Summary
Christmas, a season for overeating, arguing with your parents about politics, and…wearing masks? Join Em and Jesse as they talk about topsy turvy Medieval holidays like the Feast of Fools! Also we talk a little about the Purge film/TV franchise, Rabelais, and Foucault. Sorry to the two people who follow us who are not excited about poststructuralism.
Annotations
1/ It was actually episode 42.
For liminality, see episode 18 note 8 (and episode 19 note 7, which sends you to episode 18 note 8).
2/ The tradition of throwing candy originates in a tradition called an “aufruf” (pronounced “oof roof”)–right before a groom (or in non-Orthodox temples, a couple) got married, they would get called up to read from the Torah–this is typically done at the Shabbat before the wedding. Afterward people in the congregation throw candy at him/them. I don’t know exactly how we started doing this for bnai mitzvot in our temple, except that it happened at some point in the two and a half years between my bat mitzvah and my brother’s bar mitzvah.
3/ The Purge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purge (it’s actually five films, a two-season TV series, and a plan for more films.)
4/ Mikhail Bakhtin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin
See Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World for his theories of the carnivalesque and grotesque. https://www.amazon.com/Rabelais-His-World-Mikhail-Bakhtin/dp/0253203414/
5/ François Rabelais (born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553): episode 39 (on libraries). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Rabelais
6/ For more on Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge, see literally everything he ever wrote, and especially Discipline and Punish and the book Power / Knowledge (which was not *by* Foucault but collects a lot of stuff he said).
7/ Photo of trussed up skeletons from Halloween
8/ The Three Living and the Three Dead: see episode 2(!), the image at the top of the notes and note 35.
I am too depressed to footnote Jesse’s predictions about the VA elections. (Jesse: Glenn Youngkin-R won.)
9/ Foucault’s power structure idea is laid out pretty plainly around page 90 of A History of Human Sexuality, vol. 1.
10/ Actually, it was episode 10, on icons and iconography. See note 4. They’ve been dismantling the pedestal of the Lee statue, and they found a time capsule that they just opened. https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/22/us/virginia-lee-time-capsule-open-trnd/index.html
Here’s the statue coming down: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035004639/virginia-ready-to-remove-massive-robert-e-lee-statue-following-a-year-of-lawsuit
11/ Max Harris, Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Folly-History-Feast-Fools/dp/0801479495
12/ We talked about Jean Gerson (and usually Joan of Arc) in episode 6 notes 25, 27, and 33 and also episode 8 note 9 and episode 9 note 23.
13/ Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England https://www.amazon.com/Masking-Medieval-England-Studies-Performance-dp-1138257850/dp/1138257850/
14/ For more on St Francis and Christmas, see episode 23 note 7.
15/ A headdress/mask/helmet from Yorkshire, British Isles c8000 BCE housed in the British Museum. Made of antler (the skull and antlers of a red deer stag): https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1953-0208-1
16/ Buffy, season 2 episode 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)
17/ We ARE in the late-post-Middle Ages!
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