Back in the glory days of Walt Kelly's comic strip "Pogo," before it became too verbose for me to follow, there was a manic and aggressive Bun Rabbit who proclaimed holidays on a drum. Not content to be limited to the usual ones, he went to such extremes as Knecht Ruprecht's Visiting Day and the Festum Stultorum. Now I can read Latin as good as the next man (whose name is, incidentally M. Tullius Cicero). But recognizing that the latter festival was the Feast of Fools didn't enlighten me much as to its actual nature, which necessity has just now forced me to track down.
It seems that in the later medieval Church it became a practice here and there to devote certain holidays to various ranks of the clergy. The sub-deacons' day came shortly after Christmas, the date varying from place to place. Since youth will have its fling, things soon got out of hand, and the young men kicked up their heels, conducted a farcical mass, sang dirty songs, burned old shoes for incense, and feasted on the high altar. Some day this outrageous behavior was a holdover from the Roman Saturnalia. Others (with whom I am inclined to agree) view it as a healthy and harmless way of blowing off steam. Apparently Church officials could do little more than try to tone it all down, and the Festum Stultorum lasted until the seventeenth century when it flickered out in the 1660s.
The Festum Stultorum was by no means the only parody of the Mass and other offices. There was the Beauvais Feast of the Ass in which priest and celebrants hee-hawed, and there were Masses for drunkards and gluttons. I possess a recording of a "Bacchic Vesper Service" written c. 1770 by Josef Roskovsky, by then called Father Pantaleon. Yet another example is the Officium lusorum or "Gamblers' Mass" which occupies the second side of this record, and is No. 215 of the Carmina Burana. The tunes are genuine Gregorian chants, though I believe the work follows the pattern of the daily Offices rather than that of high mass. The texts are outrageous (but not obscene) parodies; the opening of the ''Gospel'' should suffice to give the flavor: '' According to the false gospel of the silver mark ... '' (The first side of the record contains two extended songs, one a secular sequence, the other containing trouvere and Minnesinger elements.)
This is, as noted, the third volume of Dr. Clemencic's heroic attempt to present us with the "complete" medieval settings of the Benediktbeuren poems. I have remarked in the past that the vocalists in this series take a swinging, free-wheeling, and sometimes raucous approach to the songs, treating them as the popular music they undoubtedly were. I begin to think that Dr. Clemencic also intends to give us en passante the full panoply of musical instruments that were used in the Middle Ages (or might have been used). I note here the presence of coins(!) and a Jew's harp. I was tempted to work up a disquisition on the latter instrument (don't write to correct me about jaws-harps, because that's an exploded myth), but was able to restrain myself. But did you know that there were 19th century Jew's harp virtuosi, one of whom (ow! oh!) eventually wrecked all his front teeth with the instruments? And that some of them wrote for it? On your toes, MHS!
