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| The Fight between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Bruegel, 1559 |
By John Bossy
Sin required penance from the individual, as Dante had expounded it; it also, as a stain on the community of Christians, required penance from the population at large, collective ascetic rituals of which the most important was the annual season of Lent. Though generally felt to be essential to individual salvation and public prosperity, penance remained a daunting prospect: the task of persuading people to enter upon it was likened by the Strassburg preacher John Geiler to getting a horse on to a small boat. The horse might pass more readily if its steps were guided by the formalities of a rite of passage. So by the sixteenth century the moment at which the population passed from its carnal into its penitential state had become a time for the vigorously cultivated rites of separation generally known as Carnival. These were, despite some appearances, Christian in character, and they were medieval in origin: although it has been widely supposed that they continued some kind of pre-Christian cult, there is in fact no evidence that they existed much before 1200. The Italian term carnevale derived from the dominica carnelevalis or Quadragesima Sunday, the feast which in the Roman and Milanese liturgies marked for the clergy the passage from the normal to the penitential regime, and signified the abolition of meat or flesh; those words in use in other vernaculars (antruejo/introitus, carême-entrant) referred to the entrance into Lent. As a period of time and a moral conception Carnival was one half of an entity of which the other half was Lent. The unity-in-opposition of the pair, which seems a notable instance of the structural anthropology practised by Claude Levi-Strauss, was the theme of the French and Spanish poems which diffused the conception in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and also of a line of pictorial representations memorably concluded in the middle of the sixteenth by The Fight between Carnival and Lent of Pieter Bruegel.
Carnival normally occurred, and has continued to occur, as a series of three or six days ending on Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras. These were feast-days in that work was prohibited, the private became public, and communities functioned as a whole or through bodies specially created for the purpose. The object of the feast was to represent the workings of carnality in general and, out of the doings of the past year, to bring the corpus of sin to light, in order that it might be got rid of in time for Lent. Carnality was almost invariably embodied in a carnival figure who dominated the feast, was carried in procession during it, and tried, condemned and executed (usually by burning) at the end of it. In these more formal proceedings the seven sins were represented by Gluttony, just as abstinence from meat had come to represent the penitential asceticisms of Lent. Carnival was a fat man; during the feast it was obligatory to eat a great deal, especially fat things like pigs and pumpkins, and drink to match; in Nantes Shrove Tuesday was dedicated to S. Dégobillard (St Vomit), whom one may think an appropriate patron for the whole feast.
It should not be deduced from this that Carnival was more concerned with the sins of concupiscence than with those of aversion. Certainly a good deal of sexual display and obscene insult was required. Prostitutes, whatever their status during the rest of the year, were essential; bears, cocks and other symbols of lechery abounded in the iconography; massive representations of the penis, plain in Naples or disguised as enormous sausages in Konigsberg, were carried in procession through the streets. Since the object of the performance was to expose what was concealed, it was natural that conduct to which shame attached should be a favourite target for exposure. But the display of sexuality was no more binding, at least in this early period of Carnival, than the display of more or less symbolically refined violence and hostility. The days of Carnival, as its best historian the Spaniard Julio Caro Baroja says, are days 'when the collective expression of envy, anger and enmity is legitimate'; a climate of fear and insecurity, of exposure to authorised violence rendered anonymous by the wearing of masks, must be maintained and accepted. In well-regulated cities at times of no particular stress, the obligations of aversion might be met by the trading of insults, the throwing of rotten eggs, or a bit of symbolic theft; but it was in the nature of the occasion that real violence, individual assassination or collective riot, was always likely to occur. Examples from Switzerland and Corsica make it plain that the 1580 carnival of Romans in Dauphine, chronicled by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in The Peasants of Languedoc (1966) and elsewhere, was following a reasonably welltrodden route. Here the symbolic hostility of three ritual fraternities, sharpened by a variety of exterior tensions at the time of the Wars of Religion, escalated into civil war and a small massacre; what seems more significant than the riot itself is that most of the population does not appear to have noticed that anything much had gone wrong. Somewhere between symbolic and genuine violence one must put the carnival games, which included early forms of football, then as now a satisfying outlet for collective hostility. The Spaniards developed a theologically elegant version of the game where the object was to deposit in the territory of the other side a ball into which the collected dirty linen of one's own had been ritually packed.
Arguments about whether the function of Carnival was to overturn or to maintain Society seem pointless, since there existed no such thing. It it took what we should call a political tone, putting the pope or the militant reformer Zwingli, Henri III or Cardinal Mazarin in the place of the figure to be burned, or harassing the officers of justice and taxation, this was because these were members of the body of Christ whose position gave them opportunities denied to others for infecting it with concupiscence and ill feeling. The world was turned upside-down to see what was crawling about underneath.
The real mystery about the feast is why it came into existence in some regions of Christendom rather than others: in, that is, Italy, including the islands, the Iberian peninsula, most of France, Switzerland and much of Germany, but less or not at all in north-west France, the British Isles, the Netherlands except for a southern fringe, north Germany or Scandinavia. One cannot put this distribution down to the Reformation, which it pre-dated, and must allow for the capacity of the feast to spread by imitation, since it was certainly taken up by the Jews, and apparently by the Russians as well. Carnival is of its nature something to do with penance, and I suggest that it is in the history of penance that we ought to look for an explanation of its origins and the limits of its diffusion. The regions of northern and north-western Europe which eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and do not celebrate Carnival were the regions where in the early Middle Ages the penitential tariff had been invented and received, and where confession and penance had always been individual matters; the liturgical procedure of public penance had been the tradition of the specifically Roman, and then of the Carolingian, West. Carnival, it would seem, had come into existence where a tradition of public confession and penance had been left in the air by the further progress of privacy after 1215.
Source: Christianity in the West, 1400-1700, published in 1985 by Oxford University Press, pp. 42-45.
