Feast of Fools

The Feast of Fools (Latin: festum fatuorum, festum stultorum) is the name given to a specific feast day celebrated by the clergy in Europe, initially in Northern France, but later more widely. Its later reception history has considerably obscured modern understandings of the nature and meaning of this celebration, which originated in proper liturgical observance, and has more to do with other examples of medieval liturgical drama than with either the earlier pagan (Roman) feasts of Saturnalia and Kalends or the later bourgeois lay sotie.

The central idea seems always to have been a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity and impunity is briefly conferred on those in a subordinate position. In the views of later commentators, this makes the medieval festival a successor to the Roman Kalends of January, although there is no continuity between the two celebrations.

Many of the most colourful descriptions of the medieval festival are a result of centuries of misunderstandings and unscholarly conflations of events widely dispersed in time and place; many rely on the condemnations of later writers, which either exaggerate or deliberately misreport what was basically an orderly—if not always fully scripted—liturgical celebration with some dramatic elements. The involvement of inversion (subdeacons occupying the roles normally fulfilled by higher clergy) and the 'fools' symbolised orthodox biblical ideas of humility (e.g. the last being first) and becoming a 'fool for Christ' (1 Corinthians 4:10).

In the Middle Ages, particularly in France, the Feast of Fools was staged on or about the Feast of the Circumcision, January 1. It is related to certain other liturgical dramas, such, for example, as the Feast of the Ass, the Play of Daniel, and the Office of the Star. So far as the Feast of Fools had an independent existence, it seems to have grown out of a special "festival of the subdeacons", which John Beleth, a liturgical writer of the twelfth century sometimes thought to have been an Englishman by birth, assigns to the day of the Circumcision. He is the earliest to draw attention to the fact that, as the deacons had a special celebration on St Stephen's day December 26, the priests on St John the Evangelist's day December 27, and again the choristers and mass-servers on the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28, so the subdeacons were accustomed to hold their feast about the same time of year, but more particularly on the festival of the Circumcision.

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