Feast of Fools, popular festival during the Middle Ages, held on or about January 1, particularly in France, in which a mock bishop or pope was elected, ecclesiastical ritual was parodied, and low and high officials changed places. Such festivals were probably a Christian adaptation of the pagan festivities of the Saturnalia. By the 13th century these feasts had become a burlesque of Christian morality and worship. In spite of repeated prohibitions and penalties imposed by the Council of Basel in 1431, the feasts did not die out entirely until the 16th century.

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The Feast of Fools developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as an elaborate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision (1 January). Celebrating the biblical principle that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27), the feast allowed low-ranking subdeacons to assume leadership roles in worship, usually reserved for the bishop or the cantor. Similar privileges were granted to the choirboys and their “boy bishop” on the day of the Innocents (28 December), but the two feasts are best considered in separate articles.

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The first surviving notices of the Feast of Fools—from Paris, Beauvais, and Châlons, between 1160 and 1172—testify to a joyous, expansive, but not yet fully settled liturgy for the feast of the Circumcision. In 1198, in response to complaints from Pope Innocent III, a prescribed Office of the Circumcision was prepared for use in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Even more-elaborate offices were drawn up in Sens and Beauvais between 1200 and 1234. Surviving manuscripts of the Sens and Beauvais offices contain dignified and often-beautiful scores for corporate worship, deeply indebted to biblical texts and rich in musical variation.

Over the next two centuries, the Feast of Fools expanded to some twenty further cathedrals and collegiate churches in northern France, flourishing in some cities for more than three centuries before gradually succumbing to pressures of reform. The first half of the fifteenth century saw a series of sustained attacks on the Feast of Fools, culminating in its condemnation by the ecumenical council of Basel (1435), the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII of France (1438), and a letter issued by the faculty of theology at the University of Paris (1445).

While the liturgical Feast of Fools struggled for survival inside the churches, unrelated festivities of bourgeois confraternities of fools outside the churches burgeoned. Dressed in motley costumes with ass’s ears, secular fools had their own distinct traditions of parades, comic performances, and mimicry. Subsequent scholarship largely confused the two traditions, prompting considerable misreading of the older ecclesiastical records and contributing to the mistaken but widespread view that the Feast of Fools was little more than a disorderly clerical revel.

SOURCE: Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Feast of Fools”. Encyclopedia Britannica; Oxford Oress, Biographies