Feast of Fools - Official Condemnation

Official Condemnation

The Feast of Fools and the almost blasphemous extravagances in some instances associated with it were constantly the object of sweeping condemnations of the medieval Church. On the other hand, some Catholic writers have thought it necessary to try to deny the existence of such abuses. Perhaps the truth lies in the interpretation that while there can be no question that Church authorities of the calibre of Robert Grosseteste repeatedly condemned the licence of the Feast of Fools in the strongest terms, such firmly rooted customs took centuries to eradicate. It is certain that the practice lent itself to serious abuses, whose nature and gravity varied at different epochs. It should be said that among the thousands of European liturgical manuscripts the occurrence of anything which has to do with the Feast of Fools is extraordinarily rare. It never occurs in the principal liturgical books, the missals and breviaries. There are traces occasionally in a prose or a trope found in a gradual or an antiphonary. It would therefore seem there was little official approval for such extravagances, which were rarely committed to writing.

With a view to checking the abuses committed in the celebration of the Feast of Fools on New Year's Day at Notre-Dame de Paris in the twelfth century, the celebration was not entirely banned, but the part of the "Lord of Misrule" or "Precentor Stultorum" was restrained, so that he was to be allowed to intone the prose "Laetemur gaudiis", and to wield the precentor's staff, but this before the first Vespers of the feast, not during it. During the second Vespers, it had been the custom that the precentor of the fools should be deprived of his staff when the verse in the Magnificat, Deposuit potentes de sede ("He has put down the mighty from their seat") was sung. Hence the feast was hence often known as the "Festum `Deposuit'". Eudes de Sully allowed the staff to be taken at that point from the mock precentor, but laid down that the verse "Deposuit" not be repeated more than five times. There was a similar case of a legitimised Feast of Fools at Sens about 1220, where the whole text of the office has survived. There are many proses and interpolations (farsurae) added to the ordinary liturgy, but nothing much unseemly. This prose or conductus, was not a part of the office, but only a preliminary to Vespers. In 1245 Cardinal Odo, the papal legate in France, wrote to the Chapter of Sens Cathedral demanding that the feast be celebrated with no un-clerical dress and no wreaths of flowers.

The Feast of Fools was finally forbidden under the very severest penalties by the Council of Basel in 1431 and a strongly worded document issued by the theological faculty of the University of Paris in 1444; numerous decrees of provincial councils followed. The Feast of Fools was roundly condemned by early Protestants, and among Catholics it seems that the abuse had largely disappeared by the time of the Council of Trent, though instances of festivals of this kind survived in France as late as 1644.

Victor Hugo recreated a picturesque account of a Feast of Fools, in which Quasimodo serves as King of Fools, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831).