ABSTRACT
Demarcation lines between Carnival and mumming are hard to draw. Even though their central activities suggest significantly different masking experiences, the overlap of time, place, and disguise blurs the boundaries between them. They occupy the same winter time of year. While Carnival proper tends to belong to Southern, mumming to North-Western areas of Europe, in some places like the Low Countries the two forms coexist so that they seem part of the same phenomenon. As far as masking is concerned, Carnival, as we have seen, generally involves a wide spectrum of players who mask together, usually through the streets, sometimes joining in public dancing and versions of combat games. Mumming, on the other hand, tends to be smaller scale, involving a smaller band of maskers who engineer encounters with the unmasked, often in the form of house-visits. Like Carnival, mumming may be traceable back to the very early customs of the Kalends and thus part of the ancient tradition of midwinter festivity. When we turn from mainland Europe to medieval Britain it is mumming, rather than Carnival, that dominates the scene of playful masking.
