Jester's privilege is the ability and right of a jester to talk and mock freely without being punished. As an acknowledgement of this right, the court jester had symbols denoting their status and protection under the law: the crown (cap and bells) and scepter (marotte), mirroring the royal crown and scepter wielded by a monarch. [1][2]
Martin Luther used jest in many of his criticisms against the Catholic Church.[3] In the introduction to his To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, he calls himself a court jester, and, later in the text, he explicitly invokes the jester's privilege when saying that monks should break their chastity vows.[3]
References
- ^ "Medieval Jesters – And their Parallels in Modern America". History is Now Magazine, Podcasts, Blog and Books | Modern International and American history. Retrieved 2022-02-18.
- ^ Billington, Sandra. “A Social History of the Fool,” The Harvester Press, 1984. ISBN 0-7108-0610-8
- ^ a b Hub Zwart (1996), Ethical consensus and the truth of laughter: the structure of moral transformations, Morality and the meaning of life, vol. 4, Peeters Publishers, p. 156, ISBN 9789039004128
- The King's Jester: Modern style, Albert Jay Nock, Harper's Magazine, March 1928
- Alla: the Jester-Queen of Russian pop culture
- The London Quarterly Review
- The wit of Martin Luther
- The new international encyclopæeia, Volume 5
- Hub Zwart (1999) The truth of laughter: Rereading Luther as a contemporary of Rabelais. Dialogism. An International Journal of Bakhtin Studies, 1 (3), 52-77. [1]