ABSTRACT
Court-, community-, and above all Church-controlled feasts and fasts, of diverse length and type, punctuated and defined the early modern festive year, regulating and restricting the activities of both amateur and professional performers to specific dates and seasons. François Laroque highlights some challenges in identifying and interpreting informative evidence relating to festivals in early modern Protestant England.1 He potently explores the fundamental theatre-historical importance of the ‘matrix of time’ established by the annual cycle of the Christian festive year. Previous festival-based literary studies tended to concentrate on carnivalesque aspects of festival, particularly revealing from a theatre-historical perspective. By setting carnival enquiries within a holistic consideration of their accompanying year-round manifestations, Laroque encouraged a welcome widening of focus in a fertile field of enquiry. Some of the most substantial of all accounts of early modern carnival festivities, those in the journals of Felix and Thomas Platter, remain little-known to non-German scholars. Their documentary value is further enhanced by their contextualization within these informative journals. Recognizing the value of Laroque’s approach, this chapter identifies numerous references to European sacred, civic and court ceremonies and festivals in the Platter brothers’ and Hippolytus Guarinonius’s writings, many not previously available in English translation, and draws on them to piece together the three physicians’ experience of carnival and the festive year within which it is set, and insights into their healing dimensions.
