i66

THE PAGEANTS

the erotic garden of Venus and the lovers around a table in a
bower, much as they are depicted in our miniature.184 Pageantic
representations of the court and tournament of love date from the
Thirteenth Century,185 while the pageant-car of Venus was a part
of the mythological triumphs of the Renaissance.186 The pageant
of love in the spring carnival would also seem to be a survival of
the ancient magical marriage;187 German folklore knows the
mock marriage in customs in which the union of the sexes in the
fields is meant to influence vegetation.188 The report by the chron-
icler Heinrich Deichsler of such a mock Beilager in a Nuremberg
pageant in the year 1506 has already been cited;189 here a mar-
riage among peasants was mimed. The love-making on the Venus-
berg pageant appears to be a sophistication of the primitive
custom; in the Schembartlauj it is fused with the tradition of the
court of love.
The cast of characters in our text seems to indicate that a car-
nival play developed out of the pantomime of love, performed
either on the same Hblle, or following it on another sleigh,190
with some of the action no doubt taking place around the Hblle
on a market-place as in the Corpus Christi pageants. It is the
year following the date of Hans Sachs' "Das hoffgesindt Ven-
184 Cf. F. Crisp, op. cit., I, Figs. 21, 40, 41, 122-3, 218; II, Figs. LXIII, CLXII;
Hirth, I, 288-94; Marle, II, 426-32, Figs. 453-9.
185 Cf. Neilson, op. cit., pp. 253-6, 265f.; Welsford (Court Masque), pp. 120-1,
125-6; Neri, p. 64.
186 Venus appeared with Cupid in a pageant of the Fountain of Youth in 1484
during a royal entry at Reims, cf. J. Chartrou, Les Entrees solonelles et triomphales
a la Renaissance (1481-1551) (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1928),
p. 50. For Venus in pageants on the theme of the Judgment of Paris, cf. With-
ington, I, 169, n. 1 (Edinburgh, 1503), 183 (London, 1533); cf. also ibid., pp. 211,
220; II, 42. Attention has been drawn by Walz to the description by Ulrich Wirsch-
ung of a Venusberg pageant in the Nuremberg carnival of 1588, as recounted
by Vulpius in his Curiositdten, X, 390-407; cf. J. A. Walz, "A German Faust Play of
the Sixteenth Century," Germanic Review, III (Jan. 1928), 8. The pageant repre-
sented a shell drawn by doves, and on it were Venus and Tannhauser surrounded
by beautiful maidens and carousing courtiers. A Venusberg appeared in the
Dusseldorf carnival in 1852, cf. Withington, II, 147.
187 Cf. Frazer, II, 129-45 (The Marriage of the Gods); Rudwin, p. 13.
188 Ibid., II, 104; Fehrle, p. 66. For similar customs among other peoples cf.
Frazer, II, 82-96, 97-119; IV, 237; V, 251.
189 Supra, p. 138.
190 In some MSS the Hblle is described as two Mounts of Love; cf. MS No.
21, f. 449; "die hell, so zwen Venusberg gewest."