Some social historians theorize that what we know as “Carnival” today probably evolved out of the unruly May Day festivities. Here, the motive for “the repression of collective joy” (Ehrenreich) could very well be that the medieval and premodern May Day festivities often mocked the authorities with “rituals of inversion,” which turned the social order and its rules upside down. This is what is meant by “the transgressive nature of carnivalesque.” Thus, these transgressive festivities (which social historians call “carnivalesque”) increasingly gain a political edge after the Middle Ages, from the sixteenth century on, in what is known today as the early modern pe­riod. It is then that large numbers of people begin to use the masks and noises of their traditional festivities as a cover for armed rebel­lion. Thus, the Carnival theme of “the world turned upside down” meant that the underclass, the commoners, could not only take the advantage over their elite rulers of both church and state during the festivals of misrule but, more importantly, that they could imagine radical social change on a permanent basis and not just for a few festive hours.This is why social historians of this period refer to all such transgressive festivities, especially May Day, under the classification of “carnival” or, more properly, “carnivalesque.”