Fools and Saints: Derision and Regenerative Laughter and the Late Medieval and Early Modern Hagiographic Imagination

Carnivalesque misrule is not alien to Christianity. Some of the more exotic phenomena of medieval Christianity—and hagiography—can be explained as forms of religious carnival. These include holy folly, “inclusive” laughter at the expense of a humiliated saint, and the liturgical Easter laughter. Believers enjoyed, and authorities permitted, laughter as a social safety valve and as a means of expressing festive joy and acknowledging the victory of God’s kosmos over postlapsarian khaos. At the same time, medieval Christians lived in perpetual fear of an unholy carnival of ungodly folly, destructive rather than regenerating, dangerous rather than entertaining. During the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, carnivalesque patterns were instrumentalized so as to create and propagate new social orders and religious beliefs. Although Protestantism owed a good deal of its success to carnivalesque laughter, it quickly distanced itself from misrule once it had obtained the status of established churchdom.