Carnivals in Medieval Europe
...bly untiling houses and ripping the bowels of feather beds..” (doc. 4) He credits this destruction to be a great source of income afterwards to the upholsterers, carpenters, tilers, and bricklayers. After the carnivals the town was in shambles, but this put money in the pockets of the working class. The carnivals also were an outlet for the oppressed lower classes to vent their pent up frustrations and emotions that had been building up all year. During the festivities, master and slave were equals, and women and men colleagues. Gender roles were reversed; women dressed in mens clothes, and visa-versa. Henry Bourne commented on a night in Great Britain in 1725- “They sit at the same table, converse freely together, and spend the remaining part of the night in dancing, singing, etc., without any difference or distinction.” The repressing of their unspoken thoughts and wishes was over for a while, and in the words of a French traveler commenting on an Italian carnival in 1670, “All this festival activity is allowed the Italians that they may give a little vent to their spirits which have been stifled for a whole year and are ready to choke with gravity and melancholy.” All of the formerly taboo was being displayed in the street, and it was doing wonders for the human spirit. The festivities were a time for fun and release for all, as it is depicted in document three. The document shows what in Europe was referred to as “a world turned upside down.” In Florence, Italy, all of the sons in town came together in the square, and impersonated the leaders of the city (doc. 1), something that if it had been performed outside of a festival, would not have been acceptable. During the celebrations, punishments were so humiliating that an English author writing to her friend in 1838 mentioned that ‘I never knew the woman to seek any redress or the avengers to proceed to any more disorderly conduct after they had once made the guilty one “ride stang”.” One of the punishments was to force the offender to ride an old, worn-out horse backwards throughout the town and into neighboring villages, with the inhabitants parading around her making loud noises with pots and pans. This was known as making the offenders “ride stang”. There were many songs that were sang at each “stang riding”-one of which from Lincolnshi...