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The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England, by Chris Humphrey. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 113. Cloth $59.95, Paper $19.95.
Carnival, the farewell to the flesh, is more, far more, than just a party. From the fleshpots of Rio to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and stretching back to early modern France and merry old England, Carnival is also a hotly contested site of scholarly disputation. With The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England, Chris Humphrey enters the fray. In his libellum he proposes a new approach to studying these phenomena and offers two case studies to demonstrate his methods. While not exactly groundbreaking, his book has many strengths. The overview of the critical battle fines, the clarity of his presentation, the examinations of two specific social dramas, and not least the brevity of his tome (exactly one hundred pages of text), make The Politics of Carnival an engaging contribution to the field, and worth reading.
There are four chapters:
1. Social protest or safety-valve? Critical approaches to festive misrule
2. A new approach to the study of medieval misrule
3. Seasonal drama and local politics in Norwich, 1443
4. Summer games at Coventry in 1480
As the chapter titles indicate, the first half attempts to work through issues surrounding interpretation at the current time. Humphrey writes in a jargonfree way (although some of the dialectical Middle English transcriptions could have been glossed, e.g., "trought" [truth?], 64), and he carefully differentiates between "Carnival" - the holiday before Lent, "carnival" being the term used by other scholars to denote general medieval festivities - and his preferred term "misrule" for a wide set of festive practices (3). The inclusion of a table with seasons and feasts for medieval English misrule is another clarifying detail (4).
Humphrey's work clearly derives its spirit from Mikhail Bakhtin. He provides the epigraph, a statement that "The problem of carnival ... is one of the most complex and most interesting problems in the history of culture." And he reappears in the preface, the introduction, chapter 1, the conclusion, and elsewhere. Via Rabelais and His World and Problems of Dostoevsky 's Poetics, Bakhtin has of course become a byword for scholarly examinations of the carnivalesque, and...