Max Harris is Executive Director Emeritus of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is well known for his books about carnivals and festivals, among them Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (2003). His most recent book, Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools is about a special liturgical feast connected to the day of the Circumcision (1 January) in the liturgical year of the Catholic Church, celebrated mainly in France from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The feast has been regarded as unruly and sometimes as transgressive. Harris challenges this view radically.
The book is divided into five parts with 25 chapters, a prologue and an epilogue as well as a list of abbreviations, a bibliography, an index, and a useful map.
The prologue begins with a presentation of the famous letter of March 1445 from the faculty of theology at the University of Paris. In this colorful and frequently quoted letter the faculty describes and condemns the celebration of the Feast of Fools and its abuses: "Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hour of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders, or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black pudding at the horn of the altar (cornu altaris juxta) while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres in shabby traps and carts; and rose the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste" (PL 207:1171, translated by Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, and quoted by Harris, 1-2). According to Harris the letter is far from being an accurate description of "the Feast of Fools at all times and everywhere" (3). On the contrary, he claims that it "is an exaggerated product of its immediate cultural environment" (3). Not only are clerks unreliable witnesses, according to Harris, but also scholars have been led astray, especially by E. K. Chambers' collection of materials on the Feast of Fools in the first volume of his Mediaeval Stage (1903). In Harris' view, Chambers did three things wrong: first, he separated the data from their liturgical context; second, he crammed material from several centuries into sixty pages where he privileged ecclesiastical opposition to the feast; third, he isolated his material from its historical context and overlooked changes that took place over time (4). Harris' ambition is to consult the sources, rewrite the history of the Feast of Fools, and situate the feast in its liturgical context.
In the first part of the book, "Before the Feast of Fools" (11-62), Harris discusses older feasts and rituals that have frequently been connected with the Feast of Fools, for instance by the theological faculty in Paris, but also by modern scholars who have sought to explain the feast via pagan precursors. Harris describes the Kalends of January, mockeries in Byzantine churches, Roman games, Herod games and plays in Germany, and clerical ball games in France, which have all sometimes been seen as precursors of the Feast of Fools. Harris shows that this is not the case, and continues in part two, "Shaping the Feast of Fools" (65-127), to describe how the feast was created in northern France in the twelfth century as a liturgical feast. There were sometimes complaints against the celebration, for instance from Innocent III, but according to Harris these refer in reality to minor disorders and were met by the creation of more elaborate liturgies, for instance at Sens (chapter 9).
Part three, "Supporting the Feast of Fools" (131-84), treats local ecclesiastical support for the feast in France from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century. As in the previous century, there were also in these centuries occasional rumors of disorder (chapter 12), but in the main, according to Harris, the feast developed as an orderly and pious celebration of a church ritual.
In part four, "Suppressing the Feast of Fools" (187-224), Harris documents the attacks on the feast during the fifteenth century, but also that despite these attacks, the feast survived in some French cathedrals into the sixteenth century.
The fifth part of the book, "Beyond the Feast of Fools" (239-88), is about what happened outside the churches. Hence chapters 21-25 describe festive societies, the staging of mystery plays, parades and feasting outside the cathedrals and churches.
This is a revisionist work in which Max Harris has successfully done what he promises to do in the prologue. He has turned away from Chambers' compilation of texts to the primary and secondary sources. By treating the sources critically and with caution he has managed to point out the variations in the celebrations of the Feast of Fools through the centuries and from city to city. He has convincingly shown that the liturgical feast in the main was not rowdy, but was kept as an orderly and dignified affair. Among the many achievements of his book is that it discerns between what happened in the churches and what happened outside the churches, between the orderly liturgy on the day of the Circumcision (1 January) and the feasting conducted by lay people in connection with the New Year. The clerical feast in the church and the feasting of the lay societies outside were two distinct and separate phenomena. Scholars have, in line with the letter of the theological faculty in Paris quoted above, tended in the main to see the liturgical feast and the feasting of the lay people together.
One could argue that where there's smoke there's fire, that the complaints against the feast (for instance, that made by the theological faculty at Paris) were related to some sort of reality, and that Harris brushes these complaints and descriptions of the feast aside too easily. But perhaps he is right in seeing clerks as unreliable witnesses and the condemnations of the feast as mainly based on rumor. And there is no getting away from the fact that even if there were abuses--and one can argue about how serious they were and to what degree they took place within the church--Harris has convincingly shown that the Feast of Fools in most places and at most times was a liturgical feast celebrated in a dignified way. Seen in comparison with the reviewed book, earlier scholarship has frequently presented a distorted description of the feast.
This is meticulous scholarship built on neat and thorough analysis of an extensive material. The book is well written, lively and stimulating--in short, very easy for a reader to enjoy.
Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools will be of interest to those who specialize in Christianity and church history as well as those who want to learn more about feasts and rituals in general. The book will also be highly relevant to those who study the interplay between elite and popular culture.