The Court Jester " fragile is the appearance of the heroes of the Middle Ages " [J. Le Goff, "Heroes & Wonders of the Middle Ages, ed. Laterza, 2005, p. 124].
If the Fathers of the Church shall make sentences for those who perform intrattenedo the public, a partial rehabilitation and social morality has since the middle of the eleventh century with the advent of the troubadours and later the trouvères. In addition, St. Francis of Assisi is "God's Jester", elevating the condition of humility typical of wandering minstrels who lived on alms. The Jester, therefore, may tend to the good or evil: it can be jester of God or the devil.
The Jester is in limbo because they do not belong to any social group: no place among oratores , bellatores and laboratores , is a being marginal, as it is often represented in miniature, at the margins of manuscripts.
Only a miracle can bring it to a social recognition: the case of the Confrérie des Ardentes of Arras, whose existence has been documented since the end of the twelfth century. Two clowns are the stars of a Marian miracle in the midst of a plague: the Virgin appears to the histrionic two with a candle and heals several sufferers. So every year the minstrels of the brotherhood celebrated the event with a candle miraculous.
If you were to place a jester, the only places in which to place are those of the party and carnival, however, places are not real but symbolic. Exceptionally, even that of devotion, as in the aforementioned miracle, or as suggested by the story of the jester of Notre Dame who performs public as having the statue of the Madonna and Child.
From the XV century requires the figure of the court jester, often represented in the iconography of the time with vertical stripes and elaborate costumes with hoods equipped with bells or donkey ears. The constant presence of one or more of buffoons at court suggests the existence of a sort of madness of fashion at the fifteenth-century nobility. The jester-clown has certain licenses and is a tolerable and exorcise madness that is a counterpoint to the elegant costumes of the European courts.
The need for madness is a phenomenon that also affects non-aristocratic social classes. In fact, since the XII century in spreading the monastic festivals of fools that follow Christmas. With the gradual prohibition by the church hierarchy carnival to celebrate these rituals in churches, monks and clerics, around the fifteenth century, they go out of their seats to bring the feasts of fools in the villages and towns, involving all the people. Symbol of these festivals is the donkey, an animal that becomes the emblem of the madness itself, that is appropriated the minstrels, jesters, If that does not often wear a weird hat with donkey ears.
shame, devotion, marginality and madness are the four ingredients that inspire a reconstruction of a complex shape and difficult to decipher, but in any case capable of getting sick.
