Donkey fair

The donkey fair (also donkey festival , Latin Festum Asinorum or asinaria festa , French Fête de l'âne ) was a kind of carnival event in the Middle Ages with religious, humorous and erotic aspects, a special form of the widespread "fool's mass" .

The donkey festival was originally created to commemorate the flight to Egypt ( Mt 2,13–15 EU ) and was celebrated in many places on January 14th: A young girl was put on a donkey with a small child in the role of the Virgin Mary and in procession led through the place to the church, where a holy mass was celebrated.

Over time, the donkey fair developed into an exuberant fool's festival, the focus of which was a satirized fair in the style of contemporary parody with erotic, ambiguous “ mass chant”. Pagan rituals such as Saturnalia may also have played a role in its development. The participants wore animal costumes. The liturgical chants were allowed to end in hinham and the “blessing” of the jester bishop appointed for that day was answered with animal sounds. In the sequence the praise of the donkey was sung and reminded of the Old Testament donkey Balaam ( Num 22,22-35 EU ).

For the lower ranks of the clergy , the donkey fair was an opportunity to find an outlet for the otherwise strict rules of monastic or church life once a year. High dignitaries were deprived of their power for a day and watched the goings-on with mixed feelings; Temporary attempts to organize the festivities in a more regular manner were unsuccessful.

The donkey has been a symbol of phallus and fertility since ancient times , and it appears in biblical and apocryphal stories about the life of Jesus . The donkey played an important role in medieval customs and ceremonies.

References to the donkey fair can be found in France as early as the 9th century. Victor Hugo described a Fête des Fous in his novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame . Such forms had their peak in the High Middle Ages. During the Reformation there were still individual pamphlets with a parodic tinge, no comparable forms are known from later times.

literature

Mikhail Bakhtin : Rabelais and his world. Folk culture as a counterculture. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-518-28787-7 , pp. 124-133 (translated from Russian by Gabriele Leupold).

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Hansjörg Auf der Maur : Celebrating in the rhythm of time I. Men's festivals in the week and year. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1983, ISBN 3-7917-0788-4 (Handbook of Liturgy, Part 5), p. 173.
↑ Rupert Berger et al. a .: Shape of the service. Linguistic and non-linguistic forms of expression. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1987, ISBN 3-7917-1045-1 (Handbook of Liturgical Studies Part 3), p. 129f.

[1] Hansjörg Auf der Maur : Celebrating in the rhythm of time I. Men's festivals in the week and year. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1983, ISBN 3-7917-0788-4 (Handbook of Liturgy, Part 5), p. 173.

[2] Rupert Berger et al. a .: Shape of the service. Linguistic and non-linguistic forms of expression. Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1987, ISBN 3-7917-1045-1 (Handbook of Liturgical Studies Part 3), p. 129f.