more common one, than the continuance of customs after the original cause of them has ceased, the people, long after the cessation of any apparent political necessity for such drolls, remained so captivated with the merriment of them, the grosser the better for them, that, the primary object of them being vanished, the jest began to threaten a recoil on the clergy itself who had instituted them."--Essay to Retrieve the Ancient Celtic (1768) by John Cleland |
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The Feast of Fools (Latin: festum fatuorum, festum stultorum) is the name given to a specific feast day celebrated by the clergy in Europe, initially in Northern France, but later more widely. Its later reception history has considerably obscured modern understandings of the nature and meaning of this celebration, which originated in proper liturgical observance, and has more to do with other examples of medieval liturgical drama than with either the earlier pagan (Roman) feasts of Saturnalia and Kalends or the later bourgeois lay sotie.
Context
The central idea seems always to have been a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity and impunity is briefly conferred on those in a subordinate position. In the views of later commentators, this makes the medieval festival a successor to the Roman Kalends of January, although there is no continuity between the two celebrations.
Many of the most colourful descriptions of the medieval festival are a result of centuries of misunderstandings and unscholarly conflations of events widely dispersed in time and place; many rely on the condemnations of later writers, which either exaggerate or deliberately misreport what was basically an orderly -- it not always fully scripted -- liturgical celebration with some dramatic elements. The involvement of inversion (subdeacons occupying the roles normally fulfilled by higher clergy) and the 'fools' symbolised orthodox biblical ideas of humility (e.g. the last being first) and becoming a 'fool for Christ' (1 Corinthians 4:10).
In the Middle Ages, particularly in France, the Feast of Fools was staged on or about the Feast of the Circumcision, January 1. It is related to certain other liturgical dramas, such, for example, as the Feast of the Ass, the Play of Daniel, and the Office of the Star. So far as the Feast of Fools had an independent existence, it seems to have grown out of a special "festival of the subdeacons", which John Beleth, a liturgical writer of the twelfth century and an Englishman by birth, assigns to the day of the Circumcision. He is the earliest to draw attention to the fact that, as the deacons had a special celebration on St Stephen's day December 26, the priests on St John the Evangelist's day December 27, and again the choristers and mass-servers on the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28, so the subdeacons were accustomed to hold their feast about the same time of year, but more particularly on the festival of the Circumcision.
Official condemnation
The Feast of Fools and the almost blasphemous extravagances in some instances associated with it were constantly the object of sweeping condemnations of the medieval Church. On the other hand, some Catholic writers have thought it necessary to try to deny the existence of such abuses. One interpretation that reconciles this contradiction is that, while there can be no question that Church authorities of the calibre of Robert Grosseteste repeatedly condemned the licence of the Feast of Fools in the strongest terms, such firmly rooted customs took centuries to eradicate. It is certain that the practice lent itself to serious abuses, whose nature and gravity varied at different epochs. It should be said that among the thousands of European liturgical manuscripts the occurrence of anything which has to do with the Feast of Fools is extraordinarily rare. It never occurs in the principal liturgical books, the missals and breviaries. There are traces occasionally in a prose or a trope found in a gradual or an antiphonary. It would therefore seem there was little official approval for such extravagances, which were rarely committed to writing.
With a view to checking the abuses committed in the celebration of the Feast of Fools on New Year's Day at Notre-Dame de Paris in the twelfth century, the celebration was not entirely banned, but the part of the "Lord of Misrule" or "Precentor Stultorum" was restrained, so that he was to be allowed to intone the prose "Laetemur gaudiis", and to wield the precentor's staff, but this before the first Vespers of the feast, not during it. During the second Vespers, it had been the custom that the precentor of the fools should be deprived of his staff when the verse in the Magnificat, Deposuit potentes de sede ("He has put down the mighty from their seat") was sung. Hence the feast was hence often known as the "Festum `Deposuit'". Eudes de Sully allowed the staff to be taken at that point from the mock precentor, but laid down that the verse "Deposuit" not be repeated more than five times. There was a similar case of a legitimised Feast of Fools at Sens about 1220, where the whole text of the office has survived. There are many proses and interpolations (farsurae) added to the ordinary liturgy, but nothing much unseemly. This prose or conductus, was not a part of the office, but only a preliminary to Vespers. In 1245 Cardinal Odo, the papal legate in France, wrote to the Chapter of Sens Cathedral demanding that the feast be celebrated with no un-clerical dress and no wreaths of flowers.
The Feast of Fools was finally forbidden under the very severest penalties by the Council of Basel in 1431 and a strongly worded document issued by the theological faculty of the University of Paris in 1444; numerous decrees of provincial councils followed. The Feast of Fools was roundly condemned by early Protestants, and among Catholics it seems that the abuse had largely disappeared by the time of the Council of Trent, though instances of festivals of this kind survived in France as late as 1644.
Victor Hugo recreated a picturesque account of a Feast of Fools in his 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Quasimodo serves as King of Fools. In the Disney adaption Quasimodo attends the festival by accident and meets Esmeralda who was also take part in the festival. After Quasimodo is crowned the king of fools he is been tormented by the crowd thanks to Frollo's soldiers. Phoebus was disgusted at the treatment and begs Frollo to stop it but he refuses. Esmeralda seeing this was enraged, frees Quasimodo and puts the torture to a stop.
See also
