FOOLS, FEAST OF. The Romans kept the festival of Saturn, in Dec., as a time of general license and revelry. During the brief season of the saturnalia (q.v.), the Flaw, reclined on his master's seat at table, the master waited upon his slave, and soci ety, for the moment, seemed to be turned upside down. The grotesque masquerade sur vived the pagan creed which gave it birth, and not only kept its place among the Chris liens, but, in the face of solemn anathemas of fathers and councils, found its way into the ceremonial of the Christian church. It was called, at different times and places, by many different names, but has latterly come to be best known as the feast of fools (festum futuorum, festum, seultorum).
The circumstances of the observance were almost infinitely varied, but it was every where marked by the same spirit of broad, boisterous drollery, and coarse but not ill natured caricature. The donkey played such a frequent part in the pageant that it was often called the feast of asses (festum, asinorum). In some places, the ass of Balaam was figured; in others, the ass which stood beside the manger in which the infant Savior was laid; elsewhere, the ass on which the Virgin and Child fled to Egypt, or the ass on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem. In every instance, there was more or less attempt at dramatic representation, the theater being generally the chief church of the place, and the words and action of the drama being often ordered by its book of ceremonies. Sev eral rituals of this sort are still preserved. That which was in use at Beauvais, in' France, has a rubric ordering the priest when he dismisses the congregation to bray three times, and ordering the people to bray three times in answer. As the ass was led towards the altar, he was greeted with a hymn of nine stanzas of which the first runs thus: Where the ass did not come upon the stage, the chief point of the farce lay in the election of a mock pope, patriarch, cardinal, archbishop, bishop, or abbot. These
mimic dignitaries took such titles as "Pope of Fools," " Archbishop of Dolts," " Cardi nal of Numskulls," "Boy Bishop," " Patriarch of Sots," " Abbot of Unreason," and the like. On the clay of their election, they often took possession of the churches, arid even occasionally travestied the performance of the church's highest office, the mass, in the church's holiest place, the altar. In some convents, the nuns disguised themselves in men's clothes, chanted mock services, and elected a " little abbess,': who for that day took the place of the real abbess.
The feast of fools maintained itself in many places till the reformation in the lath century. At Antibes, in the s. of France, it survived till year 1644, when we have it described by an eye-witness in a letter to the philosopher Gassendi. The scene was, as usual, a church; and the actors, dressing themselves in priests' robes turned inside out, read players from books turned upside down, through spectacles of orange-peel; using coal or flour for incense, amid a babblement of confused cries, and the mimic bel lo'wings of cattle, and grunting of pigs.
The history of the feast of fools has been treated in several works; the best is the Memoire pour servir d rHistoire de la Fe_te des Foes, by Du Tilliot, published at Lausanne in 1741; reprinted at Paris in 1751, and again in the Reeueil des Ceremonies et Coutumes 1?etigiouses de Toes les Peuples, tome viii. (edit. Prudhomme 1809.)