Carnival in Late Medieval Italian Sermons: A Time of Overeating in Pagan Fashion

This article focuses on two important collections of Quinquagesima sermons from northern Italy. The first one is Jacobus de Voragine’s Sermones de tempore (c. 1270), where one finds one of the earliest detailed descriptions of behaviours which were typical of Carnival, including the condemnation of banquets and overeating. According to Jacobus, they represented dangerous replicas of pagan festivals, traditionally characterized by the excessive consumption of food (meat, in particular), uncontrolled leisure and a total absence of the fear of God. The second source is a cycle of Lent sermons which Bernardinus of Feltre preached in 1493. Bernardinus shows that, two centuries after Jacobus, the reputation of Carnival had not improved in the slightest in northern Italy: on the contrary, Carnival banquets were still compared with pagan festivals, though they were considered even worse than pagan idolatry for Christians were supposed to behave more soberly than mere idolaters.