I am particularly happy to see these two fine contributions to scholarship regarding the arguably lighter side of medieval performance: Max Harris's meticulously researched Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools, which corrects longstanding confusion about sacred—as distinct from secular—celebrations of foolishness, and “The Farce of the Fart” and Other Ribaldries: Twelve French Medieval Plays in Modern English, in which Jody Enders translates twelve medieval French farces into modern English for the first time. Both texts will be of great value, although not, perhaps, to exactly the same readerships.

Harris begins his book by demolishing the distorted history of the Feast of Fools he encountered when he began his research. For example, in his highly influential Mediaeval Stage (1903), E.K. Chambers treats the feast as a species of “Folk Drama” with little connection to its liturgical context; he condenses several centuries’ worth of archival sources to focus on ecclesiastical opposition to the feast rather than on evidence with a more positive bent, and he fails, finally, to consider the feast's historical development (quoted in Harris, 3–4). With the publication of Sacred Folly, Harris provides an exhaustive and persuasive new history to replace this mislaid foundation. He relocates the feast within “the corporate worship of the Christmas season” (3), balancing his analysis “between disruption and innovation” while carefully tracing “the development of the feast over time” (5).

The book is divided into five parts consisting of five chapters each. In Part I, “Before the Feast of Fools,” Harris shows that the various winter festivities all too often conflated with the Feast of Fools are, instead, distinct celebrations with their own quite separate histories. Far from being an outmoded pagan influence, the Roman celebration of Kalends developed as an increasingly elaborate masquerade within a Christian context (14), and continued to be celebrated for roughly a hundred years following the first recorded mention (ca. 1160) of the festum stultorum. Harris argues for the Feast of Fools as “an absorbing liturgical alternative to secular Kalends masquerades” (23), and he notes that other festive activities—such as a liturgical ball game “danced” in certain French cathedrals at Christmas or Easter (with recorded instances extending into the sixteenth century)—developed concurrently (54–62). A thirteenth-century invasion of the cathedral in Padua by clerics impersonating Herod serves as further evidence that “carefully planned moments of comic disorder can contribute to a profoundly devotional liturgical effect” (42). Harris rejects the notion of a direct connection between this event and the Feast of Fools, though, and traces the much more likely influence of Herod games and plays found throughout the German empire at this time (41–53).

Sacred Folly's second part, “Shaping the Feast of Fools,” begins in Paris and focuses on the earliest celebrations identified as the festum stultorum, associated by some with the feast of the Circumcision honoring the subdeacons, and by others with Epiphany (65–6). Harris explains that this “officio confuso was not chaotic but mixed” (67) in that it drew on various liturgical sources rather than having its own clearly specified elements, and that the feast celebrated not the kind of fool who “denies God's existence and authority” but the “second kind of biblical fool . . . chosen by God because of his or her lack of worldly status” (ibid.).

As Harris notes, celebrations of the Feast of Fools were largely restricted to France and were not uniform. Chalôns-sur-Champagne, for example, celebrated a Feast of the Staff (69–73) and Beauvais, a Feast of the Ass, which Harris argues was far more sedate than the “‘drinking-bout’” imaginatively reconstructed by earlier historians (74–85, quote at 83). Nonetheless, complaints were made against the Feast of Fools by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and his cohort; these, however, resulted not in the wished-for effect of the feast's suppression, but instead in the development of its “settled and expanded liturgy” (86–97, quote at 97). Harris concludes Part II by describing the office of the Circumcision from Sens, which is similar to surviving offices from Le Puy-en-Velay and Beauvais (98–112), and discussing the liturgical Play of Daniel from Beauvais, as well as Laon's Office of Joseph (113–27).

Previous historians have mistakenly understood attacks against the activities of secular sociétés joyeuses to be providing information about the clerical Feast of Fools, and in the third part of Sacred Folly, “Supporting the Feast of Fools,” Harris clears up this confusion by examining support for, as well as criticism of, the feast between 1234 and 1400 (131–84). Part IV, “Suppressing the Feast of Fools,” details attempts to suppress the feast, beginning with letters written by theologian Jean Gerson around 1400; ongoing complaints provide evidence of the feast's continued existence, however, as late as 1566 (187–236). Finally, in Part V, “Beyond the Feast of Fools,” Harris discusses the lay festive societies that proliferated between 1450 and 1560 in urban France, demonstrating the clear distinction between their activities and the clerical Feast of Fools (239–84).

Like Sacred Folly, Jody Enders's “The Farce of the Fart” and Other Ribaldries is a welcome contribution to scholarship on early farce and farcical entertainments. The scripts that Enders has translated are thought to have been written during the fifteenth century and were first printed during the sixteenth. Two of her selections were subsequently included among the sixty-four plays collected in 1840 as the Recueil du British Museum (edited and published in facsimile by Halina Lewicka in 1970), and the other ten are among the fifty-three published by Gustave Cohen under the title Recueil de farces françaises inédites du XV ^esiècle in 1949 (variously known as the Recueil Cohen for its editor or the Recueil de Florence for the location in which the plays were discovered in 1928). Enders identifies only eleven farces from this period previously available in English translation, and six of the plays in this volume are furthermore unavailable in modern French. In preparing her translations, Enders consulted every existing Middle or modern French edition of the plays, and her production notes for each play identify the source text(s) from which she worked (37–8).

Enders's volume begins with a concise and accessible introduction to the farce as a genre born during the “long Middle Ages” to answer “the most controversial questions of the day about law, politics, religion, economics, social stratification, and the battle of the sexes” (2). Enders observes that though it has often been denigrated and despised by later critics, editors, and historians, the farce was likely connected to the mime of ancient Greece and Rome (7–9), before being brought into full bloom by the Basochiens—clerks and apprentices training to practice law in the French Parliament. This group came together on two afternoons each week, on one of which they tried fictional cases (9–11). Their mock trials were the probable occasions upon which these brief, irreverent, often scatological and violent farces premiered—a consideration Enders duly notes would go far to explain the “preponderance of legalistic scenes” in the genre (9).

Enders has translated her selections with an eye to production, having seen several of these plays staged by her students and colleagues. To approximate their characteristic shifts between high or polite verbal constructions and the lowest, crudest language, she shifts between formal archaism and “American slang, dialects, regionalisms, and accents (mostly Southern, y'all, and ‘New Yawk,’ the latter including myself in the mockery group so, at least, I've shared in the ridicule)” (49). For example, the Lady in At Cross Purposes objects: “Egad, milord, I can't possibly take your money, honest. Please don't mention it again.” A few lines later, she acquiesces: “If you say it'll help you out a little bit with all that pain you're s'ppposed to be in and all . . . well, okey-dokey, then, I'll take the cash” (234). The register shifts even further for her asides: “Pesterin’ me every night like ya do with all them pathetic requests that I, like, grant yuz my love and such” (235). Wondering whether the dialects might suit my actual ear more than they do my mouth or imagined audition, I enlisted colleagues for a reading of Blind Man's Buff and can report that a skillful actor can certainly pull off the accented dialect. Personally, I would have preferred a more literal translation from which to work, shaping each production according to my own sense of humor and to those of my ensemble. One might also wish that Enders had found a way to streamline the repetitive warnings that producers must clear permissions if they wish to use any of the many copyright-protected musical selections that she suggests as “time-sensitive . . . English-language, musical analogues” for the medieval songs that open, close, or pop up in the middle of these plays (47).

Both Sacred Folly and “The Farce of the Fart” and Other Ribaldries make available important material about the medieval French roots of farce and farcical entertainments. Harris shows us that presumptions about the Feast of Fools as a precedent for secular fooling have no basis, and Enders gives us ample evidence that contemporary sketch comedy is no more vulgar or pointed than its fifteenth-century antecedent. Both volumes are accessible to scholars who do not read modern French, let alone the medieval versions of this language or Latin. This is a wonderful thing, since both the period and geographical region are of tremendous importance to the history of theatre, performance, and laughter. But these publications will also be of value to Francophone as well as Anglophone readers. Sacred Folly is a specialized book that must replace Chambers and those historians who have relied upon him as an authoritative source. “The Farce of the Fart” explicitly aims to popularize both these twelve plays specifically and the entire genre of medieval farce generally. The book's introduction will be useful in the classroom, appropriate as assigned reading in combination with one or more of the farces, but also useful for a medieval specialist seeking to introduce this material within a broader theatre or literature curriculum. Those readers with a serious research interest in this area may be somewhat frustrated in wishing for more ready access to Enders's scholarship.