Abstract
The “Carnival Season” is a holiday period during the two weeks before the traditional Christian fast of Lent. The word has a Latin origin and literally means "to remove the meat" or "stop eating meat". But carnival and the “carnivalesque” are not limited to this period of the year; it refers to the varied popular festive life of the Middle-Age and the Renaissance . Besides carnivals proper, they were plenty of other feasts (for instance the “feast of the fools”, or the “feast of the ass”), and the carnival atmosphere also pervaded some agricultural festivities. If today carnival festivities have lost some of their importance, they and the comic spectacles and rituals connected with them had a very important place in the life of medieval men. Carnival and “carnivalesque” are connected with folk culture and folk humour, and everyone in the community would get involved. They existed in all the countries of medieval Europe. Large medieval cities devoted an average of three months a year to theses festivities. All these forms of ritual were based on laughter, on the comic and the grotesque. They were strongly separated from the official sphere, “(…) sharply distinct from the serious, official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonial” .
