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This, plus the inherent drive of the religious reformations, made them work towards the disenchantment of the world, and the abolition of society based on hierarchical equilibrium, whether that of élite and mass, or that we find reflected in the Carnival, and the “world turned upside down”. Indeed, the hostility to Carnival and such-like remains of popular culture is one of the evident points in common between religious and secular re-orderings. In the perspective of élites of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world upside down of Carnival was neither a subject of amusement, nor a salutary correction for élite pride, nor an “air-hole” (safety valve), nor a recognition of the depth and many-sidedness of human life. It was simply an image of, and an invitation to sin. Starting with Brant’s Ship of Fools, a stream of writing, painting (Bosch, Breughel), illustrations begin to moralize this theme of reversal. It is in the end no laughing matter. Indeed, the world
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