ABSTRACT
For several days the Christians rave and go crazy, until sprinkled with some kind of ash in the Temple they come to themselves and recover.
(Observation on Carnival attributed variously to the envoys of Prester John and Suleiman II)1
Carnival, throughout most of Europe, was the most striking and spectacular of the late-medieval masking traditions. Yet masking was only one element in a winter playtime that spread right across countries and classes, sometimes for weeks at a time. In the medieval Christian calendar it was the festival to celebrate and bid farewell to plenty immediately before the privations of Lent. But the accepted carnival period frequently spread backwards from the climax of the jours gras, the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. The earliest date on which Shrove Tuesday can fall is 3 February, the day after Candlemas, which marked the end of winter and, as the final festival of the childhood of Christ, seems also to have closed the Christmas festivities.2 The temptation to merge with the Twelve Days of Christmas and New Year celebrations proved strong, at least in Mediterranean countries. By the end of the sixteenth century we are told of ‘the tyme of Carnavall from Christmas feast to Ashwensday’3 - the entire period between the two major fasts of Advent and Lent.
