O Carnival it is one of the most popular festivals in our country, in addition to being held in different parts of the world. The party takes place between February and March and is known for being a period of celebration with street parties, in which people dress up in different ways and consume a lot of food and drink.
At historical origins of carnival go back to some celebrations held by different peoples of antiquity, like Greeks and Romans. In the case of the Romans, for example, the Saturnalia, parties that took place in honor of the god of agriculture. It was a time of celebration marked by countless street celebrations.
From the Middle Ages, the celebration was added to the Catholic Church's festivities calendar and became a feast in that the population celebrated their freedom before the days of seriousness and restriction that marked the Lent. Taking this into account, we brought some information about how carnival celebrations took place in Europe in Modern age (1453-1789).
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Carnival in the Modern Age
Carnival took place in different regions of Europe, but it was particularly strong in regionmediterranean, that is, in the Italy, Spain and France. Carnival-like celebrations — that is, with street parties, plenty of food and drink, and people dressing up — also took place at other times of the year, such as the party offools, which took place on December 28th.
The festivities could start in late December or January and could be extended until around Lent. It is important to consider that Carnival did not happen in the same way in Europe, as each region had its own way of celebrating it. The party was marked by excessive consumption of meat and alcoholic beverages. Insult, mockery and jokes were also practices of this period.
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Historian Peter Burke gives examples of public places where celebrations took place: Place Notre Dame, in the city of Montpellier (France), and Piazza San Marco, in Venice (Italy)|1|. Costumes were also an important detail of the celebrations, and it was common to see men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Masks were an essential accessory and many had a very large nose. It was also common to witness people dressed as priests, devils and wild animals.
In the Carnival celebrated in Europe in the Modern Age, floats were built that paraded through the streets of cities.*
In the squares of European cities during the last days of Carnival, a series of actions organized by clubs formed by members of the upper classes, such as the Abbaye des Conards, from Rouen, France, or the Compagnie della Calza, from Venice, Italy. This type of club organized public presentations made up of three achievements, which were:
parades with floats;
popular competitions;
presentation of a piece.
Games were also a common practice of Carnival in the Modern Age. Many played characters in the streets, imitating priests and lawyers, people threw water on each other, and mockery of all kinds took place. One of the most popular forms of mockery highlighted by historians was called charivari.
Charivari
O charivari was a popular justice ritual which happened mainly at Carnival, but which could happen at other times of the year, according to the laws and traditions of each region of Europe. Often the charivari it happened during the carnival period, because in that period mockery and insults were openly allowed.
This practice was known throughout Europe and could have some differences in execution in each region where it took place. Still, the charivari, in its best known form, was characterized by a slander song, which was sung under the window of the home of the person being mocked. It was also common to force the victim of charivari The parade through the city riding backwards on a donkey.
O charivari it targeted people who were involved in situations considered atypical, unusual. The point of view here was to “execute individuals who threatened family and community norms”, as historian José Rivair Macedo says.|2|. O charivari happened against
[…] girls who exchanged a boy from the community for a foreigner; girls with an unruly life; brides who married pregnant wearing the veil or other insignia of virginity; boys who gave themselves to widows; women declared adulteresses, girls involved with married men; husbands cheated by their wives; excessively violent or excessively weak husbands—especially those beaten by their wife|3|.
Peter Burke also mentions that the charivari it could “be used outside the context of marriage, against preachers or rural lords; in seventeenth-century France, tax collectors were expelled from the cities they visited”|4|. O charivari was known as asouade, in France, and skimmingtonride, in England.
O charivari, as an act of public defamation, is a practice that dates back to antiquity and is very common in Mediterranean regions. In addition to attacking issues relating to marriage, it also targeted authorities and people accused of wrongdoing—such as heretics. The first known reports of the charivari date back to the ninth century and to regions dominated by the Byzantine Empire.
O charivari, in some cases, was also linked to legal mechanisms in certain cities and, therefore, was used as a punishment or as part of a punishment. A clear example of this is that thieves, in certain parts of Europe, were transported to their execution sites mounted on his back on a donkey—just like at Carnival during the Age Modern.
What did Carnival represent in the Modern Age?
There are no records from that time that directly explain what Carnival meant to people of the Modern Age, but Peter Burke brings two pieces of information about how Carnival was seen, based on an analysis of thought and other records of the time course|5|. In this sense, Carnival was:
a period of opposition to Lent. Carnival was a period of exaggeration precisely because Lent was a period of deprivation, marked by fasting and abstinence;
understood as a representation of a very common idea in Europe in the Modern Age: “the world upside down”.
With regard to the second point, some observations are in order. The world upside down was an existing representation in European popular culture that dealt with things and behaviors that were out of a natural order. Thus, in this idea, men and animals exchanged roles, as well as parents and children, students and teachers, men and women, etc.
Peter Burke also claims that the idea of the world upside down was present in a utopia of that time known as cocaine — a mythological land where there was no work, where food was plentiful and sex was easily obtained. From this point of view, Carnival was understood as a passing Cocanha|6|. Taking this relationship between Carnaval and Cocaña into account, Peter Burke states:
Carnival was a time of comedies, which often featured inverted situations, in which the judge was placed in the trunk or the woman triumphed over her husband. […] The everyday taboos that restricted the expression of sexual and aggressive impulses were replaced by stimuli to it. Carnival, in short, was a time of institutionalized disorder, a set of inversion rituals.|7|.
But the freedom of Carnival and its imposition of the world upside down was, for a time, persecuted by the Catholic Church. During the second half of the 16th century, there was a reaction from the Church and some secular authorities against popular festivals and all the disorder caused by them, with Carnival being one of the celebrations affected.
the mentioned Abbaye des Conards, a club in the city of Rouen, France, which organized plays and public parties during Carnival, was one of those affected by the repression of popular festivals. The masked party, organized at night by this club, was banned by order of the French authorities.
The persecution of popular festivals did not only take place in Rouen, but spread throughout Europe, and is explained by historian Georges Minois as an attempt to authorities at the time to reduce possible conflicts caused by religious issues (Europe was at the height of religious rivalries caused by the emergence of Protestantism). Furthermore, the persecution of Carnival came as a reaction from Puritanism, which settled in parts of Europe after the religious reform|8|.
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Curiosities
Shrove Tuesday, that is, Carnival Tuesday, was referred to in England as a time for “so much cooking and grilling, so much toasting and toasting, so much soaking and fermenting, so much as roasting, frying, chopping, chopping, carving, devouring and stuffing the gut that we would think people sent to the flail their two-month's provisions at once, or that they've balled their bellies with enough meat for a trip to Constantinople or the Indies Westerners"|9|.
In Nuremberg (Germany), there was a float that paraded through the city called Hole.
Race, wrestling and horse racing competitions often took place at Carnival. In Italy, the race of old people and Jews was also held.
In street celebrations, Carnival was represented as a fat young man, and Lent as a thin old woman.
In 1583, ninety butchers from Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) paraded around carrying a 200-kilogram sausage.
A wooden phallus was recorded in Naples, Italy, which was carried through the streets of the city during the Carnival of 1664.
The insult was openly allowed during Carnival.
It was common for aggressions to happen to animals during the days of Carnival. One of the practices was the stoning of roosters.
Violence increased considerably throughout Europe during Carnival, and robberies and assaults became commonplace.
In the Spanish Carnival, there was a feast for Santa Agata, in which women ruled and men had to obey.
O Corpus Christi during the Modern Age it was accompanied by carnival celebrations, and there were large banquets and floats.
During Carnival, execution ceremonies could take place in which victims could be hanged, decapitated, burned or dismembered.
O charivari it was a common practice in Europe until the mid-19th century.
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|1| BURKE, Peter. popular culture in the modern age. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989. P. 206.
|2| MACEDO, José Rivair. Charivari and judicial ritual: the infamous cavalcade in medieval Europe. To access, click on here.
|3| Same as note 2.
|4| BURKE, Peter. popular culture in the modern age. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989. P. 222.
|5| Idem, p. 212.
|6| Idem, p. 214.
|7| Idem, p. 214.
|8| MINOIS, Georges. History of laughter and mockery. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2003, p. 318-320.
|9| BURKE, Peter. popular culture in the modern age. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989, p. 207.
*Image credits: Marchesini 62 / Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves Silva
Graduated in History