Editing Feast of Fools (section)

== Official condemnation ==
{{More citations needed|section|date=October 2023}}
[[File:Feast of Fools, Carving in Beverley Minster (p.62, Jan 1824).jpg|thumb|Feast of Fools, [[Misericord]] carving in [[Beverley Minster]], [[East Yorkshire]]<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Bond |first=Donald F. |date=August 1940 |title=The Gentleman's Magazine The First Magazine. A History of the Gentleman's Magazine, with an Account of Dr. Johnson's Editorial Activity and of the Notice Given America in the Magazine. C. Lennart Carlson |url=https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/388462 |journal=Modern Philology |language=en |volume=38 |issue=1 |pages=85–100 |doi=10.1086/388462 |issn=0026-8232 |s2cid=162977253|url-access=subscription }}</ref>]]
The Feast of Fools and the subversive traditions associated with it were the object of condemnations of the medieval Church, starting as early as the twelfth century.<ref>{{Cite journal |date=April 1994 |title=Thomas Forrest Kelly, ed., Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony. (Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice, 2.) Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xi, 241; 9 black-and-white illustrations, many musical examples, many figures. |url=https://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0038713400028360 |journal=Speculum |language=en |volume=69 |issue=2 |pages=606 |doi=10.1017/S0038713400028360 |issn=0038-7134|url-access=subscription }}</ref> On the other hand, some Catholic writers have thought it necessary to try to deny the existence of such abuses. One interpretation that reconciles this contradiction is that, while there can be no question that Church authorities of the calibre of [[Robert Grosseteste]] repeatedly condemned the license of the Feast of Fools in the strongest terms, such firmly rooted customs took centuries to eradicate. It is certain that the practice lent itself to serious abuses, whose nature and gravity varied at different epochs. It should be said that among the thousands of European liturgical manuscripts the occurrence of anything which has to do with the Feast of Fools is extraordinarily rare. It never occurs in the principal [[liturgical book]]s, the [[missal]]s and [[Canonical hours|breviaries]]. There are traces occasionally in a prose or a trope found in a [[gradual]] or an [[antiphonary]]. It would therefore seem there was little official approval for such extravagances, which were rarely committed to writing.

In order to curb the extremeness of the festivities after the Feast of Fools, on New Year's Day at [[Notre-Dame de Paris]] in the twelfth century, the "[[Lord of Misrule]]" or "Precentor Stultorum" was restrained, so that he was to be allowed to intone the prose "Laetemur gaudiis", and to wield the precentor's staff, but this was before the first Vespers of the feast, not during it, though the festival was not entirely banned. During the second Vespers, it had been the custom that the precentor of the fools should be deprived of his staff when the verse in the [[Magnificat]], ''Deposuit potentes de sede'' ("He has put down the mighty from their seat") was sung. Hence the feast was often known as the "Festum 'Deposuit'". [[Eudes de Sully]] allowed the staff to be taken at that point from the mock precentor but laid down that the verse "Deposuit" not be repeated more than five times. There was a similar case of a legitimized Feast of Fools at Sens about 1220, where the whole text of the office has survived. There are many proses, and interpolations (''farsurae'') added to the ordinary liturgy, but nothing much unseemly. This prose, or ''conductus'', was not a part of the office, but only a preliminary to Vespers. In 1245 [[Cardinal Odo]], the papal legate in France, wrote to the Chapter of Sens Cathedral demanding that the feast be celebrated with no un-clerical dress and no wreaths of flowers.