Playing The Fool

Much madness is divinest sense

To a discerning eye:

Much sense the starkest madness.

‘Tis the majority

In this, as all, prevails.

Assent, and you are sane:

Demur – you’re straightway dangerous,

And handled with a chain.

Emily Dickinson

The silly season is galloping in as the year winds down and we wind up. Once upon a time, before we all came to think of ourselves as consumers, the Solstice was a time when we got to play the fool. So beginning with nothing – which we all have plenty of – let’s spin around with zero, sashay with the space, find a few fools and celebrate silliness. Starting – and ending with the Tarot Fool, making fun about nothing.

I got plenty of nothin’

And nothin’s plenty for me

Porgy from Porgy and Bess by Gershwin

In the great game of life, Tarot was the most popular card game for over 300 years throughout Europe. Games played with the Tarot, use the Fool as an expendable card, playable at any moment, yet incapable of taking any tricks or of being taken, valuable in points only if held unplayed.

The modern Joker in playing cards, invented by the New York Poker Club as a ‘wild card’ to make the game more interesting, is apparently not related to the Tarot deck’s Fool – so the authorities say. But it does serve a similar function to the Tarot Fool - and to the medieval Court Jester; it’s wild, powerless and free. Paradox rules its being.

Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free

The Tarot Fool is an image of everyman and woman and is always un-numbered or takes zero. Skipping apart from the ordered procession of the other Major Arcana, the tarot Fool has no number.

Is s/he first or last in the Arcana sequence?

It is irrelevant, for the Fool is a nothing - it is neither below one nor less than one - it is no- one! The zero of the Fool suggests s/he moves before or after, above or below, in and out of the other personages in the cards. Metaphysically and psychologically s/he is a wild card. 

The fool is a holy nothing – a whole, a zero. The zero is as contrary as the tarot’s Fool for it is a universal symbol of absence or negation, but also a symbol of completion. Nothing is null and void, insignificant, empty, absent, insubstantial, worthless. It is the ether, the immensity of space, a point, a hole, yet also conversely, the whole.

Where did you come from, baby dear?

Out of the everywhere into here.

George MacDonald

For every culture uses the circle as a representation of unity, perfection and cyclical movement.

 The circle symbolises spirit and a circle describes the cosmos – everything unified in the vast realm of the uni-verse, the one song of life. A circle is alpha and omega where there is no beginning or end. The ancients said God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. So the circle is a vision of limitless possibilities, just like the Fool in perpetual motion, ever restlessly roaming the world.

The Fool reminds us that the center of the universe is here - where we are now  - and there  - wherever the Fool might show up next.

Nothing comes from nothing.

Everything comes from nothing.

Zero contains a wealth of concepts and yet it is nothing. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity – the void and the infinite. Zero has been rejected and exiled and yet it has always defeated those who opposed it.

Nothing is a profound problem. It has the potential to unsettle the very foundations of thinking in physics and philosophy – it forces us to ask the ultimate questions of the meaning of life.

Zero provides us a glimpse of the ineffable and the infinite – it is in fact infinity’s twin both equal and opposite, paradoxical and troublesome. 

Nothing really matters

Freddie Mercury

We moderns know that Nothing –no-thing - is really something because it occupies space and contains power. Our computer keyboard affirms this reality.

Yet in the West, during the late Middle Ages when tarot emerged, zero was a dangerous idea to be feared and outlawed. For nearly two millennia the West could not accept zero. It had had no place within the Pythagorean framework.

What shape could zero be? Its irrationality made non-sense of the Greeks neat and ordered universe, so Pythagoras and Aristotle rejected and ignored it.

The Medieval Christian scholars, who imported their ideas from the Greeks and Romans, included this fear of the infinite and horror of the void.

Satan was considered literally Nothing. 

The circulus – little circle – was the brand burned into the forehead or the cheeks of criminals in the Middle Ages.

You ain’t seen nothing yet

Al Jolson

In other parts of the world however, zero was embraced very early on. The Indian Hindus readily accommodated a wide variety of concepts about nothingness. Unlike Christianity and Judaism who sought to flee from the void as it was considered a state of poverty and anathema – the Indian religious traditions accepted non-being on an equal footing with that of being. Zero formed a coherent whole. Nothing was a state, from which one might have come and to which one might return. Furthermore, these transitions might occur many times – without beginning and without end. In Buddhist teachings, one sought to achieve Nirvana – the being at oneness with the cosmos.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams  

W. Shakespeare in Hamlet

Nevertheless, zero wormed its way into European society, firstly through its use by traders and merchants. The Muslim world had long accepted the wonderful zero and convinced the Jews that the Arabic counting system was far superior to Roman numerals. Throughout the 13^th century, Italian merchants began to put commercial pressure on their governments to eventually accept zero in the business world. 

Masolino 1425

Then artists took up zero’s cause. At exactly the time tarot appeared in Northern Italy, an Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the power of the infinite zero by painting a vanishing point. In  the 15th century he placed a zero point in the centre of his drawing of a Florentine building and thereby magically transformed Western art, turning two dimensional work into 3 dimensions.

Eventually the church and its scholars were forced into the realization that the earth is not the centre of the universe. Nicholas of Cusa and Nicolaus Copernicus cracked open the nutshell universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest

Leonardo da Vinci

In this millennium, the 2000s – the age of the ‘naughtys’  - the zero has become commonplace. There are many more zeros around today than when Tarot emerged into being and in fact, than anytime in history. Because of binary arithmetic, computer calculations and codes, astronomy’s billions of stars within the known universe, not to mention national debts – we are accustomed to the ubiquitous zero.

In our mathematics, we announce each decade with zero as that circular no-thing recycles and ushers in the next cycle i.e. from 9 to 10 or 19 to 20 and so on.

By adding a few zeros we increase our source of income. Add a few more zeros and the banks and speculators move us into hyper-inflation. We assume that zero moves us into infinity, as we take for granted that zero increases a number 10-fold, a hundred fold and on and on ad infinitum….

Much ado about nothing

Shakespeare

Where does zero’s Fool fit? Is s/he first or last in a sequence ?

Zero is neither below nor less than one. If we count forwards we generally start with number 1. Except for the Mayans, nobody had a year zero or started a month with day zero. To Europeans, that seems unnatural. Yet if we count backwards, it is second nature. – 9,8,7 … …O - we have liftoff!   The bomb goes off at ground zero. An important event happens at zero hour not at one hour.

Zero has become a commonplace - we name Year Zero as the time when the unspeakable began in Cambodia and Ground Zero in New York City marks an historical spot.

A baby turns one after a year’s life which surely means the baby was zero years old before that first birthday?

(3.Image January 1^st 2000 cartoon)

It is a silly, childish discussion and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated

The Times (London) December 26^th 1799

We Westerners left the Fool out when our calendar was devised – there is no year zero. Hence the wonderful joke of the third millennium with its spectacular world-wide opening ceremonies taking place a year early on December 31^st 1999, when really it began in the year 2001.

The Divine Bum - ‘’King of the Road”  

Like zero, Tarot emerged into early Rennaissance Europe and its Fool was pictured as crazy, mad and an itinerant

.The word fool comes from the Old French fol from the Latin follis meaning a “pair of bellows”or “a windbag”. The tarot Fool indeed often carries an inflated bladder. Today’s clowns sometimes carry a pair of bellows maintaining that ancient connection with the windy folly of their origins.

Visconti Fool -  early 15th century

Buffoon from the Latin buffo means toad and the Italian buffare  means “to puff” also suggesting a windbag.

The Fool’s French name Fou means madman and is cognate with the word fire, echoing the connection with light and energy. Folle means madwoman and Folie  means folly. In the Swiss deck, the Fool is called Le Mat meaning “the dull one”. 

In Italian Il Matto – the Mad One.

Often court fools were mentally retarded and therefore considered to have a special relationship to the spirit. Affectionately called “God’s folk” the village idiots were cared for by the community as they were considered under protection – touched by God.

Silly once meant blessed. To be “silly” in a Medieval sense meant to be holy and sensitive to religious impulse.

Mitelli Fool

Frequently the image of The Fool is shown in medieval and Renaissance engravings as a child of the Moon (La Luna ); the Fool as a luna-tic. The 17^th century Fool in the Mitelli deck from Bologna may be a lunatic.

Jester is a word that comes from the French and originally meant “someone who recites gestes or heroic tales”. This suggests an earlier role of fools being all-round Minstrels and troubadours. Many centuries later, the 20^th century “song and dance men” of Vaudeville, Burlesque, Music Hall, both pre-and post-television and moving pictures have entertained the masses royally.

The Fool was also at home in the Medieval Morality plays, free to move on and off the stage, improvising both with the other actors as well as with the audience. 

Harlequin and his mates Pantaloon, Scaramouche and Pulchinello of the Italian Commedia Dell’ Arte complete with their hectic slapstick craziness, derive from this foolish, time-honoured, theatrical tradition.

Commedia Dell'Arte at Carnivale Time in Venice

Clown is a native English word probably from the Celtic meaning  “ a boorish rustic” and cognate with the word “clod” meaning “country bumpkin” and used interchangeably with “Fool” in Elizabethan times. Circus clowns are known for their droll buffoonery.

None so deaf as those who won't hear

There have been many names for the Fool as there are colours in his crazy clothing. Buffoon, Harlequin, Joker, Droll, Zany, Punch, Vice, Puck, Jack Pudding and Merry Andrew are a few of his names in English.

Folly, Sister to Wisdom

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?

Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn

Images of the Fool were common in the Renaissance at the time the Tarot appeared in Europe. Literature, theatre and people’s daily life abounded with Fools. 

Feast of Fools Frans Floris the Elder 1540-70

The Fool was celebrated in folk festivals. Our modern April Fool’s Day is a pale left-over from the outrageous anarchic carnivals and Mardi Gras of Medieval times when the Lord Of Misrule overturned the strict hierarchies of the times at the Winter Solstice and on Holy Innocents’ Day. Foolery, drunkenness and cross-dressing ruled the day. Every small town and large city held a rowdy parade that a crowned Fool headed in triumph.

 

The Frolic of My Lord of Misrule 1655 (English)

Topsy-turvey ruled, gender-bending expected when even wives had license to beat their husbands.

Shall we try it this Xmas time 2014?

 

In the literature of the time, the Fool’s mother was called Folly and it is she who is sister to Wisdom. Shakespeare’s motto that a wise man knows he is a fool, recalls the famous assertion of Socrates, wisest of the Greeks, who said he knew only that he knew nothing.

20th century Tarot artist Brian Williams re-launched 15^th century Sebastian Brandt’s wonderful Das Narrenschiff - The Ship of Fools (written in1494) with his Tarot of Fools deck in 2002. The allegory of foolish humanity all in the same boat sailing oblivious through the world, seems especially poignant in this environmentally fragile era of our global village.

Erasmus the great Dutch humanist portrayed Folly as Goddess in his masterpiece In Praise of Folly published in 1511. To Erasmus, Folly encompassed all forms of Unreason and defended the “creative vital instincts of humanity against the encroachment of the analytical reason.

” For although Folly “may have no altars or temples, she is nevertheless the most universally worshipped and beloved and obeyed of all the deities who bear sway over human affairs.” Folly “fosters the pleasing allusions which make life possible”.

What would work without Folly? What would sex be? Folly is the very giver of life for is not the very act that brings humans into existence filled with folly?

The Court Jester

The revelation of laughter

T’were better Charity

To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb –

Merry and Nought, and gay and numb –

Than this smart Misery.

Emily Dickinson

Fools played a large part in medieval life and were an integral part of every feudal court. Sometimes they could even attain certain renown. Mattello was one such

famous fool. His name is derived from the Italian matto and he was the court fool to Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua.

Cleopatra's Feast. Jacob Jordans

Great Lords and Popes found a place for a Fool in their households and there s/he was kept in an honored position. The Fool’s job was to entertain their master and mistress and to remind him that like Caesar, he was only human and open to error. Theoretically at court, the poor Fool was the one person immune from retribution for quips at the master’s expense. However all too often s/he became the butt for cruel jokes, so s/he was also a scapegoat.

Dwarf jester. Velazquez

Fools come in all shapes and sizes, often absurd, grotesque physical specimens, which emphasized their role as an outsider. There were giant fool and dwarf fools. Jimmie Camber who lived in the early 1500s and was the pet dwarf of King James 5 of Scotland, was said to be “just over a yard high and two yards in girth” (round the waist).

There were learned fools who specialised in clever wordplay. Some university professors took part-time jobs as buffoons to supplement their meager teaching salaries. Buffoonery could pay so well, that many could give up teaching entirely. Some dwarf fools were prominent in other professions and many were lawyers.

Can you see my tongue in my cheek as we make the connections in our contemporary world?..….(Tim Minchin et al)

Both male and female could play the Fool. In the 1600’s Mathurine was the favorite fool of three French Kings.

Our modern-day equivalents – of which there are many  - are easy to spot! Each country and time period has ‘em. Our modern media is full of Fools.

 

Bottom or Simpleton

Taboo is the Fool’s terrain

The Fool, slippery as s/he is, can be divided roughly into two types, although s/he has the capacity to be in both camps.

 

Keying Up. William Merritt Chase. 1875

The Buffoon, like the clown is Shakespeare’s John Falstaff or Sir Tony Belch. Lots of noise, spiteful, full of guile, rapacious, lying, deceitful, greedy and drunken. 

Whilst we laugh at poor Bottom wearing asses ears in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream we are reminded that ignorance is the place we all start learning from.

We are familiar with the buffoon in drag in Pantomime or Capping Concerts. All Fools love to cross-dress and confound sexual stereotypes. Australia’s Dame Edna is a marvelous modern Buffoon/ Fool.

Buffoons thumb their noses and show their bottoms at convention and authority. Their tomfoolery includes iconoclasm, disrespect and subversion. Jennifer Saunders and Pamela Stephenson in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous are two buffoons spilling venom at the fashion industry and all other aspects of the filthy rich’s lifestyle.

 

Then there is the Holy Innocent, often a simpleton or saint-like Forrest Gump character. 

The Idiot in Dosteovesky’s book by the same name is a beautiful example. Prince Mishkin is an epileptic who “sees” things with a heightened awareness and personifies the redemptive power of simplicity plus faith.

Mentally and physically abnormal, a Fool is always an outsider who is set apart and therefore sees the world in a different way.

PoMo Tarot by Brian Williams

Without guild and malice, naïve, usually celibate often used as a foil to show up a corrupt society, the only person to speak but with no power to change the world.

Parsifal from the Arthurian legends was a great fool, relying on complete naive intuition. He was fool enough NOT to ask and eventually then to ask the one simple question that was needed to redeem the Wasteland.

Like the foolhardy youngest brother or sister in fairy tales who rushes in where angels fear to tread and by doing so, wins the hand of the princ/ess and the kingdom, the Fool’s approach to life combines wisdom AND folly, which can result in miracles.

The Fool harbors surprising depths. Either or neither, idiot or jester, he unites Shakespeare’s Caliban – willful, dark and unformed – and Ariel – capering, graceful and brilliant “from the sublime to the ridiculous”. Napoleon said “there is but a step between them” The Fool shows us how the sublime and the ridiculous are one and the same.

The Fool, like zero, employs and embodies paradox, the exception that does not deny the rule, but manages to escape it, or break it. S/he blurs distinctions, especially in the area of sexuality and spirituality. An ambiguous figure of fun, s/he can be both grossly obscene and (w)holy innocent. The Fool criticises the ego while celebrating the self. The Fool scatters certainty about sexual identity. The Fool often represents the marginalised and the dispossessed. Taboo is the Fool’s terrain. Nothing is sacred and comedy is his/her way of entering it.

The Fool is our guide who does not know where s/he is. A medieval text tells of the Fool Philip, who was given a new shirt by his master. Philip put on the shirt and ran all through the house asking everyone who he was, for he did not recognise himself in his new clothing.

And then there’s the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes – who speaks like the jester without punishment or censure… to the whole community trapped in illusion…. “But look, the Emperor is wearing no clothes!”

The Fool is the revelation of laughter and the embodiment of mirth. Laughter expresses a complex of derision, fear, triumph, outrage, sexuality and union.  Laughter happens when we are totally involved, absorbed in the moment and/or looking on as an observer, standing quite apart from the moment. Laughter breaks us out of ourselves and may restore proportion, whilst reflecting skepticism and credulousness. Often though, a fit of the giggles does NOT restore order, but increases the silliness of the moment. The Fool scorns our orthodoxies, and substitutes absurdities, encouraging us to believe them because s/he does. 

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.

Aeschylus

The Fool is also the most tragic figure of all. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Fool is the King’s constant companion witnessing the ultimate exposure and defeat of the King. King Lear is progressively stripped, first of his worldly power, then of ordinary human dignity, then of the necessities of life, to physical nakedness, helpless and abject as any animal. Then on the heath, as he loses even his sanity, the poor mad king is guided by his half-witted court jester. Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Fool is the impartial critic, the mouthpiece of truth and real sanity. Shakespeare invests Lear with motley and crowns the Fool.  In his dotage, King Lear cries “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools”.

 Contemporary Fools

….. fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Alexander Pope. Essay on Criticism.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Fools rush in where wise men never go…

Elvis Presley

The demise of the fool - at least as an institution and as an accepted part of the ruling classes’ everyday life - began in the 17^th century.  The 1790 image shows us a stern nymph admonishing the fool in ass’s ears. “Know Thyself she instructs…. Tut tut – the Age of Reason(?!)  and political correctedness is upon us.

From Marina Warner's From Beast to Blonde

Of course in the modern age the Fool is still within and without - everywhere we are surrounded by fools, Fools abound. Popular culture is their playground and they pop up wherever you may least expect them - in our music, on the radio and TV, and of course in the movies.

Nothing is real

Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles

Some of my favorite Fools are:-

Lewis Carrol was a fabulous Fool, as is his Book Alice in Wonderland itself.

Charlie Chaplin like Don Quixote tilting against reality, the little tramp is the quintessential fool… with his gift for self-mockery, exploiting his own absurdities without any apparent loss of self-esteem.

Jack Lemmon & Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot

Marilyn Monroe played The Fool in most of her movies where the Hollywood macho machine forced her into being the dumb child blonde. However she transcended her sex-objectification in roles such as Some Like it Hot or Diamonds are a Girls’ Best Friends with her comedic sense of timing and naivety in taking things at their face or literal value. Her waif-like vulnerability was often ingenuously,  genuinely funny.

Peter Sellers,  Mae West, Judy Holliday, Lucille Ball,

Guiletta Masina (Fellini’s wife in her role in his masterpiece movie La Strada ) all fit the bill.

Danny Kaye – one of my all-time favorite Fools.

Danny Kaye & Bing Crosby

The great Sammy Davis Junior, Vaudeville and Music hall “song and dance man”

Jack Nicolson’s The Joker in the movie Batman 

 He has no past and is never seen without the wild make-up of a joker in a deck of cards.

 Billy T. James in his brilliant rendition as The Mexican Kid in the immortal NZ movie Came a Hot Friday .

Jim Carrey in The Truman Show  plays a classic Fool, Peewee’s Big Adventure is a memorable movie tribute to the Fool.

Rowan Atkinson and company in the BlackAdder series and John Cleese in Fawlty Towers,  Billy Connolly, Stephen Fry, Miranda and Russell Brand are all hilarious fools.

Buster Keaton

And then there are the groups of fools and eccentrics - the Buffoons; the Keystone Cops in the 1930s, The Marx Brothers 1940’s, the Carry On Films from the 1950s, Spike Milligan and The Goons 1950s, Dad’s Army and The Hillbilly’s 1960s TV, The Young Ones 1980s.

And the inimitable Monty Python – their classic ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (and Death)’ as they swing from the crosses of Gethsemene in the Movie Life of Brian

And then there’s real life….

The hippies and the young at heart of all ages, wearing a medley of colours affecting rags and patches, baubles and bells. Maybe the motley of psychedelic colours of the ‘60s and ‘70s presaged a new dawn of consciousness for all of us? Remember those cries – oxymorons all – of “free love” and “make peace not war” while sticking flowers down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns…. Ah how foolish we were! Pied Pipers and Peter Pans all.

Banksy the graffiti artist continues the great tradition of mocking the establishment.

Backpackers, wanderers traveling around with all their worldly goods slung over their shoulder. Tramps, hobos, transvestites, cross-dressers…. Fools are punks and drunks, the social outcasts, the homeless, the bawds – the Fool is us.

The centre of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one’s imagination can make sense of.

Margaret Atwood

The King and his court can be a lovely symbol for the inner world of our psyche. The child/fool criticizes or resists the King, who stands for our adult ego - while celebrating the innocent self. S/he is equally at home in the everyday world of ‘reality’ where most of us try to live most of the time, and in the non-verbal world of the imagination where we visit not nearly enough.

Like Puck, Oberon’s Jester  in Midsummers Night’s Dream, the Fool connects the two worlds of reality and imagination. Puck mixes them up and makes fun of waking consciousness.

“Lord what fools these mortals are!”

Shakespeare

The Fool’s world is often bizarre and delights in illusion and the imaginary. It is the Cheshire cat’s grin. It destroys logic and entertains in puzzle. It lies in the singularity of the Big Bang and the heart of black holes. The Fool will always have the last laugh.

Let us celebrate and crown our own Fool. “Ask – “where’s the Fool in my life?

Who’s the Fool in my family or workplace, the community, the funny old world?”

Let’s skip into and through our own lives, looking for the Fool, playing the Fool, being the Fool.

“Esser come il Matto nel tarocchi”

(to be like the tarot Fool – all over the place, at home everywhere and nowhere)

From the Chrysalis

My cocoon tightens, colours tease.

I’m feeling for the air:

A dim capacity for wings

Degrades the dress I wear.

A power of butterfly must be

The aptitude to fly.

Meadows of majesty concedes

And easy sweeps of sky.

So I must baffle at the hint

And cipher at the sign.

And make much blunder, if at last

I take the dew divine.

Emily Dickinson

Please excuse changes of font size and weird layout. The Fool is at work - the blog software is misbehaving and I am sick of trying to fix it!

Bibliography  Books and  Magazines – (authors listed alphabetically)

FOOLS PLAYS  A study of Satire in the Sottie by Heather Arden. Cambridge University Press 1980.

THE BOOK OF NOTHING by John d. Barrow. Vintage 2000.

SAMBO The Rise and Demise of an American Jester by Joseph Boskin. Oxford University Press 1986.

THE KING’S FOOL A Book about Medieval and Rennaissance Fools. By Dana Fradon. Duttons Children’s Books 1993.

THE FOOL - THE CLOWN – THE JESTER by Fred Fuller. From Gnosis a Journal of Western Inner Traditions No. 19 Spring 1991.

THE DEVIL’S PICTUREBOOK by Paul Huson Abacus Press 1971.

MYSTICAL ORIGINS OF THE TAROT From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage by Paul Huson. Destiny Books 2004

JUNG AND THE TAROT An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols. Samuel Weiser Inc 1980.

ZERO The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. Souvenir Press 2000

CRAFTSMAN OF CHAOS by Lynda Sexson from Parabola. Myth and the Quest For Meaning. The Trickster Vol 4 No. 1 Tamarack Press.

THE WOMAN’S ENCLYOPAEDIA OF MYTHS AND SECRETS  by Barbara Walker. Harper San Francisco 1983.

FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE On Fairytales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner. Chatto and Windus 1994.

THE FOOL  His Social and Literary History by Enid Welsford. Gloucester Mass. 1966.

BOOK OF FOOLS by Brian Williams Llewellyn Publications 2002

WOMEN ON TOP  Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe. From Society and Culture in Early Modern France by Natalie Zemon Davis. Sanford University Press 1975.