ABSTRACT
Courtly entertainment at this period is characterised by fluidity of form, the apparent irrelevance of generic boundaries. It has long been recognised that ‘Plays, pageants, tournaments, disguisings, dances, interludes and mummeries all developed together, and with much mutual interchange both of theme and form’.1 Although this often makes it difficult for us to distinguish the different elements involved in courtly disguising games, it is clear that within them significantly separate patterns developed which exploited different masking possibilities. One of these involves the transformation of a popular custom that we have already explored: mumming.
