ABSTRACT
The third chapter presents an original hypothesis on the prehistory of Carnival and of its early historical development in late antique and early medieval times. It is based upon a different set of historical sources than the other chapters and moves from the perspective of the history of religions rather than cultural history or historical anthropology. It also challenges existing interpretations about the existence of an alleged, pre-medieval European or Eurasian “religion of Carnival”. Various questions of epistemology and methods are also discussed in these pages. The fact that it offers an analysis of certain historical phenomena linked to Carnival, but not carnivals themselves, and moreover not linearly along the axis of time, makes it an ancillary and somewhat tangential part of the book.
