ABSTRACT
Although the roots of the carnival might be found in antiquity, for example, the Dionysian cults and rites of Greece or the Roman Saturnalia, for our purposes, the carnival became an essential part of Western culture in the late medieval period (Bakhtin 1968). In the days that preceded Lent, the popular classes, namely peasants and some townspeople, held a variety of public festivals of endless revelry and transgression as an expression of resistance against the elites and the dominant system. During carnival the prevailing morals and values were flaunted, inverted, and reversed. The traditional deference the peasants gave to the authority of the elites became transformed into various kinds of parody, lampoon, and ridicule. It was a moment in which the morality of the elites was challenged by flagrant and blatant ribald transgressions. Elite standards of beauty were challenged by valorization of the grotesque and the elites themselves were mocked and lampooned. The hedonism of the festivals of the carnival included mead—a form of beer—and a great deal of food and bodily pleasures. There was endless laughter, as laughter was always a form of resistance to elite domination. For a brief moment, there were illusory moments of a utopian equality between people of all ranks, as the elites were “brought down to earth” as embodied members of a common humanity. They too would eat, defecate, and urinate like everyone else. While on the one hand, these moments of transgression and merriment might very well have seemed to challenge the social structure and privileges of the elite, ultimately the carnival served to reproduce the very social conditions which fostered the resistance. And thus the carnival became an essential moment of medieval society that was in part responsible for its seemingly unchangeable nature and the remarkable stability of its class structure over time.
