A Liturgical Play for the Medieval Feast of Fools: The Laon Ordo Joseph

A newly identified medieval play for the Feast of Fools, with a new English translation and musical edition, reveals that many of the most obscene and subversive practices were misunderstandings, exaggerations, or fabrications of overzealous ecclesiastical reformers. This book proposes performative gloss as an important tool for understanding how medieval liturgical dramas generated meaning.

Format: Hardback
Length: 190 pages
Publication date: 08 August 2023
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Scholars and non-scholars alike have long been captivated by the medieval Feast of Fools, an annual celebration on or around the New Year that came to be known for its inversion of established hierarchies, its raucousness, and its scurrilous, even sacrilegious, clerical behavior. However, we now know that many of the most obscene and subversive practices associated with the feast were, in fact, misunderstandings, exaggerations, or even fabrications of overzealous ecclesiastical reformers. Our most reliable information about the Feast comes from the scant extant liturgical items that clerical communities actually used during their celebrations. This book demonstrates that the twelfth-century Ordo Joseph from Laon, in France, a play long known to scholars, telling the story of Joseph the patriarch and his brothers, is, in fact, a drama for the Feast of Fools, long hidden in plain sight, intended for performance at Epiphany. It situates the play within the context of the cathedral community's history of biblical exegesis under its schoolmaster Anselm of Laon, proposing performative gloss as an important new tool for understanding how medieval liturgical dramas generated meaning. It includes a new Latin edition of the text, accompanied by an English translation, as well as a musical reconstruction that harnesses the music of Laon's liturgy and finally makes possible a performance of this spectacular, newly identified Feast of Fools drama.

Weight: 440g
Dimension: 164 x 242 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781837650590