Feast of Fools

The Feast of Fools developed in the late 12th and early 13th centuries as an elaborate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision of Christ (January 1). Celebrating the biblical principle that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27), the feast allowed lower members of the clergy, particularly the subdeacons, to assume leadership roles in worship usually reserved for the cantor or the bishop. Largely confined to cathedrals and collegiate churches in northern France, the Feast of Fools flourished in some cities for more than three centuries before gradually succumbing to pressures of reform. Although it was not the disorderly clerical revel that scholars have often imagined, the feast was certainly open to moments of good humor.

The first surviving notices of the Feast of Fools come from Paris, Beauvais, and Châlons-en-Champagne between 1160 and 1172. All three sources testify to a joyous, expansive, but not yet fully settled liturgy for the Feast of the Circumcision.

Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (also known as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) opens on January 6, 1482, the occasion of the annual Feast of Fools. The hunchback Quasimodo is elected Pope of Fools and is then paraded through the streets on a mock throne. Throughout Book 1 of the novel, the crowd taunts church and university officials.

Source: Illustration by Louis Boulanger and William Finden (1878); Wikimedia Commons.

[Page 238]In Châlons, a procession through the city center paused for clergy and people to join hands in a choral circle dance. In Beauvais, a live ass was led into the cathedral at the start of first vespers, perhaps recalling the journey of the Holy Family to Egypt. These communal acts of worship were incorporated into a divine office that extended over 24 hours, celebrating the incarnation of Christ, honoring his mother Mary, and inviting worshippers to set anxiety aside and to enjoy a time of divinely permitted gladness.

An isolated series of official complaints about the Feast of Fools at the turn of the 13th century can be traced to Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) or his representatives in France. Based on ill-founded rumor rather than on eyewitness testimony and motivated at least in part by Innocent's ongoing conflict with the French king, these complaints nonetheless prompted a burst of creative liturgical reform. In 1198, the bishop of Paris, Eudes of Sully, established a settled office for the Feast of the Circumcision in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. An even more elaborate office of the Circumcision was drawn up by Peter of Corbeil, archbishop of Sens between 1200 and 1222. The Sens office is a dignified and often beautiful score for corporate worship, deeply indebted to the biblical text and rich in musical variation. It remained in use in Sens cathedral until the mid-16th century. Similarly elaborate offices were established in Beauvais and Le Puy-en-Velay for the feast of the Circumcision and in Laon—which honored its sub-deacons five days later—for the feast of Epiphany.

In 13th-century Beauvais and Laon, the Feast of Fools was also the occasion for elaborate liturgical plays. Although serious in intent and conducive to worship, these plays were not afraid to invite laughter. The Laon Office of Joseph found comic potential in the economic shrewdness of the Ishmaelite merchants who bought Joseph for a low price in Canaan and sold him for a high price in Egypt and in the mimed antics of Potiphar's wife (conventionally played by a male cleric) as she tried to seduce Joseph. The Beauvais Play of Daniel briefly invited its audience to join in the laughter of the Babylonian court, thereby implicating the townspeople's own amusement at supposedly pagan New Year activities outside the church.

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