The gate of the year

Engraving by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, datable around 1570, representing the Feast of Fools, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
With the term “Feast of Fools” are grouped together several celebrations taking place in the days following Christmas (like Saint Stephen, on December 26, Saint John the Evangelist, on December 27, or The Innocents’ Day, on December 28), which shared mocking and burlesque features, and constituted a proper anticipation of the Carnival period (Gaignebet 1974, p. 42). The lapse of time going from Christmas to Epiphany was once known as the “Twelve Days” and had the function to reconcile the cycle of the lunar calendar with the solar cycle. Such a period assumed the characteristic of a sort of “suspended time”, of “period outside time”. It was in this span that the Feast of Fools had place, with a series of customs signaling the temporary reversal of social order, the suspension of the norms and hierarchies which sustained the community structure. The young clerics elected one of them as “bishop” or “king”, perhaps in analogy with the “King of Saturnalia” of the Roman age. The essential of these rites consisted in the creation a fictive and derisory order, which reversed the roles and ceremonials of authority, to the extent of putting in ridicule the ecclesiastical structure and the Christian liturgy themselves. In this way, disorder and folly took possession of the church and the Christian cult was transformed by the presence of practices and beliefs of pre-Christian origin. For medieval man, the beliefs inherited from Antiquity mingled, seamlessly, with Christian religiosity. Several Councils and Church documents of the 1400s and 1500s deplore these customs and stigmatize the “ridiculous spectacles, with masks, arms and tambourines and other indecent things that are made in those churches”. In 1444, the University of Paris decreed that “the feasts of subdeacons, or of the fools, was a residue of paganism, a condemnable and pernicious corruption, which tended to the visible disdain of God, of the divine offices and of Episcopal dignity” ” (Heers 1983, p. 181).

[Image: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/371790]




Folly

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Engraving by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, datable around 1570, representing the Feast of Fools, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. With the term “Feast of Fools” are grouped together several celebrations taking place in the days following Christmas (like Saint Stephen, on December 26, Saint John the Evangelist, on December 27, or The Innocents’ Day, on December 28), which shared mocking and burlesque features, and constituted a proper anticipation of the Carnival period (Gaignebet 1974, p. 42). The lapse of time going from Christmas to Epiphany was once known as the “Twelve Days” and had the function to reconcile the cycle of the lunar calendar with the solar cycle. Such a period assumed the characteristic of a sort of “suspended time”, of “period outside time”. It was in this span that the Feast of Fools had place, with a series of customs signaling the temporary reversal of social order, the suspension of the norms and hierarchies which sustained the community structure. The young clerics elected one of them as “bishop” or “king”, perhaps in analogy with the “King of Saturnalia” of the Roman age. The essential of these rites consisted in the creation a fictive and derisory order, which reversed the roles and ceremonials of authority, to the extent of putting in ridicule the ecclesiastical structure and the Christian liturgy themselves. In this way, disorder and folly took possession of the church and the Christian cult was transformed by the presence of practices and beliefs of pre-Christian origin. For medieval man, the beliefs inherited from Antiquity mingled, seamlessly, with Christian religiosity. Several Councils and Church documents of the 1400s and 1500s deplore these customs and stigmatize the “ridiculous spectacles, with masks, arms and tambourines and other indecent things that are made in those churches”. In 1444, the University of Paris decreed that “the feasts of subdeacons, or of the fools, was a residue of paganism, a condemnable and pernicious corruption, which tended to the visible disdain of God, of the divine offices and of Episcopal dignity” ” (Heers 1983, p. 181). [Image: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/371790]