for hundreds of years, the ceremonial dinner of Fools has been condemned and sometimes celebrated as a disorderly, even transgressive Christian competition, during which reveling clergy elected a burlesque Lord of Misrule, presided over the divine workplace donning animal mask or women’s outfits, sang obscene songs, swung censers that gave off foul-smelling smoke, performed cube on the altar, and another way parodied the liturgy of the church. in a while, they might take to the streets, howling, issuing mock indulgences, hurling manure at bystanders, and staging scurrilous performs. the matter with this well known account—intriguing because it may possibly be—is that it truly is fallacious. In Sacred Folly, Max Harris rewrites the heritage of the ceremonial dinner of Fools, displaying that it constructed within the past due 12th and early 13th centuries as an intricate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision (1 January)—serving as a dignified substitute to rowdy secular New 12 months festivities. The reason of the banquet used to be now not mockery yet thanksgiving for the incarnation of Christ. Prescribed position reversals, during which the reduce clergy presided over divine workplace, recalled Mary’s joyous confirmation that God “has placed down the amazing from their seat and exalted the humble.” The “fools” represented these selected by means of God for his or her lowly prestige. The ceremonial dinner, by no means common, used to be principally limited to cathedrals and collegiate church buildings in northern France. within the 15th century, high-ranking clergy who depended on rumor instead of firsthand wisdom attacked and at last suppressed the banquet. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians time and again misinterpret documents of the banquet; their misguided debts shaped a shaky beginning for next figuring out of the medieval ritual. by means of returning to the first files, Harris reconstructs a banquet of Fools that's all of the extra outstanding for being sanctified instead of sacrilegious.