in sections of Germany and Austria, at carnival time, male runners, half of them dressed as women, jumped and leaped through the streets. In France it was on Saint Stephen’s Day or New Year’s Day that men dressed as wild beasts or as women and danced in public … The saturnalian Feast of Fools involved young clerics and laymen, some of them disguised as women, who made wanton and loose gestures.20
Whatever social category you had been boxed into—male or female, rich or poor—carnival was a chance to escape from it.
No aspect of carnival has attracted more scholarly attention than the tradition of mocking the powerful, since these customs were in some sense “political,” or at least suggestive of underlying discontent. The use of public festivities as an occasion to send up the local secular and ecclesiastical authorities was by no means confined to late medieval Europe. The ancient Israelis had celebrated Purim with masking, drunkenness, and rituals ridiculing their rabbis; the Romans had their Saturnalia. Rituals of mockery were also indigenous to many parts of Africa, with a Dutch traveler, for example, describing an early-eighteenth-century carnival celebrated along the coast of Guinea as
a Feast of eight days accompanied with all manner of Singing, Skipping, Dancing, Mirth, and Jollity; in which time a perfect lampooning liberty is allowed, and Scandal so highly exalted, that they may freely say of all Faults, Villainies, and Frauds of their Superiors, as well as Inferiours without punishment so much as the least interruption. 21
In our own time, too, festivals miming class—or gender—struggle persist in traditional societies. Ecuadorian agricultural laborers celebrate a festival in which they dress up as and engage in parodies of their bosses. At the Holi festival in the Indian village of Kishan Garhi, women attack men, untouchables harass Brahmins, and even the resident American ethnographer might be forced to “dance in the streets, fluting like Lord Krishna, with a garland of old shoes around his neck.”22 In chapter 8, we will come across similar festivities—among African slaves in the Americas, for example—that also contained the latent threat of rebellion. The widespread occurrence of mocking rituals would almost suggest some human, or at least plebeian, instinct to playfully overthrow the existing order—whether as a way of harmlessly letting off steam or, at some level of consciousness, rehearsing for the real thing.
Many of the mocking rituals associated with European carnival centered on a king of fools, a costumed character who probably first appeared in the Church-sanctioned Feast of Fools. If anything illustrates the ambivalence of the Church toward festive behavior, it was this event, which was initiated by the lower-level clergy—deacons, subdeacons, and priests—who comprised the Church’s internal lower class. This feast, described by Chambers as “largely an ebullition of the natural lout beneath the cassock,” originally took place inside churches between Christmas and New Year’s. The participating clergy dressed absurdly—in women’s clothes or their own clothes worn inside out—and performed a noisy burlesque of the mass, with sausages replacing the priest’s censer, or with “stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes” instead of incense, and “wanton songs” and gibberish substituting for the usual Latin incantations.23 As one disapproving contemporary described the scene: “They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town … and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste.”24
Ecclesiastical higher-ups were not amused and tried, in fits and starts, to stamp out the Feast of Fools. In 1207 Pope Innocent III ordered Polish churches to discontinue the rite, and in 1400 the rector of the University of Paris tried to ban it, complaining that the indecencies involved would “shame a kitchen or a tavern.”25 In 1436, the town council of Basle allowed the Feast of Fools, but only if it was conducted without irreverence. Apparently a reverent Feast of Fools was not possible, since Basle forbade the feast in 1439—only to permit it again four years later, on the condition that it be celebrated outside the church. In Sens, in 1444, local Church authorities contented themselves with limiting the number of buckets of water that could be poured over the king of fools during the rite—to three—and stipulating that the event be moved outside the church.
Church authorities often tried to “divert the energies of the revellers” from the Feast of Fools to the more uplifting spectacle of the ecclesiastical plays.26 But these too had a tendency to get out of hand. As early as the twelfth century, Chambers reports there were complaints that the dramas were becoming too worldly and encouraging “license, buffoonery, and quarreling.” Productions of religious plays easily descended into “shameless revel[s],”27 no doubt abetted by the huge quantities of beer some towns budgeted for these occasions and even for the plays’ rehearsals. Disorder was so common that the Church offered indulgences for attendance at plays, but only on condition that one did not engage in lewd or disorderly behavior at them, however that may have been defined. Even the Corpus Christi feasts honoring Christ’s body had become, by the fourteenth century, an occasion for rioting.
Confronted with so much unruly behavior, sometimes at events once approved or initiated by clerics themselves, Church officials took the same approach they had taken with dancing: They sought again and again to expel the offending activities from their immediate property. The Feast of Fools, as we have just seen, was increasingly driven outdoors. Religious dramas followed it, many of them being abandoned by the Church and largely “secularized” in the thirteenth century. In England, the fund-raising festivities known as church ales were banned from Church property in the mid-thirteenth century. Corpus Christi processions came increasingly under secular control in the fifteenth century. The festivities that once added color and laughter to the Church usually proved to be more than it could handle.
The gradual expulsion of dancing, sports, drama, and comedy from the churches created a world of regularly scheduled festivity that is almost beyond our imagining today. The Church calendar featured dozens of holy days—including Epiphany, Ascension, Pentecost, and Corpus Christi, as well as the more familiar Easter and Christmas—on which all work was forbidden, and on most of which vigorous celebration was tolerated. In fifteenth-century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort, usually dedicated to a mix of religious ceremonies and more or less unsanctioned carryings-on. Weddings, wakes, and other gatherings furnished additional opportunities for conviviality and carousing. Then there were the various local ceremonial occasions, such as the day honoring a village’s patron saint or the anniversary of a church’s founding. In the north of France in the sixteenth century, the celebrations commemorating a local church’s founding could last for a full eight days. So, despite the reputation of what are commonly called “the Middle Ages” as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen—at least in comparison to the puritanical times that followed—as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labor. As the British historian E. P. Thompson wrote:
Many weeks of heavy labour and scanty diet were compensated for by the expectation (or reminiscence) of these occasions, when food and drink were abundant, courtship and every kind of social intercourse flourished, and the hardship of life was forgotten … These occasions were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for.28
The Sacred Versus the Profane
The festivities that crowded the late medieval calendar can be understood as the fragments of what might have been a more joyous and participatory religion. People once danced, drank, feasted, and performed dramas and burlesques within their churches; now they did so outside those churches in the festivities that still clung to, and surrounded, each holy day. Scholars often mark the transition with a change in terminology—using the word ritual for events held in the context of religious observance and the lighter-weight term festivity for those outside of it.
Inevitably, something was lost i
n the transition from ecstatic ritual to secularized festivities—something we might call meaning or transcendent insight. In ancient Dionysian forms of worship the moment of maximum “madness” and revelry was also the sacred climax of the rite, at which the individual achieved communion with the divinity and a glimpse of personal immortality. Medieval Christianity, in contrast, offered “communion” in the form of a morsel of bread and sip of wine soberly consumed at the altar—and usually saw only devilry in the festivities that followed. True, the entire late medieval calendar of festivities was to some degree sanctioned by the Church, but the uplifting religious experience, if any, was supposed to be found within the Church-controlled rites of mass and procession, not within the drinking and dancing. While ancient worshippers of Dionysus expected the god to manifest himself when the music reached an irresistible tempo and the wine was flowing freely, medieval Christians could only hope that God, or at least his earthly representatives, was looking the other way when the flutes and drums came out and the tankards were passed around.
The result of the Church’s distancing itself from the festivities that marked its own holidays was a certain “secularization” of communal pleasure. After the festival’s official religious rites—the mass, the procession, the various blessings and public prayers—were completed, the rest of the day’s (or week’s) activities lay at least in part outside the Church’s spiritual framework and moral jurisdiction. On the one hand, this relative secularization may help account for the uglier side of the European carnival tradition. Without a built-in religious climax to the celebrations—the achievement, for example, of a trancelike state of unity with the divinity—they readily spilled over into brawling and insensate drunkenness. The Jews in particular, as Christian Europe’s perennial scapegoats, knew better than to venture out when the gentiles were having fun. Shakespeare’s Shylock warned his daughter:
What, are there masques? Hear you me Jessica:
Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces.29
But if secularization drained festivities of moral content and ecstatic insight, it also gave people ownership of and control over them. Great passion and energy went into the planning of festivities, with special organizations, like the French confraternities of young men, dedicated entirely to preparations year-round. There were constant minor conflicts to resolve—between secular and religious authorities, peasant leagues and urban guilds—over the form and nature of festivities. And sometimes the revelers singled out for ridicule the very authorities who declaimed against the festivities and threatened to stamp them out. In 1558, for example—admittedly, well past the Middle Ages—the bishop of Fréjus’s attempt to suppress the local Feast of Fools led to a riot and storming of his palace. Festivity—like bread or freedom—can be a social good worth fighting for.
Finally, with secularization, there had to be a realization that festivity, even when it occurred on religious holidays, was ultimately a product of human agency. Ancient Dionysian revelers and Christian glossolaliacs believed that their moments of ecstasy were the gifts of a deity. But when the church doors closed shut on festivity in the late Middle Ages, the revelers must have understood that whatever joys they found were of their own, entirely human, creation. Huge amounts of effort and expense went into a successful celebration: Costumes had to be sewed, dance steps and dramas rehearsed, sets built, special pastries and meats prepared. Pleasures crafted with so much creativity and forethought—pleasures that, moreover, were often barely tolerated by the ecclesiastical establishment—can hardly be said to come from God. In the secularized festivities of the late Middle Ages, people could discover the truth of Mikhail Bakhtin’s great insight: that carnival is something people create and generate for themselves. Or, as Goethe wrote, carnival “is a festival that really is not given to the people, but one the people give themselves.”30
5
Killing Carnival: Reformation and Repression
At some point, in town after town throughout the northern Christian world, the music stops. Carnival costumes are put away or sold; dramas that once engaged a town’s entire population are canceled; festive rituals are forgotten or preserved only in tame and truncated form. The ecstatic possibility, which had first been driven from the sacred precincts of the church, was now harried from the streets and public squares.
The suppression of traditional festivities, occurring largely in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, took many forms. Sometimes it came swiftly and absolutely, when, for example, a town council suddenly broke with tradition by refusing to grant a permit for the celebrations or a church denied the use of its churchyard. Or the change might come slowly, with authorities first limiting festivities to Sundays, then, in a classic catch-22, prohibiting all recreations and sports on the Sabbath. In other places the festivities were attacked in a piecemeal fashion: Some German towns banned masking in the late fifteenth century;1 in midsixteenth-century Béarn, the queen issued ordinances outlawing singing and feasting.2 Dancing, masking, reveling in the streets—the ingredients of carnival, or festivities in general, could be outlawed one by one.
Church and state might act separately or together in suppressing festivities; in one French diocese, the local monsignor, finding himself “surrounded by dancers, cat-called by masked men,” obtained from the king six sealed letters prohibiting the revelry.3 In sixteenth-century Lyon, local church authorities disbanded the confraternities traditionally responsible for organizing festivities, replacing them with pious groups dedicated to organizing prayer vigils.4 Often the attempts at suppression were more farcical than solemn. In one late-seventeenth-century English parish, a preacher denounced a newly erected maypole—the traditional signal for revelry. His wife went further and cut it down at night. Some youths put up another one, but as local authorities smugly observed, it was “an ugly thing … rough and crooked.”5 Other enemies of carnival were at first even less successful. “I could not suppress these Bacchanals,” wrote the Reverend John William de la Flechere of the Shropshire Wakes, “the impotent dyke I opposed only made the torrent swell and foam.”6
The wave of repression—or, as the instigators saw it, “reform” —extended from Scotland south to parts of Italy and eastward to Russia and Ukraine, sweeping through both town and countryside. It targeted not only the traditional festivities held on saints’ days and the holy periods surrounding Christmas, Lent, and Easter, but almost every possible occasion for revelry and play. Traveling troupes of actors and musicians began to find themselves unwelcome in the towns, driven off or bribed by local authorities to go away. Church ales, festivities that had been used to raise money for English parishes, were denounced and often banned outright, along with the numerous fairs that served as festive gatherings as well as sites for commerce. Sports of every kind came under attack: bull running, bear baiting, boxing, wrestling, football. A 1608 order prohibiting football in Manchester speaks, for example, of the harm done by a “company of lewd and disordered persons usinge that unlawfulle exercise of playing with a footbale in ye streets.”7 The crackdown even extended to informal, small-scale fun, as in the English town of Westbury-on-Severn, where a group of young people who fell to “dancing, quaffing and rioting” on their way home from church found themselves facing charges for drunkenness, fornication, and various forms of impiety.8
There were all sorts of regional and temporal variations on the theme of repression. The Catholic south of Europe held on to its festivities more tightly than the north, though these were often reduced to mere processions of holy images and relics through the streets. In Germany, Protestantism rode in, as we shall see, on a wave of carnivalesque revolts, only to take a hard stance against public festivity or disorder in any form. England seesawed between repression and permissi
veness for decades, with the Calvinists vigorously banning festivities and the Stuart kings—perhaps less out of fondness for the festivities than hostility to the Calvinists—repeatedly seeking to restore them. But everywhere the general drift led inexorably away from the medieval tradition of carnival. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White summarize the change:
In the long-term history from the 17th to the 20th century … there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life … Everywhere, against the periodic revival of local festivity and occasional reversals, a fundamental ritual order of western culture came under attack—its feasting, violence, processions, fairs, wakes, rowdy spectacle and outrageous clamour were subject to surveillance and repressive control.9
The loss, to ordinary people, of so many recreations and festivities is incalculable; and we, who live in a culture almost devoid of opportunities either to “lose ourselves” in communal festivities or to distinguish ourselves in any arena outside of work, are in no position to fathom it. One young Frenchman told his reforming priest that he “could not promise to renounce dancing and abstain from the festivals … It would be impossible not to mingle and rejoice with his friends and relations.”10 A Buckinghamshire resident described the emptying of the common after the suppression of Sunday recreations as a depressing loss. While formerly the common “presented a lively and pleasing aspect, dotted with parties of cheerful lookers-on,” it was now “left lonely and empty of loungers,” leaving the men and boys with nothing to do but hang out in the pubs and drink.11 To people who had few alternative forms of distraction—no books, movies, or television—it must have seemed as if pleasure itself had been declared illegal.