This chapter examines one of the most striking phenomena of late antique popular culture: the festival of the Kalends of January. The Kalends, as depicted by an array of evidence, from Gaul as well as from across the Mediterranean world, provides a particularly rich and suggestive case study. The festival contains a number of elements traditionally seen as characteristic of popular culture: masquerade, satire and role reversal, as well as the eating, drinking, dancing and carousing generally involved in festivals. The Kalends is also especially suitable as a case study for late antique popular culture in that it seems to be a distinctively late antique phenomenon, first rising to prominence in our sources during the fourth century and retaining visibility in the ecclesiastical record until remarkably late on, as we shall see. I shall examine the strategies by which the late antique church sought to delegitimize and ultimately destroy the Kalends, even though seemingly without much success. I shall give an interpretation of the festival with the aid of comparative and theoretical material but also in terms of the prevailing particular social and economic contexts.

Much (if certainly not all) of the material regarding the Kalends comes from ecclesiastical sources, which provide evidence for a long-running campaign against the festival, indicative of the broader campaign against popular culture. Caesarius of Arles comes to the fore once more: as a highly vocal and hugely influential critic of the Kalends, we will find his descriptions and attacks sampled and repeated, again and again, even beyond the end of the first millennium. However, while late antique and early medieval Gaul supply a substantial body of evidence relating to the Kalends and its celebrations, I shall supplement this with material relating to the festival from elsewhere in the late antique world. While specific local contexts remain very important, it would be foolish to neglect the clearly complementary evidence relating to the celebration of the Kalends in other locations, as well as further relevant comparative ‘festive’ material.

Looking more widely enables us to build a more polyvalent view of the meaning and significance of the Kalends. I shall also attempt in this chapter to take more of an insider view: that is, as part of my analysis, I shall try to understand the celebrations from the inside, in a manner its own participants could recognize, at times reading ‘against the grain’. In keeping with the aims of the book, I shall also be looking to interpret the festival in terms of broader theories of popular culture, including the highly influential theory of Carnival. However, my analysis will seek to analyse the Kalends not as an example of ‘timeless’ popular festivity but as very much historically contingent. As part of this analysis, as with the rest of the book, I shall be seeking to understand the Kalends in terms of its social, economic and cultural contexts and meanings, including what it can tell us about the potential relationship between popular culture and popular resistance, as well as the relationship between popular culture and contemporary social and economic change. In this way, this chapter builds upon the key themes and questions of the book as a whole.

We begin with an overview of the festival in late antiquity before turning to the dominant ecclesiastical critique: that the Kalends was a pagan festival. I then consider various different scholarly approaches, in particular considering the applicability of theories of carnival. Many of the themes thus raised come together in an analysis of the distinctive and much-attacked Kalends masquerades. Next I turn to examine the role of gift exchange, which then widens out to a consideration of the broader social and economic meanings and contexts of the festival as a whole. A conclusion brings together the main themes and questions posed by the festival and its late antique discourses.

The Kalends of January in Late Antiquity

The Kalends of January was a date of long-standing importance in the Roman world and in the Roman official calendar.Footnote ⁴ On 1 January the consuls for the year were sworn in but the public rites lasted three full days, during which time the army, as well as the senate and others, swore an oath of allegiance to the emperor and gave the vota publica for his preservation. Donatives were distributed to the army and gifts of various kinds (including tokens, trinkets and silver coins) were given to the people. The New Year was also the occasion of ludi and related processions.Footnote ⁵ The Kalends probably constituted one of the dies fasti,Footnote ⁶ and a holiday, at least informally;Footnote ⁷ however, its status as a public holiday is first officially attested only in 389, in a law of Theodosius I.Footnote ⁸ The festival of the Kalends was closely associated with Rome and Roman traditions and for the first few centuries of the Roman empire its spread was clearly limited. Dio and Herodian feel the need to explain Kalends customs to their Greek-speaking readership,Footnote ⁹ although we know that celebrations had spread to North Africa by the time of Tertullian.Footnote ¹⁰ However, the plethora of sources from the fourth and fifth centuries show a wide geographical spread at this point, from locations as far distant as Amaseia (in the Black Sea region),Footnote ¹¹ Antioch,Footnote ¹² Barcelona,Footnote ¹³ Carthage,Footnote ¹⁴ Milan,Footnote ¹⁵ RavennaFootnote ¹⁶ and Turin.Footnote ¹⁷ Ecclesiastical sources from the sixth and seventh centuries and beyond show that Kalends celebrations continued to be widespread, with testimony from Andalusia,Footnote ¹⁸ Constantinople,Footnote ¹⁹ Galicia,Footnote ²⁰ LydiaFootnote ²¹ and Rome.Footnote ²² The continuation of the Kalends in both the Byzantine empire and the Islamic Near East has received recent scholarly attention,Footnote ²³ but obviously the main focus of this chapter will be on the evidence from late antique and early medieval Gaul, which I shall now consider.

Once again, homiletic critiques of the festival made by Caesarius form the heart of the material from southern Gaul. A brief discussion of the festival comes in Serm. 193;Footnote ²⁴ briefer still is the mention given as part of a list of profane practices attacked in a sermon sometimes described as in parochiis necessarius.Footnote ²⁵ It is Caesarius’ Serm. 192, however, that contains the most extensive, and influential, critique. Serm. 192 appears in several important manuscript collections of Caesarius’ sermonsFootnote ²⁶ as well as separately in earlier manuscripts from geographically disparate locations.Footnote ²⁷ Caesarius’ words appear almost verbatim in the work of Isidore of Seville, showing the transmission of the sermon into Hispania by the seventh century.Footnote ²⁸ That his critique was still influential even much later in the medieval period is evident from the Golden Legend, where Jacob de Voragine directly quotes Caesarius in his text for the Feast of the Circumcision.Footnote ²⁹ Jacob ascribes the sermon to Augustine: as common with Caesarius’ sermons, the Kalends homilies were not necessarily (or even normally) circulated as the work of the bishop of Arles himself.Footnote ³⁰ However, while these two cases do show the transmission and influence of Caesarius’ preaching, the most influential Gallic text against the Kalends was in fact (as demonstrated some years ago by Rudolph Arbesmann) a canon from the Synod of Auxerre in northern France. Canon 1 of this synod, dated to between 561 and 605, stated: ‘It is prohibited on the Kalends of January to dress as a young calf or a stag or to observe the custom of diabolical strenae.’Footnote ³¹

It was this canon that was frequently repeated in Frankish and insular penitentials.Footnote ³² Nonetheless, Auxerre was not the only sixth-century Gallic council to legislate against Kalends practices. The Council of Tours in 567 prescribed fasting and liturgical offices in order to ‘stamp out’ the pagan habit of the Kalends (at calcandam gentilium consuetudine) in one canon,Footnote ³³ while another attacked the worship of Janus as part of the ‘ancient errors’ of these same festivities.Footnote ³⁴

Returning to what we know about the festival itself, the celebration of the Kalends in the Roman empire involved both official, public events, put on in imperial centres and large cities by the imperial and civil authorities, and their military counterparts, but also unofficial activities, enjoyed across a broad swathe of society. In this way, of course, it functioned like most other Roman festivals, and indeed some of its most characteristic elements seem strikingly similar to those of calendrically adjacent celebrations. Mid-winter was a period traditionally marked by extended feasting and celebration. The most obvious point of comparison for historians is the festival of Saturnalia, which ran from 17 to 23 December during the imperial period.Footnote ³⁵ Saturnalia was followed not long after by the Compitalia (3 to 5 January), another festival with a distinctly ‘popular’ flavour, at least in its urban form.Footnote ³⁶ Unlike the Saturnalia, but like the later Kalends celebrations, the Compitalia had its own associated ludi in Rome. Compitalia shared several key features with Saturnalia: it involved feasting and household-wide celebrations, and was particularly associated with slaves.Footnote ³⁷ It is Saturnalia, however, that looms large in the minds of scholars of popular culture working across many different periods who like to associate it with early modern Carnival, and to assert that it held a comparable symbolic importance in ancient popular culture.Footnote ³⁸ It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that so few ancient sources link the Kalends with the Saturnalia.Footnote ³⁹ While it is clear that the Compitalia was moribund by late antiquity, it seems likely too that the festival of the Kalends overtook the Saturnalia in popularity during this period.Footnote ⁴⁰ An examination of the reasons for the success, and longevity, of the Kalends forms the heart of this chapter.

What did celebrating the Kalends involve? One of the most ubiquitous elements cited is the exchange of strenae, ‘good luck presents’.Footnote ⁴¹ These can obviously be compared with the sigillaria given at Saturnalia, specifically on Sigillaria itself (23 December); strenae, like sigillaria, were given both horizontally and vertically, encompassing tips from employers and patrons as well as gifts among friends.Footnote ⁴² Gifts could also be edible: dates and honey were mentioned by Ovid,Footnote ⁴³ fruit was decorated with tinsel according to Asterius of AmaseiaFootnote ⁴⁴ and a tasty-sounding honey cake was described by John Lydus.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although less prominent in our sources, lamps could also be exchanged as gifts at New Year: small clay examples survive from Apulia,Footnote ⁴⁶ and Tertullian refers with disapproval to the hanging of lamps at this time.Footnote ⁴⁷ The coins offered ranged greatly in value, from small bronze asses to silver denarii, and indeed gold solidi,Footnote ⁴⁸ and, as we shall see, the exchange of gifts of significant monetary value was a popular subject of attack from Christian critics of the Kalends, who wished the monetary gifts involved to be redirected into Christian almsgiving.

As well as, or instead of, giving presents, the exchange of New Year greetings (known as vota) was another crucial feature. There is a delightful illustration of this on the mosaic calendar from Thysdrus in North Africa (Figure 6.1): two male figures, smartly dressed (in their festive best no doubt), greet each other in a New Year’s embrace.Footnote ⁴⁹ Asterius of Amaseia makes a close connection between the New Year gift and the New Year kiss – which he sees, in characteristically jaundiced tones, as purely venal in character.Footnote ⁵⁰ These greetings were often as part of door-to-door visits, which formed a prominent part of the celebrations – and a target for much of the clerical disapproval, as we shall see later. Houses were often decorated for the festival. The decoration of doors with (evergreen) laurel garlands is widely mentioned in our texts,Footnote ⁵¹ and the Thysdrus mosaic depicts a table bearing branches of greenery. Lamps were also hung as part of the festival decorations – even in daylight, as Tertullian complained.Footnote ⁵² A number of other Kalends practices, clearly apotropaic or prognostic in design, will be discussed further later.

Figure 6.1

Depiction of January on the mosaic calendar from El Djem, now at the Musée archéologique de Sousse.

Photograph: Alamy.

Many of the activities described in relation to the Kalends are familiar from festive behaviour in antiquity in general (and indeed from the earlier chapters of this book). It is unsurprising, for instance, to read of (excessive) drinking, as well as of feasting.Footnote ⁵³ Tertullian echoed familiar complaints about popular culture when he complained that Kalends revellers turned the whole city into ‘nothing but a tavern’.Footnote ⁵⁴ For moralizing preachers, as we have already seen, drinking was invariably associated with general dissipation, with lust, with ‘bawdy’ singing and with immodest dancing.Footnote ⁵⁵ Opportunities for licence, and role reversal for slaves specifically, so characteristic of the Saturnalia, are less prominent in accounts of the Kalends.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, laughter, jesting and general licence do seem to have been characteristic of the Kalends, and we shall explore this further in what follows.Footnote ⁵⁷ Dice playing, a key feature of Saturnalia,Footnote ⁵⁸ is less prominent in accounts of the Kalends,Footnote ⁵⁹ though gaming and gambling are attacked by preachers in general.Footnote ⁶⁰

Who took part in the festival? It is clear that under the Roman and then the Byzantine empire involvement was spread across society, from the bottom right up to the very top, with generous provision of Kalends gifts and entertainment being expected of the political elite, who provided the civic side of the festivities. The participation of soldiers and their activities at the festival will be discussed further later. While the major festivities took place in urban centres, the Kalends would of course have brought rural populations into the town for both the official and unofficial aspects of the celebration.Footnote ⁶¹ Libanius’ account in Or. 9, which we should probably read as part of an ongoing debate with rival Christian orators,Footnote ⁶² makes an effort to stress the universality of the celebration. He claims that it was celebrated by both rich and poor,Footnote ⁶³ including slaves and prisoners,Footnote ⁶⁴ with gifts being given from the emperor downwards, including the consuls.Footnote ⁶⁵ He emphasizes the festival’s theme of equalityFootnote ⁶⁶ and its ability to bring unity to society.Footnote ⁶⁷

In what sense was the Kalends of January a specifically ‘popular’ festival? To a certain extent, its depiction as ‘popular’ stems from the rhetorical strategies of hostile polemic. Asterius refers to Kalends celebrants as the ‘rabble outside’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In a familiar tactic, Caesarius makes an association of the festival with the lower orders, with inperiti homines et rustici;Footnote ⁶⁹ however, he also describes Kalends customs as being practised by plures in populo christiano and speaks of his desire to drive the custom of dressing as stags (to be discussed later) from the city of Arles itself (de hac civitate), suggesting that Kalends practices were in fact far from being restricted to rustici.Footnote ⁷⁰ Writing on the Byzantine Kalends, Antony Kaldellis argues that the festival continued to be celebrated across the whole of society as late as 1200, and further that attacks on the festival as ‘popular’ were polemical and designed to discredit it; indeed, what we have here is a very familiar strategy in terms of ecclesiastical responses to popular culture.Footnote ⁷¹ In the analysis that follows, wherever possible I shall draw more granular pictures of participation.

It is now time to home in more closely on the celebration of the Kalends of January in late antique southern Gaul. As we saw, the special status of the festival as a legal holiday was expressed for the first time only in 389.Footnote ⁷² As Fritz Graf has recently and convincingly argued, the Kalends was seen by the Roman imperial authorities (and later, in the east, by the Byzantine empire) as a festival of significant ideological import, and thus worth promoting as well as preserving.Footnote ⁷³ Arles was of course a site of major political importance for much of late antiquity and seems a likely venue for official Kalends celebrations: the city served at different points as an imperial residence and as seat of the Prefecture of the Gauls, and possessed an impressive circus arena in which games could take place. Fifth-century testimonies from other, comparable, major cities describe a variety of official activities. Augustine speaks of games taking place in Carthage, which had brought a large number of people into the city.Footnote ⁷⁴ Processions are described a little earlier in Antioch (by John Chrysostom),Footnote ⁷⁵ but also some years later in Ravenna (by Peter Chrysologus).Footnote ⁷⁶ The fact remains, however, that we have no specific evidence for official, civic or imperial, Kalends celebrations in late Roman Gaul, as our first witness is Caesarius.

As for the region under post-Roman rule: there is significant negative evidence as regards the official celebration under Visigothic rule. The Visigothic interpretatio of excerpts of the Codex Theodosianus, produced as part of the Breviarium of Alaric II, promulgated in February 506, actually omitted the Kalends of January from the list of official celebrations, while adding Christmas and Epiphany to the list.Footnote ⁷⁷ This compendium was produced with the input of Gallic bishops (though without the help of Caesarius) and suggests that the influence of the ecclesiastical anti-Kalends polemic had been successful (as it would not be in the Byzantine East). However, Visigothic rule in Arles would be short-lived: in 507, war broke out in southern Gaul, which would lead to the long siege of Arles in 508 and then to the end of Visigothic rule over its territory. The victorious Ostrogoths re-established a new ‘praetorian prefecture of the Gauls’ and established Arles again as the seat of the prefecture and also of the vicariate, and proclaimed the area as part of a newly restored ‘Roman empire’. The legal framework of this restored empire was frequently and proudly expressed as Roman, especially in the Variae of Cassiodorus. These included two letters from Theoderic to the provincials of Gaul, telling them to behave in accordance with Roman law and civilian rule.Footnote ⁷⁸ There is, of course, a substantial propaganda aspect at work here, and we simply do not know enough to be able to say whether Ostrogothic law regarded the Kalends as an official holiday or not, although it would seem likely.Footnote ⁷⁹

The earliest literary testimony regarding the celebration of the Kalends of January in southern Gaul comes from Caesarius himself. This account, the key points of which we will consider in some detail, does not particularly suggest any official events put on by the civil authorities in Arles.Footnote ⁸⁰ In large part, the bishop appears to be describing informal activities put on by the local inhabitants of both city and countryside for themselves and for their friends.Footnote ⁸¹ However, there is an important exception in the activities of one specific group mentioned by Caesarius: his account of the festivities enjoyed by soldiers. The New Year celebrations of the Roman state had always included a military counterpart: as well as the donative to the troops, the soldiers themselves renewed their vows to their emperor at this time.Footnote ⁸² However, it seems as if the New Year festivities could also include something like a military carnival, where soldiers dressed up and performed satirical and racy skits – if we can believe our Christian sources.Footnote ⁸³ The lengthiest description comes from Asterius of Amaseia, who describes soldiers performing skits mocking the imperial authorities before going on to attack their practice of cross-dressing as part of the same festivities.Footnote ⁸⁴ Caesarius, too, attacks soldiers cross-dressing at the KalendsFootnote ⁸⁵ – in fact, the similarity of these two descriptions is striking and indeed surprising. Does Caesarius’ account provide evidence of continuity of Roman military practice among barbarian soldiers (a military sub-culture, we might call it) in a barbarian army?Footnote ⁸⁶ Or should we suspect Caesarius of employing a literary motif rather than referring to the actual activities of actual troops stationed at Arles (as some have suspected)?Footnote ⁸⁷ We cannot, alas, be sure. I shall return to the broader cultural and social significance of the military carnival in due course.

The range of communal practices Caesarius describes as taking place in Arles and in the surrounding countryside therefore seem broadly consistent with activities elsewhere. In the analysis that follows, I shall consider the key themes of the Kalends activities in terms of popular culture, firstly from the perspective of the church.

The View ‘from the Pulpit’ Once More: The Kalends of January As a ‘Pagan’ Festival

Late antique preachers stressed to their congregations that the Kalends activities represented not harmless merriment but superstitious pagan behaviour. Let’s return to Augustine, an important influence, as so often. What is in fact his longest surviving sermon was delivered in Carthage on New Year’s Day, January 404, and likely lasted a full two and a half hours.Footnote ⁸⁸ A deliberate filibuster, as Augustine’s translator Edmund Hill puts it, this sermon was designed to keep his Carthage congregation from the Kalends celebrations for as long as possible.Footnote ⁸⁹ Early on in the mammoth homily, after complaining about the noise made outside by revellers, including ‘silly and disgraceful songs’,Footnote ⁹⁰ the bishop asks his congregation: ‘Are you going to join in today in the celebration of good luck presents [strenae] with a pagan [cum pagano], going to play at dice with a pagan, going to get drunk with a pagan?’Footnote ⁹¹ Clearly there is nothing especially pagan about any of these activities, but these questions are indicative of Augustine’s strategy throughout: he constructs a binary rhetoric of separation, demarcating the church, the saved, from the nations (his biblical text for the day is Ps. 106.47), who he describes as suffused with worldly loves and destructive pleasures.Footnote ⁹² This binary distinction would turn out to be highly influential in ecclesiastical attacks on the Kalends, as well as those on popular culture more generally.Footnote ⁹³ As we have already seen elsewhere, a whole range of activities could be powerfully stigmatized as ‘pagan’ by preachers and church councils.

The claim that celebrating the Kalends was ‘pagan’ was most simply demonstrated by a common argument that the origins of the festival lay in the worship of the two-faced god Janus.Footnote ⁹⁴ Caesarius employs the usual Christian polemic against the pagan gods; he asserts simultaneously both their monstrous, demonic nature and their human origins.Footnote ⁹⁵ The focus on Janus, it should be stressed, is for rhetorical and polemical purposes: despite the original association with the god, it is abundantly clear that actual worship of Janus was not a feature of the late antique festival.Footnote ⁹⁶ Sacrifice obviously played no role in the public festivities in late antiquity.Footnote ⁹⁷ Moreover, the likelihood that the late antique congregations so warned had much of a notion of the god Janus at all is slim indeed.

There was more mileage for preachers in attacking the festival as pagan by focusing on the ‘superstitious’ practices that were distinctively attached to the Kalends in its capacity as a New Year festival. Here again, many of the practices mentioned by Caesarius chime in with those mentioned elsewhere. Kalends rituals included activities that seem to have been both apotropaic and prognostic in character. Martin of Braga has the longest list of these (including such seemingly bizarre omens as putting cloth and bread in a box for mice and moths) but they turn up in other texts as well.Footnote ⁹⁸ I have already discussed the widespread use of greenery as Kalends decorations. In northern Italy Maximus of Turin describes the practice of going outside the city in order to gather ‘auspices’, referring to ‘little branches’ (ramasculi), and Martin of Braga also mentions the long-standing custom of placing laurels at the door, although Caesarius, it is true, makes no mention of greenery.Footnote ⁹⁹ A variety of rituals related to fire are described from Antioch to Portugal.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Another widespread custom involved laying tables abundantly with food and drink on New Year’s Eve in order to ensure a bounty for the year to come.Footnote ¹⁰¹

My aim in critiquing the characterization of the Kalends of January as a ‘pagan’ festival is not to deny that there was a ‘religious’ dimension to Kalends practices. We can and should indeed understand Kalends practices as part of people’s lived religion, as embedded in popular culture, as discussed in Chapter 5. Nevertheless, I shall here argue that the problem with the Kalends, even for the church, was not really ‘paganism’ – despite the varied collections of Kalends ‘superstitions’ collected by preachers and, later on, in penitential manuals. Ordinary church-goers were already aware of this, as Peter Chrysologus recounted in a Kalends sermon from Ravenna: ‘But one of you says: This isn’t the deliberate pursuit of sacrilege, these good luck visits are just for fun; this is a celebration of the new, not an error from the past; this is just New Year, not the offence of paganism.’Footnote ¹⁰²

I am not the first to argue that the Kalends was not really a ‘pagan’ festival. Robert Markus made this point some years ago, arguing specifically that the Kalends represented a rival to Christian ideas of time and renewal, as represented liturgically by Christmas and its related calendar, and that the church would simply brook no rival.Footnote ¹⁰³ Furthermore, William Klingshirn has argued that the Kalends should be understood more as a secular festival that offended the church with its worldly emphases than a religious phenomenon, pointing out rightly that Caesarius’ objections to the festival were largely moral.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Building on Klingshirn’s analysis, I shall argue that these ‘moral’ objections focus more particularly on the Kalends as an example of popular culture, against which, as this book shows, the church waged a forceful war in late antiquity. In what follows, therefore, I shall examine the major features of the festival with popular culture in mind, beginning with the key theme of Carnival.

Kalends As Carnival: The Significance of Festive Licence

The late antique church linked Kalends activities with the activities of the lower classes in order to discredit them. However, clerics were hostile to the festival precisely because it in fact contained a number of elements associated with popular culture. For the historian of this popular culture, the temptation to make a connection with theories of carnival at this point is almost impossible to resist.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The early modern festival of Carnival, as studied by Mikhail Bakhtin in his hugely influential book Rabelais and His World, has come to be understood as symbolically central to popular culture itself and indeed, we might say, to stand by means of synecdoche for popular culture tout court.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Bakhtin’s carnival is a space where inversion is the norm, where the high becomes low, where comedy rules and the grotesque (the ‘lower bodily stratum’) reigns supreme. Moreover, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have stressed, Bakhtin’s carnival, and the ‘carnivalesque’, go some way beyond the festival itself as ‘a potent, populist, crucial inversion of all official words and hierarchies’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For Bakhtin himself, carnival is ‘a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated more or less’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It is the place where uninhibited, unofficial discourse could be uttered: ‘carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is a place where hierarchical society could, temporarily at least, be infused with its opposite; it is a site of liberation and renewal.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Bakhtin’s carnival is therefore inherently radical – at least potentially – offering a site for the expression and construction of an alternative society. The idea of carnival as providing a vital site for opposition and rebellion in ‘pre-political’ societies is what has made Bakhtin’s work so stimulating for scholars of pre-modern history.Footnote ¹¹¹ For example, Sara Forsdyke has used Bakhtin to help her interpret seemingly obscure episodes in archaic Greek history, such as the ancient accounts of the seemingly bizarre reforms of the tyrant Cleisthenes of Sicyon and riots in sixth-century bce Megara.Footnote ¹¹²

But can we really assign an oppositional meaning, or even potential, to carnival, let alone popular culture, in toto? The apparently ‘licensed licence’ of carnival (and allied festivals) has also been seen as providing a ‘safety valve’, allowing the temporary release of tensions, while in fact permitting the maintenance of the status quo.Footnote ¹¹³ (As the political anthropologist Georges Balandier once neatly formulated: ‘The supreme ruse of power is to allow itself to be contested ritually in order to consolidate itself more effectively.’)Footnote ¹¹⁴ But is that a realistic alternative? James C. Scott is surely correct when he comments that ‘safety valve’ interpretations tend to confuse ‘the intentions of elites with the results they are able to achieve’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In the end, this interpretation just gives us another excessively essentializing interpretation of carnival,Footnote ¹¹⁶ whether applied to a supra-historical ‘carnival’ or to individual examples. Henk Versnel’s nuanced interpretation of the festival of Kronia seems to offer a more convincing model, where he argues that we need to see both aspects of such festivals operating together: the ‘rebellious’ and the ‘cohesive’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The idea that these festivals provided an opportunity for ‘licence’ is central to the theme of carnival. While Saturnalia is the ancient festival most famously associated with this idea, we can also see important aspects in the case of the Kalends. One of the most obviously ‘carnivalistic’ elements of the Kalends celebrations is its traditional association with popular mockery, notably political mockery, and satire. John Lydus represents this as a venerable tradition of the Roman past: ‘And the common people [το πλήθος] would jeer at the magistrates without fear – not [only] in words, but also in gestures that strove to be amusing. They would do this in honour of freedom, and the magistrates would allow it, yielding to custom as though to law.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ Here we have a clear example of customary licentia. The most famous example of this association continuing into late antiquity comes from the New Year of 363, when the emperor Julian was ridiculed by the people in the agora of Antioch – and then attempted to satirize himself ‘back’ in his Misopogon.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The episode at Antioch is worth considering in more detail as it brings nicely to the fore the issue of carnivalistic licence. It was clearly with gritted teeth that the emperor responded to the Antiochenes: Ammianus tells us ‘although he was indignant for these and similar reasons, he held his peace, kept control of his feelings, and continued to celebrate the festivals [sollemnia celebrabat]’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Julian did not like the jibes from the people, but custom compelled him to accept them: the licence permitted to the people at the Kalends represented an important and broader Roman imperial tradition whereby licentia was permitted at a certain range of occasions and activities, especially at the games.Footnote ¹²¹ And yet, taken together, the writings of Ammianus, Libanius and indeed the emperor Julian himself are revealing as to (late) ancient elite expectations about the proper limits of festive licentia.

Despite the studied attempt at good-humoured satire in the Misopogon, Julian was angry with the people of Antioch: he threatened never to visit the city again (which represented a considerable detriment to its status and economy)Footnote ¹²² and left the famously harsh Alexander of Heliopolis in charge as governor.Footnote ¹²³ The severity of the threat posed was such that Libanius wrote two orations in response to the quarrel between the emperor and the Antiochenes: Or. 15 aimed at the emperor and Or. 16 aimed at the city.Footnote ¹²⁴ These texts show clear limits being placed on the boundaries of licence by elite authority. They also are a good starting point from which to explore how far we can consider this kind of licentia as specifically popular – and, indeed, how far the social status of its practitioners was significant in imperial and elite responses. Libanius seeks, as is well known, to plead for the city, but he does so in part by disassociating the urban elite from the behaviour of those he depicts as a lower class. When addressing both the city and the emperor he pointedly blames the most offensive activity on outsiders and those of despised professions. For instance, in his oration supposedly targeted at Julian, Libanius focuses on the role of ‘some people’, ‘redolent of forge or tannery’ – that is, associated with two particularly despised professions.Footnote ¹²⁵ Indeed, he seems to be responding to a defence on these lines from the city’s elite themselves.Footnote ¹²⁶ While seeking to speak up for Antioch, Libanius still makes clear his own disdain for popular άσελγέια: impudence or insubordination.Footnote ¹²⁷ He specifically questions who has a right to ridicule whom in a telling passage:

Antiochene impudence took expression in various forms, including insulting shouts or jests (skommata), songs (asmata) and satirical anapests. It would be perverse not to associate these anapests with an elite literary culture, and thereby conclude that the Antiochene elites were themselves involved, at least in some part.Footnote ¹²⁹ (However, as in so many periods, the bad behaviour of upper-class youths is generally regarded with far more indulgence by ruling elites than bad behaviour by social inferiors.) The behaviour in Antioch that upset Julian is obviously familiar from the broader context of a lively urban popular culture and indeed was not just limited to the few days of the Kalends celebrations alone.Footnote ¹³⁰ This behaviour, as is well known, could become especially rambunctious at times of economic difficulty and it is indeed significant that Julian’s stay in Antioch coincided with an (allegedly ill-handled) food shortage.Footnote ¹³¹ Later on in this chapter I shall indeed return to other instances when Kalends behaviour intersected with prevailing economic and social conditions. But first it is time to analyse the social and cultural meanings involved in the most ‘carnivalesque’ but also the most distinctive and probably most-discussed ritual element of all those associated with the Kalends of January: the masquerades.

The Kalends Masquerades: Performance As Subversion?

The Kalends masquerades constituted a crucial target of criticism in the Latin west in the aftermath of the complaints of Caesarius. They have fascinated generations of scholars and represent a tantalizing glimpse of a particularly suggestive aspect of popular culture. These masquerades came in various forms: dressing up in costume, including masks, and travelling in public procession, sometimes on floats (in major urban settings), or going door to door (in both urban and rural settings), most commonly at night. In Ravenna, Peter Chrysologus seems to describe both sorts of masquerade and his most developed description of the first type is worth quoting at length. This masquerade is in fact a public procession, part of the official Kalends festivities:

A few years earlier John Chrysostom had complained about daimones processing in the agora in Antioch, which probably likewise refers to a public spectacle, as in Ravenna, likewise involving masks/costumes of the gods.Footnote ¹³³

However, in his sermon Peter Chrysologus also had unofficial, door-to-door visits in mind: ‘And this is what Christians gaze at, what Christians look forward to, what they allow into their homes, what Christians welcome in their homes.’Footnote ¹³⁴ These visits, whether costumed or not, clearly constituted an important feature of the Kalends, involving songs and jests, as well as the exchange (or extortion!) of gifts, as we will see later. The costuming might well have been of the improvised kind, perhaps involving the use of charcoal (for face blackening), straw, rags, even dung, according to Peter Chrysologus.Footnote ¹³⁵ For Caesarius, it is definitely the dressing up that constitutes the most reprehensible aspect of the Kalends of January: ‘For in these days miserable men and, what is worse, even some who are baptized, assume false forms and monstrous appearances, and certain features in them are especially worthy of laughter or rather of sorrow.’^’Footnote ¹³⁶ This stress on the unnatural, the monstrous, is consistent, even when we are far from clear as to what exactly is being described.

The first kind of dressing up attacked by Caesarius involved animal costume:

The practice of dressing up as animals appears in Kalends texts from France, Germany, Italy and Spain.Footnote ¹³⁸ The first disguise mentioned, the cervulus, appears in our sources as early as the 380s in the writings of Ambrose of Milan;Footnote ¹³⁹ shortly afterwards Pacianus, bishop of Barcelona, wrote a work entitled Cervulus criticizing the practice.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As Caesarius noted, the cervulus was generally joined by a supporting cast of other animals, both wild and agricultural. One lively account comes from the Vita of Hilary of Mende (in Languedoc, c. 160 km from Arles); Hilary was a monk-bishop contemporary of Caesarius, although the Vita itself is probably seventh century. We are told that one January Hilary went to meet a group of villagers, who he found ready to go out masquerading, all decked out with antlers on their heads in order to look like wild beasts (praefixo … cervi capite ad imitandum ferae formam), but he successfully persuaded them to abandon the practice.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The popularity of the stag as a common feature in the literary sources is striking, but it can also be traced to a very different type of evidence. A number of depictions of the cervulus can in fact be found on the indigenous pottery of southern and western Gaul in late antiquity, the so-called ‘dérivées des sigillés paléochrétiennes’ (DSP) that we came across earlier in the book (Figures 6.2 and 6.3).Footnote ¹⁴² The deer is a very popular motif on this pottery, especially as a motif on the centre of plates, where it appears in combination with diverse symbols: trees, humans and other animals, including dogs, as well as crosses.Footnote ¹⁴³ While earlier scholars identified a biblical theme, making a connection with the deer panting for water in Psalm 42, this interpretation does seem tenuous.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Could not the popularity of the stag on late antique Gallic ceramics instead have more to do with the stag being the most popular and recognizable emblem of the Kalends celebrations? While this obviously cannot be proven, it remains a tantalizing possibility. The fact that the stag imagery arises in the Gallic pottery itself, rather than being a motif imitative of North African imports, adds strength to such a connection.

Figure 6.2

Drawing of a ‘dérivées des sigillés paléochrétiennes’ (DSP) plate featuring a stag.

Drawn by Clem Hayes after Rigoir, Rigoir and Meffre 1973: 207–63, at 255, no. 901.

Figure 6.3

Drawing of a ‘dérivées des sigillés paléochrétiennes’ (DSP) plate featuring stags and a human figure.

Drawn by Clem Hayes after Rigoir, Rigoir and Meffre 1973: 207–63, at 254, no. 898.

The question ‘why the stag?’ remains. For some, the significance of the cervulus lies in its connection to the Celtic deity Cernunnos.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This horned god, generally associated in scholarship with the renewal of nature, sexual power, abundance and riches, has been identified in over forty different iconographical depictions from antiquity across a wide geographical area.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ His most common attributes are deer’s antlers, torc(s) and a container of coins/grains, which he holds in his lap while he sits cross-legged. Although covering a strikingly wide chronological and geographical reach, depictions of Cernunnos mostly hail from eastern Gaul from the first century ce onwards. However, the case of Cernunnos is rather more problematic than many scholars would have us believe. There is in fact a single labelled image of the deity, on the so-called Pillar of the Boatman, a stone bas-relief from a temple in Lutetia (Paris), which is dated by its inscription to the reign of Tiberius and now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris (Figure 6.4). Cernunnos appears on this monument as one of a group made up of both Roman and Gallic deities.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While scholars have been keen to identify Cernunnos very widely, we might prefer to see the deity as essentially a scholarly construction, pieced together from various types of Celtic horned god by scholars overly eager to build a homogeneous, even timeless, pan-Celtic religious tradition.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In any case, in the absence of any corroborating evidence, it is difficult to interpret stag costuming in the Kalends as representing ‘continuity’ of pre-Christian Celtic religion.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Figure 6.4

Cernunnos as depicted on the ‘Pilier des Nautes’: Musée de Cluny – Musée National du Moyen Âge, Paris. Inv. Cl. 18604.

Photograph: RMN-Grand Palais (Musée de Cluny – Musée National du Moyen Âge)/Jean-Gilles Berizzi/Gérard Blot.

The stag is certainly not the only animal costume worn by Kalends revellers, in any case; Caesarius, as we saw, mentions sheepskins and ‘wild beast’ heads. In the long and complex textual record, different versions of clerical prohibitions against beast mumming feature a bewildering number of terminological variants referring to what is most probably a young cow: the vitulus or vitula.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ These prohibitions extend some way into the medieval period and are deadening in their volume and monotony. As E. K. Chambers (who bravely collected all the evidence) put it: ‘[h]omily followed homily, canon followed canon, capitulary followed capitulary, penitential followed penitential, for half a thousand years. But the Kalends died hard’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The canons of Gallic councils and Frankish penitentials are a fertile source for Kalends prohibitions right up to the tenth century, but references go as late and as far north as the indefatigable Burchard of Worms, writing in the eleventh century (his Decretorum is a famously ragbag text).Footnote ¹⁵² The most immediately tempting conclusion to draw from this textual morass is indeed that of Arbesmann, over forty years ago: that the later tradition of the Kalends animal dressing up is ‘purely literary’; that is, it represents a clear case of ‘cutting and pasting’ in the textual tradition and only refers to what was in fact a moribund practice.Footnote ¹⁵³ Such a critique brings us back to the methodological problems posed by the repetitive nature of early medieval ecclesiastical accounts of ‘popular religion’ and indeed popular culture: how far can we take the constant reiteration of stereotypes to represent anything other than lazy plagiarism?Footnote ¹⁵⁴ How far can we imagine real people actually dressing up like this?

The evidence in fact offers tantalizing suggestions that animal mumming did enjoy real continuity in Gaul well beyond the early medieval period.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Two late medieval manuscripts clearly depict this activity. A French manuscript of the Histoire du Graal preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris depicts what looks like a hollow tree trunk with a stag’s head on top, but we can see human feet beneath the bottom of the costume and a human face emerging out of a hole about halfway up; this costumed man is dancing to a musician playing the bagpipes.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In the famous illuminated manuscript of the Roman d’Alexandre from Tournai, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, we find two more relevant illustrations (Figures 6.5 and 6.6).Footnote ¹⁵⁷ One depicts a man in a highly impressive stag costume, dancing along to a musician; his costume is so impressive he has managed to frighten away a woman and two children.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In the other we see three men dressed as animals: a stag, a hare and an ass/boar, accompanied by female dancers (or men dressed as women?). A tonsured cleric, armed with a threatening club, towers over the group; in an added twist, under his tunic he has the legs of an animal.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Figure 6.5

Man dressed as a stag from the Roman d’Alexandre. MS Bodley 264, fol. 70r.

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Figure 6.6

Animal mummers and dancers from the Roman d’Alexandre. MS Bodley 264, fol. 21v.

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

So why, then, did people dress up in animal costumes at the Kalends? A wide variety of explanations have been proffered, neither comprehensive nor necessarily mutually exclusive: as part of an inversion of dominant categories, as apotropaic or as intended to promote fertility.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Taking a more ‘common-sense’ view, Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter point out that animal skins were easily available and hence convenient items for use in dressing up. Animal dressing up is part of a broader range of carnivalistic behaviour, where costuming enables an escape from the harshness of mid-winter: ‘escape from the old into the new, escape from normal routine into riotous play, escape from duty into temporary irresponsibility and escape from oneself into another identity’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In this case, participants could escape their normal human identity, exchanging it temporarily for that of an animal. Caesarius of Arles, as we saw, worried that Kalends dressing up revealed the deep-seated human desire to embrace the bestial within, to transform oneself into a wild beast.Footnote ¹⁶²

Dressing up as beasts was attacked by clerics as unnatural, indeed monstrous, as a perversion of God’s creation, as apostasy, as the opposite of what is Christian, indeed as pagan. Some of the costumes chosen do seem to have deliberately represented the monstrous – something that was no ordinary mortal, human or animal. As we have already seen, John Chrysostom and Peter Chrysologus described processions of ‘demons’, with the latter also claiming that a special workshop was set up (idolorum … officina) to fashion images of the gods. Chrysologus puts stress on the monstrous: he describes hideous portenta and highlights the unnaturalness of the costumes.Footnote ¹⁶³ As we saw earlier, Peter also imagined ordinary people making use of improvised materials to disguise themselves and fashion their own monstrous costumes.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Caesarius himself also seems to allude to monstrous costumes: ‘whatever other kind of omen’ (alia quaelibet portenta).Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Taking to the longue durée once more, a lively account from the Swiss protestant polemicist Rudolf Hospianian attacks the combination of monstrous dressing up and cross-dressing that occurred as part of carnival celebrations in sixteenth-century Zurich:

If dressing up as animals and monstrous creatures can represent both reversal of categories and a crossing of boundaries, the same can clearly be said for the type of dressing up that is in fact the most prominent across the whole geographical spread of Kalends activity: festive cross-dressing.

Cross-dressing is a practice common to carnivalistic celebrations across space and time. References to cross-dressing recur in a number of sources relating to the Kalends, from both east and west. Although the sources normally specify men dressing up as women, others suggest that women could also practise cross-dressing.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Our ecclesiastical authors are deeply troubled by the transgression of gender boundaries and, no doubt, the potential connection with sexual misconduct often associated with cross-dressing in hostile sources.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Caesarius considered cross-dressing as perhaps the most shameful Kalends practice of all:

And again: ‘For what is so absurd as by shameful dress to change the sex of a man into the form of a woman? What is so foolish as to disfigure one’s face, to assume an appearance, which even the demons themselves greatly fear?’Footnote ¹⁷⁰ As we have already seen, the mention of soldiers raises questions for late antique Arles but also has a parallel in Asterius’ earlier account of military revels in Amaseia.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Again we might ask what deeper meanings we should ascribe to such practices. Taking the ‘common-sense’ line, Judith Bennett and Shannon McSheffrey remark that ‘[s]ome cross-dressing was (and is) simply ludic: playful parody, associated once with Christmas, Shrovetide and May Day, and more recently with Halloween and Gay Pride’.Footnote ¹⁷² Nonetheless, the meaning of cross-dressing in ritual and in popular festivity has received a good deal of attention from anthropologists and historians alike. Anthropological interpretations of cross-dressing have tended to cluster around a number of predictable themes: seeing it as apotropaic, as an example of fertility ritual, as a ritual of status reversal, as part of a rite of passage or as a form of category definition.Footnote ¹⁷³ In the ancient world cross-dressing was associated with several Greek festivals and rituals, most strikingly perhaps the ‘Festival of Insolence’, an Argive festival, where men and women swopped clothes and fought,Footnote ¹⁷⁴ as well as being associated with rite-of-passage rituals, including wedding rites.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Cross-dressing was less common in the ritual sphere in the Roman world; for instance, at Saturnalia (male) citizens reputedly took off their togas and donned freedmen’s caps, hence performing using costume inversion to play not with gender but rather with socio-legal status.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ However, Kalends dressing up certainly involved cross-dressing and thus it is worth exploring this theme further.

Cross-dressing clearly offers liberating possibilities. Michel Meslin suggested that each individual dressing up was able to benefit ‘from the other powers of the other, and to find a positive and beneficial value in these masquerades’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Putting on the costume of the opposite sex certainly offered an opportunity to behave differently, outside the usual bounds of convention: here the theme of licence comes into play once again. Natalie Zemon Davis influentially argued that male cross-dressing enabled men to play productively on the idea of the ‘unruly woman’, giving them new opportunities for normally unlicensed behaviour in that ‘the female persona authorized resistance’, helping to remove responsibility for male actions.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Caesarius and Asterius, as we saw, made rhetorical play on the shocking contrast between and inversion of martial hyper-masculinity and femininity at the Kalends. Caesarius, in line with a long tradition of Roman gender ideology, considered the masculinity and strength of the soldiers to be put at risk in this way: ‘Those who change into the dress of women fittingly no longer possess manly strength [virile … fortitudinem], for it must be believed to be happening by God’s just judgement that they should lose the strength of a soldier [militarem virtutem] when they deform themselves with the appearance of women.’Footnote ¹⁷⁹ We can only assume that in general the soldiers involved were aware of, and positively enjoyed, just such a ‘risk’.

Cross-dressing also includes the idea of disguise, as seen in such famous cases as the Rebecca Riots of mid-nineteenth-century Wales and the Porteous Riots of mid-seventeenth-century Edinburgh.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Peter Chrysologus mentioned the use of charcoal by Kalends revellers;Footnote ¹⁸¹ face-blacking in fact turns up frequently as a feature of costumes for popular festivities, often in combination with cross-dressing. In an example from early modern Elgin (in north-east Scotland), we have a confession from a penitent brought before the kirk session, for ‘dansyng and guysing’; he admits to the court that ‘he haid his sisters coat upon him and the rest that were with him haid claythis dammaskit about thame and thair faces blaikit [blacked] … Archie Hay haid a faise [face = mask] about his loynes and ane kerche [woman’s kerchief] about his face’.Footnote ¹⁸² Here we have both cross-dressing and face-blacking. Dressing up in ‘monstrous’ forms, as well as in the clothes of the opposite sex, continued to form an important part of popular festivities and therefore of popular culture. Again, while we can point to the practicality of face-blacking as a readily available and effective disguise, we should probably push the interpretation further. Blackness in late antiquity, as in later periods, clearly had connotations of race as well as (and related to) associations with the demonic and the underworld.Footnote ¹⁸³ In her discussion of the use of cross-dressing and ‘blackface’ in medieval popular festivity, Claire Sponsler persuasively argues that we need to take both these disguises seriously, to situate them in ‘the realm of social and cultural struggle’ and appreciate their ‘dangerousness’, rather than seeing them as ‘customary and inconsequential’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ We can certainly see Kalends dressing up as offering an opportunity for different groups and individuals to express diverse sentiments. Women and men alike could have welcomed the opportunity to break out of their customary roles through cross-dressing. Social subordinates might have enjoyed the opportunities disguise afforded them when paying their noisy visits to their social superiors. However, it is hard to push anthropologically tinged interpretations much further without straying too far into the hypothetical.

So far we have seen that in accounts of the Kalends satire and role reversal – clichés, almost, of the carnivalesque – abound. But as I have hinted, there is a danger that ‘carnivalistic’ interpretations can descend into vague and unhelpful, and indeed unhistoricized, cliché.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Ultimately I want to demonstrate the complexities and ambiguities, indeed the polyvalence, of the festival of the Kalends. There is clearly a wide range of anthropological frameworks or interpretations available for the interpretation of festivals and festive behaviour.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ For instance, with Geertz’s ‘thick description’ in mind we can understand ritual behaviour as a means of describing and performing the social order in question.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ We might well also think of Victor Turner’s highly influential (and again somewhat idealized) interpretation of social rituals as fostering communitas.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ More generally, the role of ritual in establishing bonds of reciprocity and social relations, as studied by anthropologists and sociologists, comes to the fore in discussion of gift exchange, a prominent aspect of the Kalends, as I shall discuss next.

The Politics of Gift Exchange at the Kalends

The exchange of strenae at the Kalends is a conspicuous feature in late antique accounts of the festival, as an element that was prominent in both official and informal rituals and celebrations. Kalends gift-giving was modelled at the very highest level, with gifts being made both to the people and to the army by the emperor himself. Officials in the cities of the empire also made donations: Libanius refers both to the payment of gold and the throwing of coins into the crowd by these officials.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In the later Roman empire, the Kalends was clearly an important occasion for politicians and political authorities to demonstrate their largesse. It was also important in the private sphere: we have already seen how gifts were also exchanged among ‘private’ individuals as part of the Kalends greeting rituals.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ This process occurred horizontally, between friends, but also again vertically, between patrons and clients of various sorts (including, presumably, employees). Gift exchange at the Kalends served to both create and retain social and communal bonds through reciprocity.Footnote ¹⁹¹

The importance of gift exchange in pre-modern societies has been much discussed, ever since Marcel Mauss wrote his ‘Essai sur le don’, almost a hundred years ago now.Footnote ¹⁹² As explained by Michael Satlow, ‘All gifts are embedded in a set of social relationships and obligations …. The purpose of the gift is thus to create group cohesion by establishing an ongoing cycle of gift-exchange.’Footnote ¹⁹³ In a pithy if idealistic formulation, Marshall Sahlins comments, ‘[i]f friends make gifts, gifts make friends’.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ However, as many have noted, while symmetrical giving among equals might produce what Mauss and others saw as the ‘pure’ gift, more generally gifts ‘play an important and highly calibrated role in creating and reinforcing social hierarchies within each community’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ In particular, in the case of asymmetrical reciprocal relations, such as those found in ancient patronage relationships, gifts are usually given downwards in order to cement loyalty and dependency. Neil Coffee argues that gift-giving was unusually significant in Roman culture, even in comparison with other ancient societies: indeed, Roman literature has much to say about the ‘power dynamics’ of giving.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ For instance, Seneca wrote a treatise on gift-giving, De Beneficiis, which argued for giving without hope of return; Martial presents a much less idealized and of course satirical view which I shall examine further later. It is helpful now to look more closely at how gift-giving was generally seen in Roman discourse in order to provide something of an ideological background for the late antique strenae.

Saturnalia provides the canonical setting for gift exchange in Martial’s epigrams; indeed, the two final books (XIII and XIV) are presented as poems to accompany gifts. The social world conjured by Martial is certainly not one of the ‘pure’ gift: gift-giving here is always vertical, with some clear end in view, and not all gifts are equal. Martial does not subscribe at all to Seneca’s idealistic view that it is the intention behind the gift, not its value, that matters.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Not all gifts, he says, are equally desirable: in the gift poems in Book 14, the Apophoreta,Footnote ¹⁹⁸ desirable ‘rich’ and undesirable ‘poor’ presents alternate. In other books too Martial sneers at the inelegant gifts his lawyer friend Umber has received from his clients, gifts that Umber has offloaded onto him in turn: the poet says he would rather have had the money!Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Gifts are traps to lure advantage, says Martial. This epigram is worth quoting at length; here the poet defends himself against the claim that he is mean for sending only his own works as presents: ‘I hate the wily, wicked tricks of presents [odi dolosas munerum et malas artes]. Gifts are like hooks: for who does not know that the greedy wrasse is taken in by the fly he has devoured. Whenever he gives nothing to a rich friend, Quintianus, a poor man is generous.’Footnote ²⁰⁰ Martial’s point is that the gifts of a pauper (such as himself!) are not gifts as they work merely to ensnare richer friends in costly bonds of dependence.Footnote ²⁰¹ He depicts an intensely structured world of gift-giving where inferiors seek to bind their superiors with gifts, and where giving the wrong gift could cause real offence.

Turning to our late antique clerical critiques of Kalends giving, we find accounts that are equally satirical in tone but with very different kinds of complaint about vertical giving. Bishops allege that Kalends gifts move inexorably up the social scale, with drastic effects on those at the bottom of the pile, who find themselves utterly impoverished. The ideological and discursive context of this argument is of course important: these accounts are shaped by ecclesiastical discourse around what constituted appropriate giving. Late antique churchmen repeatedly argued for a new, ecclesiastically supervised form of giving in place of the traditional classical model of euergetism, and other forms of conspicuous consumption.Footnote ²⁰² Ecclesiastical attacks persisted against those who continued to support traditional civic events and entertainments, just like those associated with the Kalends. Bishops argued that those who were well-off should give generously to the church so that the bishop himself might correctly supervise the disbursement of funds to the poor.Footnote ²⁰³ It is Augustine who most directly and pithily opposed the giving of strenae to the giving of alms, as part of the binary scheme that lies at the heart of his critique of the Kalends: ‘They [the pagans] give strenae; you give alms’ (my emphasis).Footnote ²⁰⁴ A little later in the same sermon, in one of the mock dialogues he favoured as a homiletic technique, he imagines his congregation wrestling with their consciences over the issues of strenae. ‘But you say to me, “When I give strenae, I too receive them”.’ Augustine’s response is familiar: he argues that giving to the poor will receive its own reward (while failure to give to the poor will lead to divine punishment!).Footnote ²⁰⁵ The satirically tinged accounts of Kalends gift exchange given by our preachers clearly display their shared agenda: to promote ecclesiastically sanctioned alms donation in place of profane practices of giving.

The concept behind the exchange of strenae at the Kalends (as at other times) was clearly to do with reciprocity, part of the building of communitas at festivals.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Gifts were exchanged as part of larger patterns of Kalends rituals of greeting and hospitality. This gift exchange indeed forms part of Libanius’ account, fleshing out his picture of the festival as something that fostered reciprocity, social unity and equality. Kalends gift-giving, according to Libanius in his Or. 9, teaches generosity, encouraging everyone (from the emperor downwards) not to ‘cling excessively to their gold, but rather to give it up and put it into the hands of others’; it is ‘an education concerning possessions’.Footnote ²⁰⁷ In his Description Libanius explicitly discusses the ways in which Kalends giving is reciprocal and symmetrical: ‘So, on the day before the festival, gifts are carried through the city, as many as would make a table splendid, some from the powerful honouring each other, others from the lower ranks to them and from them to the lower ranks, the latter attending to the former’s power, the former sharing their luxury with their attendants.’Footnote ²⁰⁸ This passage in fact strongly indicates that the equalizing claims he has made for Kalends hospitality and gift-giving elsewhere are indeed unreliable, as Libanius recognizes here that gift-giving in fact cements and highlights relative status rather than obliterating status distinction (something which comes as no surprise to the critical reader). Nonetheless, the depiction of reciprocity in gift-giving fits his highly idealized picture of the festival as something that is enjoyed by everyone in society: he makes a point of saying that even the poor eat better than usual, and even slaves and prisoners enjoy some respite from their usual lot.Footnote ²⁰⁹

In Arles, Caesarius has little specific to say about strenae: he makes it clear that he objects to both the giving and receiving, and terms them diabolica, presumably with reference to their function as good luck presents – and as part of his broader aim to present the festival as ‘pagan’.Footnote ²¹⁰ It is from the more extended critiques of other preachers that we are able to construct a thicker description of both the practices and ideological debates involved. Maximus of Turin sets the scene nicely: his revellers get up early and go out to greet people; they exchange strenae and kisses with their friends. This kiss, says the bishop of Turin, is venal, to do with avarice rather than affectum: it is a kiss with gain in view. However, as he goes on to argue, only the well-off will in fact benefit from the exchange of strenae. According to Maximus, inferiors are expected to give to their superiors, even though some will need to borrow in order to be able to do so. He even imagines, with satirical exaggeration, a man having to sell his son into slavery so that he might fulfil his gift obligations. Horizontal giving does exist, at the level of gift exchange between rich men, but here Maximus comments with disapproval that the rich will give each other solidi while denying a beggar a denarius.Footnote ²¹¹

Asterius presents a very similar picture: he describes the Kalends kiss as motivated by covetousness and again paints a picture of giving and receiving in which very few people achieve satisfaction, as the money moves ever upwards: ‘Oh, the absurdity of it! All stalk about open-mouthed, hoping to receive something from one another. Those who have given are dejected; those who have received a gift do not retain it, for the present is handed on from one to another, and he who received it from an inferior gives it to a superior.’Footnote ²¹² He claims that strenae lead to debt and usury, depicting an honest man abused and forced to give away more than he can afford, with the result that his own family go hungry on the feast day.Footnote ²¹³ It is Asterius who gives us by far the most detailed depiction and critique of Kalends giving.Footnote ²¹⁴ He seeks to argue that it does not even succeed within traditional criteria: ‘One cannot call what takes place exchange [συνάλλαγμα], for the multitude exchange nothing with one another. But to call it a free gift [δωρεά] is still more inappropriate, since the giving is by necessity [ἀνάγκη].’Footnote ²¹⁵ Kalends gift exchange is immoral, according to Asterius, because the givers are compelled to give and the recipients are, in various ways, unworthy. It is worth considering now what his description, together with the others we have, can tell us about the specifically ‘popular’ aspects of the strenae.

Even allowing for the deeply partial viewpoints of our episcopal critics, the picture they give of the existing system of gift-giving, as one that favours the rich and powerful over their inferiors, is largely convincing. Rituals of gift-giving generally sought to reinforce, not to undo, existing patterns of economic distribution and social hierarchies. However, the limits of early Christian radicalism on this topic are also well known: patristic texts tend to propose an orderly, episcopally supervised distribution of superfluities to a carefully designated group of the deserving ‘poor’.Footnote ²¹⁶ Indeed, this is precisely Asterius’ theme: in his account the unworthy recipients of Kalends gifts include not just the rich at one end of the scale but also a variety of social undesirables at the other. His picture of the Kalends as a ‘feast of annoyance’ includes the depiction of a very motley and disreputable crew, seeking unmerited material gain: ‘For the common vagrants and the jugglers of the stage, dividing themselves into squads and hordes, hang about every house.’Footnote ²¹⁷ Asterius’ mission is to persuade his audience to give alms, not monetary gifts, to the unworthy, so he provides a series of antitheses:

Once again, several of the most familiar negative topoi of popular culture are emphasized in order to be castigated: singing, dancing and performance are highlighted as especially contemptible activities and performers as a particularly unworthy category. We might also notice the gender dimensions that emerge at this point. While in general the discourse surrounding gift exchange (academic as well as ancient and late ancient) seems to assume gift exchange among men and as to do with relative male status, here we find female recipients under explicit discussion. And again, it is the specifically sexual status of women that is raised: (deserving) widows and virgins are contrasted with (undeserving) prostitutes and licentious performers, who, as so often, are seen as basically equivalent.Footnote ²¹⁹ At the same time, as is typical, the audience of the discourse is constructed as male.

Asterius seeks to denigrate the Kalends as a festival celebrated by a lower-class rabble as part of his rhetorical strategy and his ideological agenda. However, and finally, it is worth returning to our sources once more to see if the festive practices of the Kalends could nonetheless have provided an opportunity for the under-privileged to seek material improvement in one way or another. I shall now look in detail at what we have already identified as one of the most important aspects of the interpretation of carnivalesque festivals: the association of the festival with riot, rebellion and indeed revolution, and in this way focus on one of the biggest questions as regards the nature of popular culture.

Socio-economic Relations at the Kalends: Crisis or Resolution?

Let’s start by going back in time to the sixth century bce, to an intriguing episode we find in Plutarch:Footnote ²²⁰

According to Plutarch’s much later account, the poor invaded the houses of the rich and demanded to be feasted.Footnote ²²² Sara Forsdyke contextualizes the incident at Megara within a broader pattern of popular festive revelry, linked to contemporary socio-economic concerns. Traditions of more or less extortionary door-to-door visits in ancient Greece are evidenced in a number of surviving songs, such as the Swallow Song and the Crow Song, which were seemingly sung by groups of young men who travelled door to door, asking for hospitality from householders.Footnote ²²³ For instance, in the Crow Song: ‘But, good sirs, offer me some of the wealth your house has deep within. Give me something, lord! And you too, young lady! The law requires that you give a handful to a crow when she asks. That’s the end of my song. Give something: it will be enough.’Footnote ²²⁴ In a fascinating instance of apparent continuity, the twelfth-century Byzantine author Ioannes Tzetzes wrote about begging monks who went door to door at Christmas, the Kalandai and Epiphany, either singing or reciting encomia and asking for a reward in return.Footnote ²²⁵ There are no specific Kalends songs mentioned in our Gallic texts – but as we have seen, song is one of the most frequently cited elements of popular culture and we can certainly imagine them being sung as part of Kalends visits and general revelry.

Songs were indeed part of the riotous and abusive behaviour that so upset the emperor Julian at Antioch in 362/3, behaviour which, as we saw, took place at a time when tensions were inflamed by an apparently ill-handled food shortage.Footnote ²²⁶ And we hear that in 384 the Antioch New Year festivities got (even more) out of hand; Libanius on this occasion associated the upheaval with the festival of Poseidon, which included circus races, which famously were occasions with potential for volatility. According to Libanius, it was after the races that a mob attacked an unpopular official, the former supervisor of bakers, Candidus, whom they blamed for earlier food shortages:Footnote ²²⁷

The threatening behaviour depicted here lies on the borderline between symbolic and actual violence. Libanius here describes what sounds like a classic case of carnivalistic violence or charivari, as Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira has pointed out. He suggests that here we have popular justice as street theatre, a recognizable aspect of late antique urban culture, characteristic of the new flavour of expression of social conflict in this period.Footnote ²²⁹

The Kalends celebrations could undoubtedly be boisterous. In North Africa Augustine, in one of his bouts of homiletic ventriloquism, imagines 1 January revellers saying, ‘Let’s create some chaos!’ (alogiemus); Brent Shaw comments, ‘As 1 January approaches, Christian bishops knew that there was potential for trouble.’Footnote ²³⁰ We should not forget, however, that most of the time even uproarious urban festivities, as well as food shortages and political crises, did not actually lead to violence. The closest our Kalends material takes us to violence comes with behaviour reported by Asterius. Libanius, meanwhile, as we saw, depicts the festival as an opportunity for joyous interaction between different classes and groups, leading to renewed social unity and equality, indeed the very model of communitas. It is in polar opposition to this picture that Asterius instead paints the Kalends as an occasion for social strife and conflict. In his account outsiders are not only mocked but also beaten, in an outburst of drunken violence. The first victims named are farmers who have come into the city for the festivities:Footnote ²³¹ ‘the sturdy and honest farmers [georgoi] … such as are found within … [the city] are flogged, treated with drunken violence, what they have in their hands is snatched from them; they are warred upon in a time of peace, are jeered at, and mocked with words and deeds’.Footnote ²³² Food producers, or those involved in fixing food prices, are regular targets of group violence, especially at times of food shortages – just as we saw with Candidus in Antioch in 384. However, it seems most likely that the georgoi who were abused in Amaseia were attacked rather as socially insignificant country bumpkins and innocents abroad (indeed as an ‘outgroup’) rather than in a context of conflict over food production and prices, where it was usually rich landowners and officials who were targeted.Footnote ²³³

Asterius claims clerics as another category of victims harassed by Kalends revellers in Amaseia: ‘Even our most excellent and guileless prophets, the unmistakeable representatives of God, who when unhindered in their work are our faithful ministers, are treated with insolence.’Footnote ²³⁴ Asterius goes into no more detail and his terminology is sufficiently vague that we do not know which types of clergy are concerned. We might indeed suspect that this vagueness is deliberate on Asterius’ part: that he knows of no actual insults or attacks on specific clergy members but is trying to stir his apathetic audience to moral outrage against the Kalends celebrations. On the other hand, it seems quite plausible that on an occasion of lively carnivalistic celebrations clergy, presumably distinguishable by their clothing and grooming, could have made obvious targets for insults. We can compare the riots that took place in 408 in Calama, North Africa, during celebrations of the Kalends of June: these began with a riotous dancing procession that went past the town’s Catholic church but escalated when clerics tried to stop the celebrations.Footnote ²³⁵ In Arles itself we can recall nothing so dramatic outside times of more widespread conflict, but we can recall the incident reported in the Vita of Hilary, whereby a stirred-up crowd came and insulted the bishop and were duly punished by a divinely sent fire.Footnote ²³⁶

Even without violence, some of the festive practices associated with the Kalends clearly caused unease among members of the elite, especially when these practices and behaviours made noisily visible real-life fissures of social and economic inequality, just as in the case of the enforced hospitality in archaic Megara. Asterius’ account, as hostile as it is, presents the Kalends as an opportunity for ‘commoners and beggars’ (δημόται γάρ άγύρται)Footnote ²³⁷ to receive hospitality from high-ranking members of the civic community:

Here we can see how the Kalends could provide a ritualized opportunity for marginal members of the urban community to seek redress and sustenance from its civic leaders. Bishops, meanwhile, supposedly the champions of the poor, did not look upon such behaviour with favour but tended to subscribe to traditional elite critiques of the behaviour of the lower classes instead.

We have already seen our preachers contrast the gifts of the Kalends with the supervised charitable giving they wished to see in its place. It is Asterius, once more, who provides the most developed and hostile account of the social effects of the exchange of strenae. All our preachers exhort their congregations to give alms to the poor in their Kalends sermons but Asterius draws a contrast between the worthy and unworthy poor. For all his claims that Kalends revellers are giving handouts to ‘harlots’ and stage performers, he also clearly describes the role of the urban poor in the form of unwelcome beggars: δημόται γάρ άγύρται. He does not see these people as worthy recipients of charity, especially when gathered in groups. He claims that real penetes are themselves victims of the anti-social behaviour of the Kalends revellers, as discussed earlier.Footnote ²³⁹ Asterius has his own vision of legitimate poverty and of the expected behaviour of the poor. He expected the poor of Amaseia to await episcopally organized charity humbly – not to demand it noisily on the doorstep. The Kalends beggars are deliberately constructed by Asterius as outcasts, outsiders, as outside the accepted chains of household and church patronage.

Asterius’ sermon is one of many texts that express various levels of unease at the potentially socially disruptive presence of mendicants of different kinds in late antiquity. In another sermon, on the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, Asterius himself attempted to distinguish between the more and less deserving poor.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Bishops and clerical writers consistently professed a preference for the high-born who had suffered reversals of fortune to the permanently poor and for the voluntary religious poor against the merely indigent – while at the same time showing anxiety about some supposed monks who lived from mendicancy.Footnote ²⁴¹ As we saw, there was a long-standing tradition as regards who should be entitled to the support of the church.Footnote ²⁴² Our late antique sources – ecclesiastical and legal alike – show persistent concern about dubious beggars of various kinds. John Chrysostom berated his congregations for refusing to give alms to supposed ‘fake’ beggars,Footnote ²⁴³ but also mentioned the practice of deliberately blinding children to increase their value.Footnote ²⁴⁴ Asterius described criminal beggars of various kinds.Footnote ²⁴⁵ In the late antique city of Rome a much-discussed rescript of Gratian’s indicates wider elite concerns about dubious beggars in the city.Footnote ²⁴⁶ While we do not have such concerns expressed explicitly in texts from southern Gaul, it seems likely that we can extrapolate from elsewhere in such a case.

In Amaseia Asterius sees the door-to-door visits at the Kalends as extortion: he claims that the money handed out by householders is only handed out in response to coercion. It is not difficult, however, to imagine a different interpretation, whereby the householders involved mostly took the ‘festival of annoyance’, to use Asterius’ words, in good (enough) part. For urban public officeholders, at least, it was part of the deal at such occasions – even if, at times, this must have felt like an uncomfortable one. As the festival of the Kalends traditionally included both official and informal aspects, public officials, from the emperor downwards, were likely to be prominent in celebrations – something that worked largely to their advantage, as well as occasionally to their disadvantage. This was part of the traditional licence of festivals, and perhaps especially of the Kalends, as we have already seen. In the case of late antique Gaul, it is not possible to identify any official civic aspect to the festivities in the cities in our surviving evidence, but we can think about how relations between landowners and their social inferiors of various sorts might have been performed, negotiated or indeed challenged in the Kalends rituals.

Caesarius claims, in a pattern familiar from previous chapters, that ‘superstitious’ Kalends practices were engaged in not by his primary intended audience of landowners but rather by rustici, by their social inferiors, and subordinates, including those within their own households: vicini, famuli and familiae.Footnote ²⁴⁷ The scenario envisaged in the sermons is one where landowners provide hospitality to their social inferiors and subordinates, presumably including tenants, coloni and indeed poorer neighbours, who make their New Year’s visits to their houses. Caesarius firmly warns landowners not to show sympathy (humanitas) towards the revellers, and certainly not to let them into their homes (ante domos vestras venire non permittatis).Footnote ²⁴⁸ Indeed, rather than offering hospitality, this is one of the misdemeanours for which the bishop counsels especially severe punishment: ‘But rather rebuke and correct and, if you can, even punish with severity [sed castigate potius atque corripite et, si potestis, etiam cum severitate distringite].’Footnote ²⁴⁹ Correction by punishment and example alike should be the proper response of the social superior, the bishop enjoins, explaining that this combination will help ensure both a heavenly reward for the landowner and mercy for the rustic alike.Footnote ²⁵⁰

It is apparent, however, that the expectations of Caesarius’ congregations seem to have been rather different: they were obviously minded to be tolerant of – or even find enjoyment in – the revels:

Note how the bishop feels the need to insist that Kalends practices are contaminating even when merely looked at,Footnote ²⁵² let alone laughed at (whether, he says, you are laughing with them or at them). Gift exchange surely played a role in these visits, even if Caesarius is not explicit on this point beyond issuing a general prohibition of strenae. We must assume, even if Caesarius does not go into detail, that social superiors were expected to provide gifts, not least in the form of hospitality. Ultimately, these ‘exchanges’ were indeed one of the customary practices or rituals whereby the fundamentally unequal and yet relatively stable social and economic relations of the late antique Provençal countryside were maintained – alongside more obviously coercive and extractive means. Indeed, Cam Grey comments of Kalends gift exchange that it ‘was effective for both rich and poor’. While the well-off cemented their influence, the poor ‘could legitimately except to receive more than they gave while also behaving in ways that accorded with accepted norms of communal behavior’.Footnote ²⁵³

Finally, further ‘superstitious’ practices of the rustici are also worth considering in terms of their economic and social symbolism. Caesarius accuses rustici of one of the most widely attested Kalends practices, one already mentioned earlier:

This is an act which Caesarius wants his householder audience to ‘command to be removed’ from their households.Footnote ²⁵⁵ It is not hard to see how a practice designed to ensure plenty throughout the year would have resonance for those whose diets were indeed not always assured of abundantia. And although Caesarius attributed this practice to rustici, it is attested in various locations, as we have seen, including the city of Rome. Food shortages were of course an ever-present threat in the pre-modern world, whether caused by price-fixing, corruption, poor weather or demonic interference, and the poor were, as ever, the most vulnerable. We can easily understand the persistence of this ritual, then, despite the clerical naysaying.

The Kalends of January proved impressively resistant to the consistent disapproval of the church. And yet, the study of this festival also neatly demonstrates broader problems in the study of pre-modern popular culture tout court: notably, the difficulty of analysing the practices of the Kalends from within when forced to use elite and ecclesiastical literary sources. Nonetheless, a whole range of themes pertinent to the study of the history of popular culture, and to this book, converge in the case of the Kalends of January. The festival has worked nicely as an example of our model: its celebration contained clearly oppositional elements while incorporating ‘top-down’ as well as ‘bottom-up’ aspects.

Conclusions

Let’s try to return to the point of the view of the Kalends revellers themselves: what might they have said to describe or interpret their activities? Earlier in the chapter we came across the ecclesiastical records from early modern Elgin, which preserved some of the testimony of the accused winter revellers, but we never got to hear what Archie Hay and his friends might have said to defend themselves. In late antique Ravenna, however, Peter Chrysologus, as we saw, at least pretended to give us a glimpse of the ‘other side’ of the struggle as he ventriloquizes his congregation’s side of the story: ‘But one of you says: This isn’t the deliberate pursuit of sacrilege, these good luck visits are just for fun; this is a celebration of a new beginning, not a superstition from the past; this is just New Year, not the threat of paganism.’Footnote ²⁵⁶ Meanwhile, a text from early medieval Gaul, the much-discussed Vita Eligii, provides a spirited defence of traditional culture in the form of a fictionalized speech from the pagan opponents of its titular hero. We have already seen how St Hilary of Mende was able to persuade a band of Kalends revellers to hang up their antler horns. Eligius reputedly met a group of peasants from a vicus outside Noyon that were made of stronger stuff: ‘No matter how often you talk, Roman, you will never be able to uproot our customs, but we will continue always and forever to carry on our feasts as we have hitherto. No man will ever be able to forbid us the ancient entertainments that are so dear to us.’Footnote ²⁵⁷ Ramsay MacMullen has very aptly compared this speech to ‘the passionate speeches invented by Tacitus for oppressed barbarians’.Footnote ²⁵⁸ Kalends practices do seem to provide us with an illuminating snapshot of what we can consider a continuing ‘culture war’ – even if we need to read this through the distorting lens of ecclesiastical discourse.

So what of the purported retort of Peter Chrysologus’ congregation: that their Kalends activities were simply ioci, jokes? This is, I suggest, only part of the story: the activities did provide fun during the traditional festive season, but we can and should identify several aspects of deeper significance. What was the festival of the Kalends ‘about’? It was, in the final analysis, about many things – or, to put it in the terms of an anthropologist, it was polyvalent. The Kalends celebrated new beginnings and renewal and hence constituted one of the most important festivals of the calendrical cycle. It also provided an important opportunity for mid-winter revelry and an occasion to enjoy plenty, where at all possible. It also had a vital social aspect: the festival provided an annual opportunity for the renewal or development of relations with both social equals and social superiors, including an important occasion on which to receive gifts or patronage of other kinds. That is not to say that we need accept a Durkheimian-style interpretation whereby the festival inevitably renewed the status quo through practices of social and ritual communitas. Indeed, at times the Kalends undoubtedly also provided an opportunity for the enacting and inflaming of tensions of various kinds: social and economic but also, perhaps, in terms of gender.

During late antiquity the festival of the Kalends of January became increasingly popular (as well as increasingly visible). The late Roman state had specifically enshrined the status of the holiday, seeing it as offering an important opportunity to show generosity and foster unity, while local civic elites had sponsored (perhaps sometimes through gritted teeth?) the often uproarious celebrations. While the end of traditional forms of imperial and civic euergetism brought an end to official, publicly funded celebrations, ‘bottom-up’ celebrations certainly more than filled the space left behind. One might point out that the Kalends did not offer any real threat to the status quo: indeed, the evidence from Gaul suggests that landowners were happy to sponsor the revelry through hospitality to their subordinates. The opposition to the festival, as we have seen, came largely from the church. The dynamics of this triangular relationship (to put it baldly) between popular culture, the church and secular interests and power will come more clearly to the fore in the final, concluding chapter.