History
After the Reformation in the 16th century, pupils of the cathedral schools in Protestant nations conducted these processions to raise funds to replace the church support that had disappeared. The traditional practice developed differently in the north and the south of Europe.
Since then the Star boys' singing procession has become common in many parts of Europe (both in Catholic and Protestant areas) and in Russia.
The importance of the Twelfth Day and the feat of the Epiphany grew with the introduction of the Gregorian calendar as the day, according to the earlier Julian calendar, is also the Old Christmas Day. The custom passed further on to the general populace as a kind of narrative folk drama, but seems to have declined in its original form since the late 19th century.
Read more about this topic: Star Boys' Singing Procession
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)