174

THE PAGEANTS

the device is combined with the tradition of the pageantic castle.
The ball or wheel are ancient symbols of the fortunes of life.227
The motif was exploited to the full by medieval and Renaissance
artists,228 particularly for satiric purposes. In the woodcut for
Chapters 37 and 56 of the Narrenschifi, "Von gluckes fall," and
"Von end des gewalttes," the wheel, with three fool-asses on it,
is turned by a pull on a cord held by a large hand. Hans Burgk-
mair's wheel of fortune in his illustrations to Petrarch's De
remediis utriusque Fortunae bears the following pointed text in-
terpreting the four asses:229
Ad alta vehor
glorior elatus
descendo mortificatus
axi rotor
A broadside issued to the peasants in 1525, "An die versamlung
gemayner pawerschafft,"230 pictures Fortuna turning her wheel,
her victim being a knight in agony, while peasants and knights
look on; the caption on the Flugsckrift reads: "Hie ist des
Glucksradts stund vnd zeyt/ Gott wayst wer der oberist bleybt."
Perhaps a rime such as this, or one with carnivalesque nonsense
in it, was shouted by the Ldufer as their Holle sped along. As a
tableau, Fortune's wheel, with painted or plastic figures fixed to it,
had appeared in the Thirteenth Century in Adam's Jeu de la
Feuillee; here the wheel rolled several well-known citizens of
Arras "dessous desseure."231 In the fourteenth-century morality
Bien-Advise et Mal-A dvise the four figures on the wheel represent
the cycle: "Regnabo, Regno, Regnavi, Sum sine regno.232 A play
227 Cf. K. Weinhold, Glucksrad und Lebensrad, Abhandlungen der Kdniglichen
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1892, Philosophisch-historische Classe, Abh.
I, 9; H. R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1927), pp. 147ft. Stumpfl (Kultspiele), pp. 369-70, refers to
several examples of the wheel of fortune in folk-processions and customs (Austria,
Brittany), and relates the wheel to the ancient sun-wheel (Sonnenrad, Glucksrad,
Jahresrad).
228 Cf. Patch, op. cit., pp. 154ft.
229 Cf. Hirth, I, Fig. 354; cf. also Geisberg (Buchillustration), Heft 8, Tafel 373:
H. Burgkmair, Gliicksrad (1516).
230 Cf. Zoepfl, I, Bild 1; the sheet was printed in Nuremberg.
231 Cf. Adam le Bossu, Le Jeu de la Feuillee, op. cit., pp. 34-6; Driesen, pp. 49-51.
232 Cf. Petit de Julleville, La Comedie et les Moeurs en France au Moyen Age
(Paris: L. Cerf, 1886), pp. 81-3. For excerpts of the text cf. F. Parfait, Histoire
du Theatre Francois (Paris: Mercier et Saillant, 1745), II, 113-44.