The Ugly, the Comic, the Obscene: Satires on the Peasantry and Carnival Festivities
Depiction of charivari, early 14th century (from the Roman de Fauvel)
The Middle Ages was a period full of contradictions, in which public shows of piety and austerity were accompanied by generous concessions to sin, as is revealed to us by many short stories from the period, and there were places where prostitution was tolerated (even villages-gynaecea, known as columbaria, patronised by feudal lords.) Nor must we forget the eroticism of courtly poetry and the songs of the goliards, who were clerics at that. Moreover the sense of shame was certainly different from the modern one, especially among the poor, where families lived in promiscuity, sleeping all in the same room or even in the same bed, while bodily functions were performed in the fields without anyone worrying overmuch about privacy. Obscenity (and praise of the deformed and the grotesque) appears in the satires on the peasantry and in the carnival festivities in relation to the lives of the humble. These are two fairly different phenomena. There are many texts, from French fabliaux to the Italian short stories and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the villein is shown as a fool, ever ready to swindle his master, dirty and stinking (in one story, on passing in front of a perfumer's workshop, an donkey driver was so overcome by the scents that he fainted, coming to only when they had him smell some manure). Sometimes, peasants were also portrayed as Priapus, disfigured by disgusting genital attributes.
But this was not an example of popular comicality; it was more of an expression on the contempt and diffidence in which peasants were held by the feudal and ecclesiastical worlds, who took sadistic pleasure in the peasant's deformities and laughed at him rather than with him.
For their part, the common townsfolk were the stars of grotesque parodies during carnival and similar events, such as the Feast of the Ass and the charivari, processions held when a widower remarried, characterised by shouting, obscene gestures, and dressing up in disguise, during which people made an enormous racket using cauldrons, casserole dishes and other kitchen utensils. But at carnival time the main element was the grotesque representation of the human body (hence the masks), parodies of sacred things and complete licence in language, blasphemy included. The triumph of all that during the rest of the year was considered ugly or forbidden, these festivities nonetheless were an interlude granted and tolerated only on specific occasions. For the rest of the year there were the official religious holidays. On these occasions the traditional order and respect for the hierarchy were reconfirmed, while during carnival the social order and hierarchy was allowed to be overturned (they even elected the king or the bishop of the festivities) and the clownish and "shameful" traits of popular life emerged. The people took gleeful revenge on the feudal and ecclesiastical powers and, through parodies of devils and the underworld, they tried to react against the fear of death and the afterlife, and against the terror of the plagues and catastrophes that would dominate the rest of the year.
And so one might say, paradoxically, that seriousness and gloominess were the prerogative of those who practiced a healthy optimism (we have to suffer but then eternal glory will be hours) [N.B. I wouldn’t call that healthy], while laughter was the medicine of those who pessimistically lived a wretched and difficult life.
Those events also included the Feast of Fools, and it's obvious how the figure of the fool (who can also be the bearer of unexpected wisdom) was characterised by a grimace of madness that was immediately transformed into a clownish mask.
On such occasions a farcical role was also assigned to the excrement that in church, during the burlesque election of a false bishop, was used instead of incense, while during charivari excrement was tossed at the crowds. In this way ugliness was in a certain sense redeemed, perhaps partly owning to the fact that the star of the carnival, hungry and oppressed by disease, was no more beautiful than the character he represented – and hence, through an act of defiance, the ugly person was accepted and imposed as a model.
– Umberto Eco (ed.), On Ugliness
