A Reassessment of the Feast of Fools: A Rough and Holy Liturgy
By Max Harris
Paper given at the Société Internationale pour l’étude du Théâtre Médiéval – 12th Colloquium (2007)
Introduction: Those who write about the Feast of Fools are, more often than not, both indebted to and led astray by E. K. Chambers’ collection of materials on the subject in the first volume of his Medieval Stage. We are indebted because his is still the most complete collection available of translated, paraphrased, or summarized data culled from the archives. We are led astray for at least two reasons. First, Chambers separates the data from its liturgical context. Not only does he divide the Feast of Fools from the liturgical drama of the Christmas season, treating the former in volume one under the general rubric of Folk Drama and the latter in volume two under the general rubric of Religious Drama, but he further separates both from their place in the daily office of the Christmas season. To the liturgy as such, in which both the liturgical drama and the Feast of Fools were deeply embedded, he pays scant attention. Secondly, Chambers packs a great deal of material, culled from archival sources stretching over several centuries, into a dense sixty pages of annotated revelry. Much of this material is taken from ecclesiastical documents attempting to restrict excesses or entirely to suppress the Feast of Fools. By privileging isolated ecclesiastical opposition over habitual (and, by and large, orderly) liturgical accommodation, Chambers creates the impression that the Feast of Fools was no more than a cluster of folk—and thus, in his view, pagan—customs having little or no connection with the Christian liturgy other than to disrupt it, and that it was always and everywhere rowdy, raucous, and intrusive, “an ebullition,” as he puts it, “of the natural lout beneath the cassock.”
A Reassessment of the Feast of Fools: A Rough and Holy Liturgy
By Max Harris
Paper given at the Société Internationale pour l’étude du Théâtre Médiéval – 12th Colloquium (2007)
Introduction: Those who write about the Feast of Fools are, more often than not, both indebted to and led astray by E. K. Chambers’ collection of materials on the subject in the first volume of his Medieval Stage. We are indebted because his is still the most complete collection available of translated, paraphrased, or summarized data culled from the archives. We are led astray for at least two reasons. First, Chambers separates the data from its liturgical context. Not only does he divide the Feast of Fools from the liturgical drama of the Christmas season, treating the former in volume one under the general rubric of Folk Drama and the latter in volume two under the general rubric of Religious Drama, but he further separates both from their place in the daily office of the Christmas season. To the liturgy as such, in which both the liturgical drama and the Feast of Fools were deeply embedded, he pays scant attention. Secondly, Chambers packs a great deal of material, culled from archival sources stretching over several centuries, into a dense sixty pages of annotated revelry. Much of this material is taken from ecclesiastical documents attempting to restrict excesses or entirely to suppress the Feast of Fools. By privileging isolated ecclesiastical opposition over habitual (and, by and large, orderly) liturgical accommodation, Chambers creates the impression that the Feast of Fools was no more than a cluster of folk—and thus, in his view, pagan—customs having little or no connection with the Christian liturgy other than to disrupt it, and that it was always and everywhere rowdy, raucous, and intrusive, “an ebullition,” as he puts it, “of the natural lout beneath the cassock.”
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