Bean King
The bean king ( English bean king , French roi de la fève / le roi-boit , Catalan tortell de rice , Spanish roscón de Reyes ) describes the custom, which has been tangible since the late Middle Ages , of electing a king on Epiphany or its eve and collectively to commit his kingdom.
description
The name "Bean King" is more recent than the phenomenon it describes; in German it only goes back to the 16th century and only becomes general in the 18th century. The manifestations of the ritual royal celebration on Epiphany are different regionally and socially; at its center, however, is always the king determined by choice or, more often, by lot. One of the popular lottery schemes is the distribution of a cake with a bean baked in it. The king's office falls to the person in whose piece of cake the bean is, hence the name “bean king”.
In the past, a number of other lottery procedures were also used , such as written or printed lottery tickets, which made it possible to obtain further court offices in addition to the king. This is followed by a joint drink , with the party regularly having the task of acclaiming “The King is drinking” as soon as the King raises the glass. In French, the characteristic call has become eponymous ( "le roi-boit" ). In addition to family manifestations of the custom, there were large urban and court forms that integrated a number of other ritual elements , such as processions, church services and amusements of all kinds.
history
Older folklore saw the "bean king" as an heir to the Roman Saturnalia and thus followed a historical derivation that prevailed in the 17th century. More recent approaches deny such a continuity or at least point to its unprovability in view of a gap in the tradition between late antiquity and the high Middle Ages, which extends from the last mention of the Roman Saturnalia in the 5th century to the first evidence of a bean king in the 13th century, i.e. eight hundred years includes. The bean king has been a widespread phenomenon in western and parts of central Europe since the 14th century. The custom is characterized by broad acceptance across all social barriers, it ranges from the French royal court to early modern infirmary , includes monasteries, cities, guilds , farmers, students, pupils: they all choose their own king (or queen). The ritual remained tied to the Epiphany until well into the 18th century and was understood by contemporaries as a way of celebrating the ecclesiastical feast day in connection with the idea of Christ's kingship. As a result of the Reformation , the appropriateness of the Bean King as a festive ritual becomes the subject of confessional debate. With the Enlightenment , the conceptual connection to January 6 is lost in many cases, and in its place, especially in the 19th century, a carnivalization of the ritual takes place, which sees the king as a foolish figure and exponent of a world that has been turned upside down for a while. At the beginning of the 20th century, the custom in the German-speaking area was largely extinct except for a few areas on the Moselle and Rhine.
present
The present knows the bean king primarily as a French tradition, but it is also very widespread in Switzerland. In France (and parts of overseas Francophonie, e.g. Québec , New Orleans ) and Catalonia, the bean cake is traditionally the focus of the celebration; the beans are regularly replaced by porcelain figurines, which have been emerging in large numbers since the 19th century and which are now a separate area of collection. The popularity of the bean king in Switzerland is primarily due to the efforts of the cultural historian Max Wavia, who successfully propagated the custom at the end of the 1950s with the support of the Swiss Association of Bakers and Confectioners. In the rest of Europe, bean kings are more local nowadays, in Germany the custom is still (or again) used by individual corporations, such as carnival clubs ( Speyer ) or the friends of Kant and Königsberg . In Frankfurt am Main to the local financial and economic life make a bean round since 1898 peaks.
Art history
The Bean King has produced a rich iconographic tradition. There are two modes of representation: One of the two is older and less common; she puts the bean cake at the center of the party. A corresponding picture can already be found in the book of hours Adelaide of Savoy from the 14th century; the most famous version of the type comes from Jean-Baptiste Greuze (now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier). The other method of representation became popular in the 16th century through a work by Martens van Cleve, which was copied many times . It always shows the characteristic moment when the king raises the glass and the party calls "The king is drinking!" A number of artists from both Netherlands took up the subject, including Jacob Jordaens , Jan Steen , Jan Miense Molenaer and Richard Brakenburgh . The drinking king thus becomes one of the most popular genre motifs of the 17th century. Well-known representations of Jordaens hang today in St. Petersburg ( Hermitage , approx. 1638), Brussels ( Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten ), Kassel (State Art Collections), Paris ( Louvre ) and Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum, approx. 1645).
literature
- Dominik Fugger: The Kingdom on Epiphany. A historical-empirical ritual study. Schöningh, Paderborn 2007, ISBN 978-3-506-76404-1 .
- Nikolaus Grass: Royaumes et Abbayes de la Jeunesse - “Kingdoms” and “Abbeys” of youth. In: Louis C. Morzak and Markus Escher (eds.): Festschrift for Louis Carlen on his 60th birthday. Schulthess, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-7255-2710-5 , pp. 411–459.
- Marc Jacobs: King for a Day. Games of Inversion, Representation, and Appropriation in Ancient Regime Europe. In: Gita Deneckere (ed.): Mystifying the Monarch. Studies on discourse, power and history. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2006, ISBN 978-1-4294-5462-9 , pp. 117-137.
- Dieter-Jürgen Leister: The King drinks! The Celler Bean Festival by Jacob Jordaens and his relatives. Special exhibition from June 19 to August 31, 1955 in the Bomann Museum in Celle. Bomann Museum, Celle 1955.
- Claudia Schnitzer: Kingdoms - Economies - Farm weddings. Playing forms of courtly masquerade that carry and infiltrate ceremonies , in: Jörg Jochen Berns / Thomas Rahn (eds.): Ceremonial as courtly aesthetics in the late Middle Ages and early modern times (early modern times, vol. 25), Tübingen 1995, pp. 280–331.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ "Tortell de Reis" (German king cake ) is the Catalan name for a candied yeast plait with baked beans and baked king to be eaten together. The family member who finds the bean in his piece of cake has to get the "tortell" the following year. Compare: Tortell de Reis
- ^ Börsen-Zeitung