The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England. By Chris Humphrey. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001; pp. xiii +113. $19.95 paperback

Abstract

Chris Humphrey's reading of the customs of late-medieval English “festive misrule” offers a valuable critique of how contemporary approaches influenced by (chiefly) Mikhail Bakhtin's writings about carnival tend to overlook the particular contexts of and variations in cultural activities. Humphrey discusses the “safety-valve” and the “social protest” as contradictory theoretical strategies that characterize most analyses of carnival practices in the medieval period. The safety-valve approach sees carnival as a temporary outlet for suppressed social energies, which ultimately aims to restore social order at the end of an inversion of it. Alternatively, the social-protest attitude believes that carnival has the power to affectand, more important, the goal of affectingsocial relations and class struggle. Humphrey convincingly argues that although these two attitudes have great appeal, especially when one is trying to contextualize the contemporary practices of popular culture, these theories are both too general and too prescriptive, leading to inaccurate or even false conclusions about the evidence.