…we’re talking to you!

Fr. Jim points us to a brief entry at the Reason blog (ironically) about the medieval celebrations, taking place during the Octave of Christmas, coinciding mostly with the Feast of the Circumcision, in which social – particularly ecclesiological – order was reversed and a "Lord of Misrule" was crowned. From the old CE entry on the revelries:

The same conclusion follows from two well-known cases which Father Dreves has carefully studied. In 1199, Bishop Eudes de Sully imposed regulations to check the abuses committed in the celebration of the Feast of Fools on New Year’s Day at Notre-Dame in Paris. The celebration was not entirely banned, but the part of the "Lord of Misrule" or "Precentor Stultorum" was restrained within decorous limits. He was to be allowed to intone the prose "Laetemur gaudiis" in the cathedral, and to wield the precentor’s staff, but this was to take place before the first Vespers of the feast were sung. Apart from this, the Church offices proper were to be performed as usual, with, however, some concessions in the way of extra solemnity. During the second Vespers, it had been the custom that the precentor of the fools should be deprived of his staff when the verse "Deposuit potentes de sede" (He hath put down the mighty from their seat) was sung at the Magnificat. Seemingly this was the dramatic moment, and the feast was hence often known as the "Festum `Deposuit’". Eudes de Sully permitted that the staff might here be taken from the mock precentor, but enacted that the verse "Deposuit" was not be repeated more than five times. A similar case of a legitimized Feast of Fools at Sens c. 1220 is also examined by Father Dreves in detail. The whole text of the office is in this case preserved to us. There are many proses and interpolations (farsurae) added to the ordinary liturgy of the Church, but nothing which could give offense as unseemly, except the prose "Orientis partibus", etc., partly quoted in the article ASSES, FEAST OF. This prose or "conductus", however, was not a part of the office, but only a preliminary to Vespers sung while the procession of subdeacons moved from the church door to the choir. Still, as already stated, there can be no question of the reality of the abuses which followed in the wake of celebrations of this kind.

The central idea seems always to have been that of the old Saturnalia, i.e. a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity or impunity is conferred for a few hours upon those ordinarily in a subordinate position. Whether it took the form of the boy bishop or the subdeacon conducting the cathedral office, the parody must always have trembled on the brink of burlesque, if not of the profane. We can trace the same idea at St. Gall in the tenth century, where a student, on the thirteenth of December each year, enacted the part of the abbot. It will be sufficient here to notice that the continuance of the celebration of the Feast of Fools was finally forbidden under the very severest penalties by the Council of Basle in 1435, and that this condemnation was supported by a strongly-worded document issued by the theological faculty of the University of Paris in 1444, as well as by numerous decrees of various provincial councils. In this way it seems that the abuse had practically disappeared before the time of the Council of Trent.

The 1/31 edition of the BBC’s Early Music Show explores the feasting, with plenty of music. Really, take a listen to Lucy Skeaping’s musical and historical journey – excellent.