ABSTRACT
Defining games and jokes as the liberty ‘to idle away spare time’, I suggest that members of early modern courts found in calendar rituals and alleged immoderate passions and crude jokes of ordinary people interstitial moments of mere recreation. In their highly competitive world, courtiers never missed out on their private Carnival celebrations and occasional other inversion games. Court fools tested an unrestrained use of the senses and passions that civilisation bridled. Literary circuits gave some court fools comic afterlives and this literature on the quick-witted and rowdy court fool was also a source of amusement through which courts symbolically extended their authority across all social groups and playfully explored the vicissitudes of interpersonal relations and status at court.
