The gate of the year

Illustration from a manuscript edition of the Roman de Fauvel (Ms. Fr. 146, fol. 34), dating to the XIV century and now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. The image shows a group of masks participating in a charivari. In the central section, a personage wearing trousers that seems made of animal skin and cowbells around his waist is represented while he is playing a tambourine: the guise of the costume reminds of the masquerades of many contemporary popular Carnivals. The charivari was a widespread custom in France, as well as in other European countries. It was employed to hail with hubbub and joking songs the newly married couples. In particular, it signaled the marriages which were retained “unnatural”, for example the case of a couple with a very pronounced difference of age among the spouses, and so forth.
According to historian Natalie Zemon Davis, the function of the charivari and of the youth associations was to emphasize before the entire community the diverse phases of life (the rites de passage), in order to elucidate the responsibilities of the future husbands and fathers, to maintain the proper order in marriages and to guarantee the biological continuity of the collectivity, stigmatizing marriages of individuals of very different ages or the stranger spouses, etc. in the cities, these youth associations turned into neighborhood, class or occupation groups, and became the “Badia del Malgoverno” (Abbey of the Bad Government). The so-called simple peoples demonstrated in this way a surprising social creativity, utilizing ancient social forms and changing them to adapt to modified exigencies (Zemon Davis 1980).
But the meaning of the masquerade and of the hubbub had also a deeper meaning, as it has been emphasized by Carlo Ginzburg: “the most ancient testimonies on a rite like the charivari, designed at controlling the habits (primarily sexual) of the village, identified the riotous crowd of the masked youths with the crowd of the dead, led by mythical beings like Hellequin. To the eyes of both actors and beholders, the excesses of the “abbeys” of youths should have maintained for a long time these symbolic connotations” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 171).

[Image: http://library.artstor.org]




Human-Animal Transformation

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Illustration from a manuscript edition of the Roman de Fauvel (Ms. Fr. 146, fol. 34), dating to the XIV century and now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. The image shows a group of masks participating in a charivari. In the central section, a personage wearing trousers that seems made of animal skin and cowbells around his waist is represented while he is playing a tambourine: the guise of the costume reminds of the masquerades of many contemporary popular Carnivals. The charivari was a widespread custom in France, as well as in other European countries. It was employed to hail with hubbub and joking songs the newly married couples. In particular, it signaled the marriages which were retained “unnatural”, for example the case of a couple with a very pronounced difference of age among the spouses, and so forth. According to historian Natalie Zemon Davis, the function of the charivari and of the youth associations was to emphasize before the entire community the diverse phases of life (the rites de passage), in order to elucidate the responsibilities of the future husbands and fathers, to maintain the proper order in marriages and to guarantee the biological continuity of the collectivity, stigmatizing marriages of individuals of very different ages or the stranger spouses, etc. in the cities, these youth associations turned into neighborhood, class or occupation groups, and became the “Badia del Malgoverno” (Abbey of the Bad Government). The so-called simple peoples demonstrated in this way a surprising social creativity, utilizing ancient social forms and changing them to adapt to modified exigencies (Zemon Davis 1980). But the meaning of the masquerade and of the hubbub had also a deeper meaning, as it has been emphasized by Carlo Ginzburg: “the most ancient testimonies on a rite like the charivari, designed at controlling the habits (primarily sexual) of the village, identified the riotous crowd of the masked youths with the crowd of the dead, led by mythical beings like Hellequin. To the eyes of both actors and beholders, the excesses of the “abbeys” of youths should have maintained for a long time these symbolic connotations” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 171). [Image: http://library.artstor.org]