Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools

Abstract

The Feast of Fools has traditionally been represented as an opportunity for the medieval clergy to ring in the New Year with raucous revel. Its irreverent rites included the election of a boy bishop; masquerade; cross-dressing; donkeys in church; and general debauchery. Such clerical shenanigans met with well-deserved censure before the feast was eventually suppressed altogether in the fifteenth century—or so the story goes. Max Harris’s Sacred Folly attempts to challenge this pejorative understanding of the feast. Part I focuses on the various traditions preceding Feast of Fools through which the feast has been tarnished by association. In the Roman Kalends of January, people cross-dressed, disguised themselves as animals, sang, danced, and generally acted up. There were games at the papal court in which clerics were crowned with garlands, danced in a ring, and mounted donkeys backwards. Clergy and laity participated in the Christmas season’s Herod plays, performed in church and replete with ranting tyrant, boy bishop, and ass signifying the flight into Egypt. A clerical game of ball in the cathedral was followed by a dance through the church floor labyrinth.