Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools

In memory of Bob Potter

who in yet another gift of friendship

encouraged me to write this book

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Prologue: A Letter from Paris

PART I. BEFORE THE FEAST OF FOOLS

1. The Kalends of January

2. The Holy City of Byzantium

3. Roman Games

4. Herod in Germany

5. Tossing a Ball in a French Cathedral

PART II. SHAPING THE FEAST OF FOOLS

6. The Feast of the Subdeacons

7. The Feast of the Ass

8. The Complaints of Innocent III

9. The Office of the Circumcision

10. The Plays of Daniel and Joseph

PART III. SUPPORTING THE FEAST OF FOOLS

11. Chapter Support

12. Rumors of Disorder

13. A Spirited Defense

14. Youth Groups, Coal Dust,

and Cow Dung

15. Outside France

PART IV. SUPPRESSING THE FEAST OF FOOLS

16. Jean Gerson and the Auxerre Affair

17. Trouble in St.-Omer and Noyon

18. Troyes, Sens, and the Council of Basel

19. Rereading the Letter from Paris

20. A Durable Feast

PART V. BEYOND THE FEAST OF FOOLS

21. Festive Societies

22. Innocents and Fools

23. King of the Breeches

24. Our Lady of the Trellis

25. Mother Fool

Epilogue: Orange Peel in Antibes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the many librarians who have helped me during the writing of this book. The staff at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Memorial Library and Mills Music Library have been unfailingly helpful. In particular, I am thankful to John Dillon, Distinguished Academic Librarian and European Humanities Biographer, for tracking down so many obscure words and references in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian with such dazzling virtuosity and perseverance; to Stephanie Harris and others at the InterLibrary Loan office for their diligence in obtaining books and articles for me not only from all over the United States but also from Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK; and to John Solon, Access and Digital Services Librarian at Mills Music Library, for extending me generous borrowing privileges. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Garver, French Collections Research Associate at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas–Austin; to the staff at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Divinity School Library; and to the many libraries that have generously made their collections available online at Google Books.

I have received gracious help from colleagues in many fields. Pamela Sheingorn, Robert L. A. Clark, and David Bevington read a late draft of this book and offered perceptive suggestions for its improvement. Others who responded to individual queries or supplied personal materials include Kathleen Ashley, Markus Cruse, Andrzej Dabrówka, Yann Dahhaoui, Natalie Zemon Davis, Craig Gibson, Katia Gvozdeva, Alan Hindley, Alexandra Johnston, Samuel Kinser, David Klausner, Alan Knight, Robert Lagueux, Bill McCarthy, Jacques Merceron, Michael O’Connell, Leif Søndergaard, Carol Symes, James Stokes, Meg Twycross, and Stephen K. Wright. My apologies to any whom I may have forgotten; my thanks to all.

Thanks are due, too, to Peter Potter, Ange Romeo-Hall, Rachel Post, and all those who worked on this book at Cornell University Press; to copyeditor Amanda Heller; to Tanya Buckingham and Kevin McGrath at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Cartographic Laboratory; to my good friends Becky and Joe Bertalan for looking after the backup disks; and to my sister, Julie, in France, for taking such good care of Mum.

Finally, I am immeasurably thankful to my wife, Ann, without whom all that matters most would not be possible.

ABBREVIATIONS

Places where a Feast of Fools was celebrated

Prologue

A Letter from Paris

On 12 March 1445 the faculty of theology at the University of Paris issued a letter to the prelates and chapters of France.¹ We feel compelled, they wrote, to describe how much we abhor and how much we execrate a certain kind of ritual of merriment, which is called by its organizers the Feast of Fools. The origins of the feast, the theologians insisted, lay in ancient pagan rites of the kind condemned long ago by the apostle Paul and the blessed Saint Augustine. The Kalends of January were an especially potent influence. By the cunning plans of demons, the foul and ungodly rites associated with these Greek and Roman New Year festivities had survived for centuries under cover of the Christian feast of the Nativity. Now called the Feast of Fools, they were still being celebrated during Christmas week in churches, in consecrated places, and by persons set apart for the service of God.

In what has since become the most frequently quoted description of the Feast of Fools, the Paris theologians went on to summarize the abuses they associated with the feast: "Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings 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 rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste."²

The theologians then took pains to refute arguments in favor of the Feast of Fools that were based on the propriety of innocent recreation or on the tolerance of our predecessors for such festivities. Finally, the letter closed with a number of conclusions, intended to hasten the abolition of the "damnable and pagan Feast of Fools [festum fatuorum]. Under no circumstances should a bishop or an archbishop of fools be elected. Nor should such a bishop or archbishop of fools be allowed to bear the insignia of episcopal office, such as the pastoral miter and staff, or to have a cross and staff carried before him, as an archbishop does when walking or riding through his province." Nor should an episcopus or archiepiscopus fatuorum be permitted to celebrate the divine office, to give blessings when reading the lessons at matins, or to bless the people at other times. All these things are offensive to God, contrary to episcopal dignity, and in any case have been forbidden by papal decretals and by general councils of the church. For similar reasons, there should be no pope of fools. A papa fatuorum should not conduct divine service bearing papal insignia, bless the people, or mimic any other privileges of papal office. To do so is to profane ecclesiastical dignity and hierarchical order.

Furthermore, clergy should not use the pretext of the Feast of Fools to celebrate the divine office without wearing clerical vestments. No one should be allowed to lead choreas (group dances in line or circle patterns,³ sometimes accompanied by singing) in church during divine service or to eat or drink around the altar while mass is being celebrated. To do any of these things is to pollute the temple of God and to despise the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist. Outside the church, priests should not shed their clerical dress and, dressed as laymen or fools, further diminish the reputation of the clergy by their behavior. Even less should they adopt masked or painted faces, put on women’s clothes, or take part in theatrical plays or other games involving impersonation, especially in a public place or in the presence of a large crowd. Laymen taking part in such plays, or at least in those designed to prompt ridicule or mockery, should not dress as monks or other ecclesiastical figures. All these abuses smack of the kind of sport enjoyed by pagans during the Kalends of January. Rather than take part in them, Christians should avoid them or flee.

Published in French translation by Jean-Baptiste Thiers in 1686 and Jean-Bénigne Lucotte du Tilliot in 1741,⁴ in German translation by Guido Maria Dreves in 1894,⁵ and in English translation by E. K. Chambers in 1903,⁶ the list of abuses contained in the central paragraph of this letter has too often been regarded as an accurate description of the Feast of Fools at all times and everywhere. In fact, like many ecclesiastical condemnations of controversial behavior before and since, the letter is an exaggerated product of its immediate cultural environment. When it comes to questions of supposed misbehavior in church, disapproving clerics are often unreliable witnesses.

The same may be said, with important qualifications, of scholars. Chambers is the most influential example. For more than a century, those who have written about the Feast of Fools have been both indebted to and led astray by Chambers’s collection of materials on the subject in the first volume of his Mediaeval Stage.⁷ We remain indebted because his is still the most complete collection available of translated, paraphrased, or summarized data culled from the archives. We have been led astray for at least three reasons.

First, Chambers separated the data from their liturgical context. Not only did he divide the Feast of Fools from the liturgical drama of the Christmas season, treating the former in volume one under the general rubric of Folk Drama and the latter in volume two under the general rubric of Religious Drama, but he further separated both from their place in the corporate worship of the Christmas season. To the liturgy as such, in which both the liturgical drama and the Feast of Fools were deeply embedded, he paid scant attention.

Second, Chambers packed a great deal of material, culled from archival sources stretching over several centuries, into a dense sixty pages of annotated revelry. Much of this material was taken from ecclesiastical documents attempting to restrict excesses or entirely to suppress the Feast of Fools: the letter from the Parisian theologians is the best-known example. By privileging ecclesiastical opposition, Chambers exaggerated the disruptive character of the Feast of Fools and minimized its positive contribution to the seasonal liturgy.

Third, Chambers overlooked significant changes that took place over time, both in the Feast of Fools itself and in official attitudes toward the feast. Although he arranged his material in approximate chronological order within each city or region, he did so more as a matter of convenience than as evidence for any historical development. By isolating his material from its historical context, Chambers distorted its interpretation. It was no accident that the Feast of Fools arose in the second half of the twelfth century and encountered powerful opposition in the first half of the fifteenth century. The date of the theologians’ letter is pertinent to any serious evaluation of the charges it brought against the Feast of Fools.

In short, Chambers created the impression that the Feast of Fools was no more than a cluster of folk (and thus, in his view, pagan) customs having little or no connection with the Christian liturgy other than to disrupt it, that it met with almost constant disapproval from church authorities, and that it was always and everywhere rowdy, raucous, and intrusive, an ebullition, as he put it, of the natural lout beneath the cassock.⁸ He would have done well to heed the quiet warning of Aimé Chérest in 1853 that historians of the Feast of Fools should not generalize from what was, in truth, exceptional.⁹ The same may be said of scholars who have relied on Chambers’s narrative. Tales of clerical excess have grown more outrageous almost with each retelling.

A recent summary description of the Feast of Fools goes like this: "In the annual Feast of Fools at Christmastime, every rite and article of the Church no matter how sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominus festi, or lord of the revels, was elected from the inferior clergy—the curés, subdeacons, vicars, and choir clerks, mostly ill-educated, ill-paid, and ill-disciplined—whose day it was to turn everything topsy-turvy. They installed their lord as Pope or Bishop or Abbot of Fools in a ceremony of head-shaving accompanied by bawdy talk and lewd acts; dressed him in vestments turned inside out; played dice on the altar and ate black puddings and sausages while mass was celebrated in nonsensical gibberish; swung censers made of old shoes emitting ‘stinking smoke’; officiated in the various offices of the priest wearing beast masks and dressed as women or minstrels, sang obscene songs in the choir; howled and hooted and jangled bells while the ‘Pope’ recited a doggerel benediction. At his call to follow him on pain of having their breeches split, all rush violently from the church to parade through the town, drawing the dominus in a cart from which he issues mock indulgences while his followers hiss, cackle, jeer, and gesticulate. They rouse the bystanders to laughter with ‘infamous performances’ and parody preachers in scurrilous sermons. Naked men haul carts of manure which they throw at the populace. Drinking bouts and dances accompany the procession. The whole was a burlesque of the too-familiar, tedious, and often meaningless rituals; a release of ‘the natural lout beneath the cassock.’ "¹⁰

The author of this paragraph is a respected historian, but her summary is a gross misrepresentation. Some of the details are borrowed uncritically from the theologians’ damning letter or from Chambers’s own hostile judgments. Others reappear later in this book: most are shown to be false. More importantly, the notion that all the most shocking (or titillating) details from multiple sources can be combined to give a true picture of the Feast of Fools at any single time or place is shown to be hopelessly misguided.

To their credit, a few scholars have begun to challenge the prevailing view of the Feast of Fools inherited from Chambers. Jerome Taylor has pointed out that the Feast of Fools took place in far fewer cathedrals than is widely supposed and that it was by no means everywhere rowdy. David Hughes has observed that where the Feast of Fools did take place, its surrounding liturgies were composed as means of guiding the celebrators’ energies into constructive channels. And Nick Sandon has voiced the justifiable suspicion that some of the wilder excesses said to have been committed at the Feast of Fools lay more in the wishful imagination of later commentators than in fact.¹¹ But no one has tackled the more ambitious task of rewriting the history of the Feast of Fools as a whole, locating the feast in its liturgical context, balancing the scales between disruption and innovation, and paying careful attention to the development of the feast over time.¹²

I do so here. I begin, in part one, by looking at several activities that have been mistakenly identified as precursors to or early examples of the Feast of Fools. The most important are the Kalends masquerades, but I also include courtly pranks and clerical mimicry in imperial Constantinople, outdoor rites in papal Rome, and Herod games in Germany. By giving these their due, I clear the way for a study of the Feast of Fools itself. The Feast of Fools was a specific liturgical festivity, not just any exuberant activity that took place in or near a church at or around the New Year. Nevertheless, by bearing witness to a tolerance of playfulness in early medieval churches, a few of these other activities prepare the reader for some of the more surprising features of the Feast of Fools. So does the liturgical ball game that I discuss in chapter 5. Although the game was a contemporary rather than a forerunner of the Feast of Fools, its history so closely parallels that of the Feast of Fools that a brief account of the one serves as a helpful introduction to the more complex history of the other.

In part two I explore the way in which the Feast of Fools took shape in northern France. Early reports began to appear in the second half of the twelfth century. Although the most reliable mention nothing untoward, the turn of the century brought a series of complaints from Pope Innocent III. Partly in response to these complaints and partly in a burst of liturgical creativity, a few bishops in northern France introduced reforms, accommodating and even expanding the Feast of Fools within an orderly liturgical context. At their most innovative in the early thirteenth century, these reforms bore fruit in such masterpieces of liturgical art as the Sens and Beauvais offices of the Circumcision, the Beauvais Play of Daniel, and the Laon Office of Joseph.

In part three I document—as well as the scattered records allow—a long period of local ecclesiastical support for the Feast of Fools in France, extending from the mid-thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century. Although such support was never uniform, it was punctuated only occasionally by reports of disorder and restraint. Some of these reports arise not from the records themselves but from scholarly misinterpretation of the records. Others are grounded not in the ecclesiastical Feast of Fools but in the independent activities of groups of young laymen or early festive societies (sociétés joyeuses). A few, especially toward the end of the fourteenth century, bear credible witness to clerical excess. In chapter 15 I examine the very few references to the Feast of Fools outside France.

In part four I tell the story of the suppression of the Feast of Fools. Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, launched his first attack in 1400. The ecumenical Council of Basel condemned the feast in 1435. Three years later, Charles VII of France declared a modified version of the council’s decrees to be binding in France. In 1445 the university theologians of Paris issued their own denunciation. Although pressure continued to mount, resistance by some cathedral chapters was strong and persistent, allowing the Feast of Fools to survive well into the sixteenth century.

In part five I consider the proliferation of lay festive societies in France between about 1450 and 1560. These societies staged mystery plays and sotties (fools’ plays), organized festive parades and raucous charivaris, ate and drank together, and in many cases enjoyed considerable civic prestige. Many were led by an elected king or prince of fools. Because the cultural dominance of these societies followed the partial suppression of the clerical Feast of Fools, Chambers mistakenly considered them a second tradition of Feasts of Fools.¹³ So did Victor Hugo, whose description of the Feast of Fools in the opening chapters of The Hunchback of Notre Dame has done much to popularize this misconception.¹⁴ Festive societies enjoyed various relationships with the surviving Feasts of Fools, ranging from amicable to hostile and from close to distant, but nowhere did the clerical feast significantly influence the lay societies. The two were distinct phenomena.

I return to the letter from the Paris theologians in chapter 19. For now, readers can take heart from the promise that the history of the Feast of Fools is richer and more complex than either Chambers or the Parisian theologians were prepared to admit.

1. PL 207:1169–76. For summaries of the letter in English, see Chambers, 1:293–95; Backman, 52–53. The letter is dated anno Domini 1444, die XII mensis Martii, equivalent to 12 March 1445 in the modern calendar. Until 1564 the French New Year began at Easter (Blackburn and Holford-Strevens, Oxford, 785).

2. PL 207:1171; translation from Chambers, 1:294. The horn of the altar, by analogy with biblical practice (Exod. 27:2; 1 Kings 1:50), signifies a corner of the altar.

3. Brainard, Dance, 883. For a brief discussion of the vocabulary of medieval ecclesiastical dance, see Backman, 13–14; for a more general discussion of medieval dance terms, see Brainard, Dance; for an extended study of the French carole, for which the medieval Latin chorea often served as a synonym, see Sahlin, Étude.

4. Thiers, Traité, 441; Tilliot, 8–9. For the wide circulation of Tilliot’s book, see Leber, 9:231–32.

5. Dreves, Geschichte, 581.

6. Chambers, 1:294.

7. Chambers, 1:274–335.

8. Chambers, 1:325.

9. Chérest, 65.

10. Tuchman, Distant, 32–33.

11. Taylor, Prophetic, 32; Hughes, Music, 139; Sandon, Octave, 69.

12. Dreves, Geschichte, was an early and remarkably balanced attempt to write a brief history of the Feast of Fools. Heers, Fêtes, is marred by frequent errors and a complete lack of documentation.

13. Chambers, 1:373.

14. The animated Disney movie based on Hugo’s novel has only added to the confusion.

PART I

Before the Feast of Fools

CHAPTER 1

The Kalends of January

The fifteenth-century Parisian theologians were right in one regard: the history of the Feast of Fools begins with the Kalends of January.

In ancient Rome, the first day of each month was known as the kalendae (Kalends). After 153 BCE, when the date on which new consuls took office was fixed at 1 January, the Kalends of January ushered in not merely a new month but a new political and calendar year.¹ Civic rituals included a solemn procession of the two new consuls to the Senate, where each sacrificed a bull to Jupiter and where, too, under the empire, the senators swore an oath of allegiance to the emperor. Domestic rituals included New Year’s Eve visits to friends and relatives, the exchange of gifts (strenae) of real or symbolic value, the expression of good wishes for the coming year, and offerings to the domestic gods of the hearth.²

The January Kalends, unlike other classical festivals sometimes invoked as precedents for the Feast of Fools,³ not only survived into the Christian era but did so on an increasingly grand scale. Extending from New Year’s Eve until 3 January and expanding outwards to all the towns of the Roman world, the festival of the Kalends grew, according to its most careful historian, Michel Meslin, into a gigantic popular kermess, . . . a fiesta spilling over the whole Christian empire. It was arguably the largest popular festival in all the empire.⁴

Libanius (314–ca. 393), a distinguished Greek writer and teacher of rhetoric in Antioch and an unabashed member of the pagan Greek upper class, wrote two appreciative essays describing the Kalends of his day. One is a general encomium in praise of the festival;⁵ the other sets out the main events of the festival in chronological order.⁶ Celebration of the festival, Libanius wrote in the first essay, is coterminous with Roman rule. It flourishes in the plains and in the hills, on the lakes and on the rivers, even—weather permitting—on board ships at sea. Everywhere there are banquets and outbursts of laughter. So many gifts are exchanged that the roads are full of packages in transit. Family members are moved to reconciliation. Slaves are treated liberally. Even in the jails, he has been told, prisoners crack a smile. In the second essay he notes that the Kalends are the only feast common to all those who live under the Roman empire.⁷ On the last day of the old year, gifts to fill the table for the evening’s banquet are sent from house to house. Few sleep that night. Most people pass the time with "songs, leaping dances [p¯edēmata], and jests.⁸ Some bang on the doors of shopkeepers to keep them awake. In the morning, people decorate their doors with laurel branches. Breeders lead their horses to the temple to petition the gods for victory in the chariot races. Attendants scatter money into the crowd. Those who have drunk too much the night before spend the day asleep, but those . . . who are sharper in their wits" occupy themselves with the business of gift giving.⁹ On 2 January people stay home. Rules are relaxed. Masters and slaves play dice together. If a slave proves lazy or tipsy, the festival excuses him, and he is not reproached. Even the poor do their best to eat well. On 3 January crowds fill the hippodrome to watch the chariot races, after which they again eat, play dice, and get very little sleep.

By Libanius’s time, the more overtly pagan elements of the official ceremonies—the temple sacrifices and the related civic rituals—were on their way out.¹⁰ But other features of the Kalends celebrations still roused the ire of Christian preachers. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), as the fifteenth-century Parisian theologians were so keen to recall, railed against the din of silly and disgraceful songs and the disgraceful junketing and dances that characterized this false feast day. He challenged his congregation not to take part: "Are you going to join in the celebrations of good luck presents [strenae] like a pagan, going to play at dice—and get yourself drunk? To do so, he told them, would be to associate with demons, for demons take pleasure . . . in idle songs, they take pleasure in the trifling spectacle, in the manifold indecencies of the theaters, in the mad frenzy of the chariot races.¹¹ Everything associated with the traditional feast of Kalends was condemned as pagan by the preachers: no moral distinction was drawn between the indecencies of the theaters," on the one hand, and the exchange of gifts, on the other hand.

Surprisingly, however, no historical evidence of Kalends revelers wearing masks, cross-dressing, disguising themselves as animals, mocking the powerful, making house-to-house visits, or otherwise behaving like stereotypical medieval clerical fools survives from the pagan Roman Empire. Rather, the first signs of such practices appear shortly before 400, some eighty years after Christianity had first gained privileged status under Constantine I and at about the time that it became the official state religion under Theodosius I. Indeed, Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter have insisted that the Kalends masquerades of the early Christian empire are the first evidence of seasonal folk play involving masks anywhere in Europe.¹² Character masks were used in the formal theater of both Greece and Rome, and wax death masks of ancestors were worn in state funeral processions by costumed actors hired for the purpose; but neither of these traditions appears to have spilled over into pre-Christian seasonal folk play.¹³ Even the Germanic tribes of northern Europe left no written evidence of masking activity other than for military purposes. What visual and material evidence has survived is sparse and inconclusive; it, too, may well pertain to the arts of war.¹⁴ By contrast, the January Kalends of the Christianized Roman Empire provide a proliferation of evidence for the popular use of masks in seasonal festivities.

It is possible, therefore, that generations of Christian preachers, up to and including those in fifteenth-century Paris, were mistaken in their insistence that the New Year masquerading traditions of their day had pagan roots. Seasonal masquerades may have existed in southern Europe before the late fourth century and entered the written record only when Christian preachers took objection to them, but the lack of prior evidence is striking. Even the emperor Theodosius I’s detailed and repressive edicts against paganism, issued in 391 and 392, make no mention of Kalends masquerades.¹⁵ A few years earlier, in 389, he had simply ordered the Kalends of January to be set aside . . . as a customary rest day.¹⁶ As far as we can tell from the available records, Kalends masquerades arose in a Christian context.

John Chrysostom (ca. 344/54–407), at one time a student of Libanius in Antioch and later bishop of Constantinople, was among the first to complain of New Year masqueraders. Preaching in Antioch sometime between 386 and 398, he denounced the "demons marching in procession [pompeusantōn] in the marketplace, . . . the all-night devilish celebrations . . . , the tauntings, the invectives, the nightlong dances, this ridiculous comedy," and the drunkenness of the revelers.¹⁷ Chrysostom was a hostile witness, not an unbiased observer. Rudolph Arbesmann suggests that the marching demons were festive participants wearing masks of gods.¹⁸ As far as one can tell from similar accounts elsewhere, the masqueraders were engaged in carnivalesque mockery of the gods rather than in pagan devotion.

Peter Chrysologos (d. ca. 450), bishop of Ravenna, also complained of seasonal impersonations of pagan gods. In one sermon on the Kalends of January, he described how the pagans today bring out their gods. With planned defilements and premeditated disgrace they pull them hither and thither . . . and drag them about. While some were hauling portable images of the gods through the streets, others were mimicking the gods in masks and costumes: they mock the gods, play the role of idols, and dress themselves as the sacrilegious characters of idols.¹⁹ The parade may have been a parody of the long line of images of Roman deities that played a prominent role in the procession (pompa) which traditionally preceded chariot races and other spectacular games.²⁰

Chrysologos’s assertion that the masqueraders were pagans may have been largely correct; or it may have been little more than a standard rhetorical dismissal of those with whom the bishop disagreed and whose practices he could not control. Twycross and Carpenter believe that Christian masqueraders in Ravenna were representing the gods . . . in order to guy them, just as carnivals in some places today lampoon political figures.²¹ Although Chrysologos insisted that Christians were defiled by their involvement with these pagan spectacles, he knew that some of his congregation disagreed: But one of you says, ‘This isn’t the deliberate pursuit of godlessness, these good luck visits are just for fun; this is a celebration of a new beginning, not a superstition from the past; this is just New Year, not the threat of paganism.’ ²²

In another sermon Chrysologos complained that the Kalends revelers "fashion [figurant] Saturn, make [faciunt] Jove, form [formant] Hercules, exhibit [exponunt] Diana with her slaves, lead [circumducunt] Vulcan around roaring out tales of his obscenities, and there are even more."²³ The verbs here are ambiguous: facere can mean to make or to impersonate; figurare can mean both to fashion and to represent; so can formare. Both exponere and circumducere could, in the context, have had as their objects either a sculpted image or a costumed actor. Since Chrysologos also complained that they turn men into women and a human being is changed into an idol,²⁴ it is probable that some (or all) of the processing deities took the form of men disguised as both gods and goddesses.²⁵ Their masks were made from basic raw materials. There is not enough charcoal, Chrysologos reports, that can blacken the faces of such gods: and so that their appearance may reach the level of utter and complete terror, straw, skins, rags, and dung are procured from all over the world, and anything connected with human shame is put on their face. The masqueraders engaged in house-to-house visits, including Christian homes on their itinerary. Chrysologos grieves, This is what Christians gaze at, what Christians look forward to, what they allow into their homes, what Christians welcome in their homes.²⁶

Asterius of Amasea (now Amasya, northern Turkey) (fl. 400) also preached against house-to-house New Year visits.²⁷ The common vagrants and the jugglers of the stage, dividing themselves into squads and hordes, hang about every house, he told his congregation on the feast of Epiphany (6 January) in the year 400. The gates of public officials they besiege with especial persistence, actually shouting and clapping their hands until he that is beleaguered within, exhausted, throws out to them whatever money he has and even what is not his own. And these mendicants going from door to door follow after one another, and, until late in the evening, there is no relief from this nuisance.²⁸ Asterius makes no mention of masks or costumes, but it is hard to believe that the identity of the supplicants, especially with their connection to the stage, would not have been disguised in some form.

The pressure on the householder to provide money suggests a possible origin for the custom of New Year masquerades. Gift giving during Kalends, here as elsewhere in the Roman Empire, served not only as a sign of affection among family and friends but also as an almost obligatory means of currying favor with the powerful. Asterius complained about this at length: It is but a new form of bribery and servility. . . . For the more eminent and respectable man shames one into giving. A person of lower rank asks outright, and it all moves by degrees toward the pockets of the most eminent men.²⁹ Some of the less eminent and respectable in the community may have taken it on themselves to reverse the traditional upward flow of strenae, organizing masquerades as a way of persuading the wealthy to dispense largesse down the scale.

According to Asterius, Roman soldiers stationed in Amasea incorporated political satire into their masquerades. They learn vulgarity, he complained, "and the practices of actors. . . . They make sport of the laws and the government of which they have been appointed guardians. For they ridicule and insult the august government. They mount a chariot as though upon a stage; they appoint pretended lictors [doruphorous] and publicly act like buffoons. This is the nobler part of their processions [pompeias]. But . . . does not the champion . . . loose his tunic to his ankles, twine a girdle about his breast, use a woman’s sandal, put a roll of hair on his head in feminine fashion, and ply the distaff full of wool, . . . and changing the tone of his voice utter his words in the sharper feminine treble?"³⁰ Some commentators suggest that the soldiers also elected a mock emperor, that it was in his person that they mocked the highest authority, that the doruphoroi were imperial bodyguards, that there was a plurality of men dressed as women, and that the women belonged to the mock emperor’s court or even to his harem.³¹ Whatever the specific details of the mockery, the show was probably mobile: it was mounted on a chariot, and Asterius’s use of pompeia strongly suggests some kind of processional display. Perhaps it was a parody of the official New Year’s Day military parade,³² in which case the soldiers’ chariot would not have been the only entry.

Another common feature of Kalends masquerading was the use of animal masks. The first hint of this practice comes from Pacian of Barcelona (ca. 310–ca. 390). In a small work called Cervus (Stag), unfortunately now lost, Pacian censured a custom known as cervulum facere (doing the stag). Later he complained that his treatise had only served to popularize the custom: I think they wouldn’t have known how to do the Little Stag if I hadn’t shown them by censuring it.³³ Ambrose of Milan (ca. 339–397), whose influence over Thedosius I may have contributed to the emperor’s edicts against paganism, linked the stag to the season of Kalends: In the beginning of the year, by folk custom, the stag frolicked about.³⁴ Neither of these references explains the custom, but later references suggest that it involved seasonal house-to-house visits by a group of maskers, at least one of whom was dressed as a stag.³⁵

A contemporary sermon erroneously ascribed to Maximus of Turin (ca. 380–ca. 468) attacked the Kalends as a time when a man weakens himself into a woman, presumably by cross-dressing, or when men transform themselves into farm animals, or into wild animals, or into monsters.³⁶ In his first sermon on the Kalends, Chrysologos complained of those who have made themselves equal to beasts, put themselves on a level with asses, made themselves up as cattle, masqueraded as demons.³⁷ In his second sermon he complained that human beings are dressed as beasts, they turn men into women.³⁸

Wearing animal masks and dressing as women for New Year masquerades may have had no ritual connotation, pagan or otherwise. Like the charcoal, straw, skins, rags, and dung used to mask and costume the processional gods in Ravenna, clothes of the other sex and skins of domestic or hunted animals like cattle or deer may have been used simply because they were the cheapest and most readily available forms of disguise.³⁹ The goal of the masqueraders may have been little more than lively annual merrymaking and a profitable collection.⁴⁰ If the bishops condemned the masquerades as pagan, so much the better: demonic costumes would more effectively frighten householders into making a contribution.

By the first half of the sixth century, evidence of Kalends masquerading began to appear in what is now southeastern France. The most vocal episcopal opponent of Kalends masquerades at the time was Caesarius of Arles (470–542). In one sermon he reprimands those who "execute dances and pantomimes [ballationes et saltationes] before the very churches of the saints and others who practice that most sordid disgrace of [masquerading as] a heifer or a stag [annicula vel cervulo]."⁴¹ In a second sermon Caesarius complains that even some who are baptized . . . assume false forms and monstrous appearances. Specifically, he rebukes those whose game of playing the stag requires them to change their appearance for that of wild animals. Some are dressed up in the skins of farm animals; others put on the heads of wild animals, celebrating and leaping about. Moreover, men are clothed in the tunics of women. Some of the men, as in Amasea, appear to have been soldiers: By a most unseemly change they make their manly strength womanish by means of girlish fashions, not blushing to put the arms of a soldier into the tunics of women. They show bearded faces, but want to appear like women.⁴² In a third sermon Caesarius complains of cross-dressed men, of those who sing the praises of vices along with disorderly gestures and immodest songs, and of those who are clothed in the manner of wild beasts and . . . become like roe deer or a stag. In this instance he adds a reminder to the members of his congregation that they "should not permit a little stag, a heifer [anniculam], or any other kind of monster to come before your homes," so confirming that the stag and his companions were in the habit of making house-to-house visits.⁴³

Caesarius’s biographer William Klingshirn finds it difficult to see any pagan intentions in these activities. Suggesting that episcopal opposition to the