Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes Towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, 1350-1700

Recreation in the Renaissance Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675 Alessandro Arcan...

Author: Alessandro Arcangeli

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Recreation in the Renaissance Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675

Alessandro Arcangeli

Recreation in the Renaissance

Also by Alessandro Arcangeli DAVIDE O SALOMÈ? Il dibattito europeo sulla danza nella prima età moderna

Recreation in the Renaissance Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, c. 1425–1675 Alessandro Arcangeli Lecturer in Early Modern History Department of History, Arts and Geography University of Verona

© Alessandro Arcangeli 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–98453–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arcangeli, Alessandro. Recreation in the Renaissance : attitudes towards leisure and pastimes in European culture c. 1425–1675 / Alessandro Arcangeli p. cm. – (Early modern history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–98453–6 (cloth) 1. Leisure – Europe – History. 2. Recreation – Europe – History. 3. Renaissance. I. Title. II. Early modern history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) GV73.A73 2003 791¢.094–dc21 2003054870 10 9 8 7 12 11 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vii

Preface

viii

1 Introduction Games and leisure between history and social theory

1 4

2 The Need for Recreation Paradise lost A saint, an archer and his bow (story of an exemplum) A right to be idle?

10 10 12 14

3 The Medical Discourse Motion and rest Ancient and modern forms of exercise ‘The manner of governing health’ Amor et alea

18 18 23 32 36

4 The Moral Discourse Reason versus Joy A virtue to remember A view from Paris Games without a chance The ethics of the audience Juego(s) A time for play?

46 47 48 52 55 61 65 68

5 Games and Law Ius commune De ludo Panem et circenses The regulation of extravagance

73 74 76 81 85

6 Varieties of Pastimes Leisure and social hierarchy Plaisirs des dames Children’s games Medieval and Renaissance taxonomies v

89 89 93 100 108

vi

Contents

7 Conclusion

116

Appendix: the European Vocabulary of Recreation

128

Notes

133

Bibliography

157

Index

173

List of Figures 3.1 ‘Cantus’, from Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS series nova 2396, fol. 34. Photo: Bildarchiv, ÖNB Wien 24 3.2 ‘Oscellae vel petaurum’, from H. Mercurialis, De arte gymnastica libri sex, 4th edn (Venice, 1601), p. 164 26 3.3 ‘Schoinobates, funaboli’, from Mercurialis, De arte gymnastica, p. 148 27 3.4 Engraved frontispiece of P. Justus, De alea libri duo (Amsterdam: L. Elzevirium, 1642). Cambridge University Library, Kkk.230. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 44 4.1 Frontispiece of Bernardino da Siena, La petite dyablerie dont Lucifer est le chef et les membres sont tous les ioueurs iniques et pecheurs reprouves, intitule Leglise des mauvais (Paris: the widow of J. Trepperel and J. Jeannot, 1520). London, British Library, C.53.h.9.1. By permission of the British Library 57 6.1 La tenture de la Vie Seigneuriale: La Promenade. Tapestry, early sixteenth-century. Paris, Musée du Moyen-Age – Cluny. Photo: RMN–Franck Raux 99 6.2 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games. Oil on panel, 118 ¥ 161 cm., 1560. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum 102–3 6.3 ‘Le Brelan’, from J. Stella, Les jeux et plaisirs de l’enfance, engraved by C. Bouzonnet-Stella (Paris: Stella, 1667; repr. Geneva and Paris: Slatkine, 1981), fol. 31 105

vii

Preface This work springs from a previous book of mine, which was concerned with cultural attitudes towards dance in a variety of texts – ethical, medical and ethnographical – from late medieval and early modern Europe. When, about ten years ago, I started to look at neighbouring topics, in order to better understand the cultural framework within which my sources conceived and interpreted dance, play and leisure appeared to be the most frequent associates (rather than, say, religion and ritual, or music and theatre). While I was moving my first steps in this direction, a thought-provoking contribution by Peter Burke on ‘The invention of leisure in early modern Europe’ was published both within the proceedings of an international conference of economic history and as an article for Past and Present. Consequently, although the origins of this book are rooted in my own itinerary of research, it can also be read as a development of the agenda set by Burke (the reader of us both will notice that I am indebted to many of his hypotheses and recommendations). Work on the project became more systematic thanks to a Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence, 1998/99), and a Research Fellowship from my faculty at the University of Verona (1999–2001). With the former I concentrated on Italian material, with the latter I extended the work via a series of European comparisons. The title of my Florentine project, ‘Studies in the historical anthropology of leisure’, should be taken as a caveat for the reader of the present volume: in a mine of potentially unlimited sources, I can only hope to have considered an intelligent selection. I would also like to thank the Harvard University Center at Villa I Tatti for subsequently awarding me a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Special Project Grant (2001/02), which helped me in completing my research and collecting material for this book. Over the past few years, I presented the general outlook and/or specific aspects of my work-in-progress in research seminars and conferences at the Universities of Rotterdam, Verona, Geneva and Cambridge (Emmanuel College). During the process of writing and publishing with Palgrave Macmillan I have incurred many debts, which I wish to thankfully acknowledge here. The editors of the present series, Rab Houston and viii

Preface ix

Ed Muir, took an early interest in this project and trusted me from the time when there was yet little to read. Ed Muir read the whole manuscript at different stages and provided me with helpful advice and constructive criticism, as did Peter Burke. Among the editorial staff, Luciana O’Flaherty and John M. Smith have played an important role in turning a project into an actual book. I dedicate this book to my wife Marion, who for many years has had to put up with the blurring between my own leisure and work time. Cambridge and Verona Note Every effort has been made to contact the copyright-holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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1 Introduction

The overall hypothesis that holds this book together is the idea that during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a distinctive leisure culture was elaborated in Europe, which presents obvious connections with precedent and subsequent developments, but is nonetheless distinguishable from both. Chronology does not easily allow for clear cuts, and the variety of phenomena involved each have their own timing. Nevertheless there is a significant synchronicity in a number of fields, from the attention that moralists, jurists and physicians paid to the world of leisure activities to the development of a specific vocabulary and the multiplication of the visual representation of the subject. To introduce a book on recreation in the Renaissance, the first question that requires an answer has to be: is the topic, recreation, defined in the language of the sources or in modern terms? Or, to borrow the vocabulary that the social sciences have adopted from linguistics, is it taken in an emic or etic perspective?1 The first option concentrates on mental structures, that is, attempts, with all the difficulties implicit in the task, to infer from the sources what people thought (in this case, what they took to be ‘recreation’). The second starts from the vocabulary and world-view of the observer, rather than of the people observed. This does not necessarily mean that it implies an anachronism (it will do so only if the modern scholar ignores, either unconsciously or deliberately, the historical differences in the meaning of the relevant vocabulary). It may simply mean that clarity of the definition of the object of enquiry is established in order to better observe how people of past (or from contemporary, culturally different) civilizations behaved, which of the social practices that we regard as relevant for our purpose were in use, and in what manner. 1

2


I believe that to some extent both the perspectives have to be present, particularly if one is examining a period that witnessed a transformation in the meaning of key words and the emergence of new ones. Neither viewpoint would be entirely satisfactory or allow us to give full account of such changes, by either excluding objects that other categories would consider relevant, or vice versa including others from a different respect irrelevant. However, my orientation is predominantly in favour of the emic pole of the dichotomy, which could also be labelled as the viewpoint from inside, for a variety of reasons. What people thought was recreation, what they thought they were doing when they took some, is the most accurate description of that which my research aims to establish. A modern, clear-cut definition of that which we regard as included in and excluded from the category of ‘recreation’ would have helped in searching for given patterns of behaviour among the people of the past. But a social history of pastimes is a wide ranging subject, it has been attempted with unsatisfactory results (superficial, anecdotal), it would be hard to achieve on a large geographical and chronological scale, and it goes beyond the means and the purposes of the present writer. What the reader will find here, instead, is a cultural history of what past civilizations meant by and thought about recreation, with undoubted, indeed necessary, connections with actual practices, but nonetheless focused on linguistic and mental structures. Having said so, we will soon take into serious consideration modern scholarship on leisure and recreation, since awareness of historiographic findings and debates will help in setting the scene of the book. By entitling his recent innovative study Leisure and (rather than ‘in’) Ancient Rome, J.P. Toner has convincingly stressed how deeply reconsideration of the past and of the present categories reciprocally interact in the writing of history.2 As for the other ‘R’ word in the title, the Renaissance, its use in this context is predominantly that of a generic indicator of the chronological and geographical setting of the study: late medieval and early modern Europe. While the Renaissance as a cultural phenomenon is not as such at the centre of my analysis on this occasion, it will play a role too. This is inevitable, if one considers that leisure activities also appeared in the founding text of the very historiographic notion of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt’s essay of 1860, where the subject of one of the main sections is ‘Society and festivals’.3 While the book focuses on the period given in the subtitle (c. 1425–1675), a number of excursions on earlier material have proved necessary in order to establish traditions on which later authors rested and which they elaborated (while

Introduction 3

post-1700 texts are predominantly present in the form of secondary sources – although a neat distinction between what constitutes primary, and what secondary, material is not always necessary, or possible). I should probably state from the beginning that I do not regard gambling as a central issue in my inquiry. This is worth mentioning, since in this orientation I depart from a significant number of writers, both early and late modern (that is, some of my sources as well as many recent scholars). The European vocabulary of play (see, for instance, the Latin ludus, French jeu, Italian gioco, Spanish juego) does include gambling as one of its characteristic meanings, and gambling has often been associated with the playing of games. However, gambling per se can be recreational only in a loose sense of the word. Firstly, because if the reason of an activity is the (expected) gain, that means that it is performed for reasons other than relaxation and amusement. Recreation does not consist in a given set of thoughts, speech acts and gestures; it is rather defined by the spirit or reason why someone performs them. The latter distinction brings with it a second point: if, in the pursuit of gain, someone devotes so much time and energy to gambling that it becomes their main occupation, this mere fact raises serious doubts about the possibility of properly regarding them as playing (I may sound here worryingly similar to early modern moralists, but I think they had a point). The case of ‘leisure classes’, whose members by definition do not need to work, is, from this respect, problematic; but nobody would claim that a professional footballer, when playing according to a contract, is just having a bit of fun.4 Having said so, I must acknowledge not only that a significant share of the historiography of play has predominantly dealt with gambling, but also that for many early modern writers the financial implications of play were the main reason for discussing it. Therefore I shall briefly consider this element wherever it appears and is relevant, not least since my preference for the emic approach, or viewpoint from inside, obliges me to do so. Other topics and material will also have limited consideration here, since any serious attempt to study them would require (and does obtain from other scholars) more than cursory attention. Among these I should mention imaginative literature (as a source), the practice of reading (as a leisurely occupation), the specific worlds of music and of the arts, ritual (festivals, carnival, misrule, rough music/charivari, ritual battles – a historiographic issue in its own right, despite the fact that individuals and groups would surely have engaged in most of these practices for fun). As the preceding observations will have sufficiently indicated, the aim

4


of this book is not a reconstruction of the pastimes that were in use in Europe a few hundred years ago. I am aware that some familiarity with the historical vocabulary of leisure is necessary in order to understand the meaning of texts. However, nowadays there is no shortage of people researching into the details of actual historical practices, with the aim of allowing them to be brought back to life – not least in the interests of the European tourist industry, increasingly keen to attract visitors with the display of scenes from everyday life of the past: from a medieval parade, to a Renaissance banquet or a baroque dance. Without entering into cheap psycho-sociology, it can be easy to imagine that for common people who – in today’s Italian cities and villages – so frequently dress up in costume, being a prince or a duchess at weekends may offer an emotional substitute to the discontent of ordinary life.5 Also, the invention of such traditions is less of a superficial phenomenon than it might appear at first glance, since it seems to play a significant part in the personal and collective identities of the people involved. But, to go back to the point, in the rest of this book we will be concerned with what past societies thought they were doing when they spent part of their time in recreation, rather than with what they actually did and how. The quest for ‘reasons’ behind the behaviour of past (or, for that matter, present) actors is clearly problematic. A good deal of scholars understandably regard such a quest as outside their territory of enquiry, as it can lead dangerously to make assumptions about people’s motives that by definition cannot be verified. However, as I have just stated, there is not a single pattern of human action that constitutes per se, by its physical description, ‘recreation’: only a social context and a cultural assignment of meaning can make it perceived as such. Therefore, no study of the history of our phenomenon can avoid some consideration at least of the sets of motives and purposes that were alleged by contemporary practitioners and observers.

Games and leisure between history and social theory Before moving our clocks back to the time of my source material, let us briefly examine modern classifications of the spectrum of recreation, since they will not only provide us with a first set of internal distinctions, but also help to define the external limits of the object of my analysis. Systematic enquiry into the full anthropological meaning of play is usually acknowledged to have started with Johan Huizinga’s work, in the 1930s. The Dutch cultural historian – who also drew the

Introduction 5

reader’s attention to aspects of everyday life that are relevant to our topic in other ground-breaking volumes of his, such as The Waning of the Middle Ages – deserves this special mention particularly on the grounds of the book he specifically devoted to the subject of play, Homo Ludens.6 By punning with the scientific name for the human species, Huizinga was seriously advocating a reconsideration of the role and comparative importance of play in the human condition. While the author had expressed curiosity for the topic as early as in his doctoral dissertation (1897), the first draft of Homo Ludens was his oration as Chancellor of the University of Leiden in 1933 (to the twentiethcentury mind, a year that brings everything to memory but play). When Huizinga presented the topic at subsequent conferences, both in London and in the German-speaking world, he repeatedly had to fight the tendency of his hosts to entitle his subject as ‘the play element in culture’. In his wording, instead, his enquiry concerned the play element of culture. The difference may seem subtle. For Huizinga, however, it meant that he was not merely picking play as one element of culture among and beside others; rather, he was investigating to what extent the whole spectrum of our culture may ultimately derive from an ancestral human impetus to play. His attitude, therefore, is only to an extent that of a historian. One section of the book does indeed present a diachronical overview of European culture from antiquity onwards; but for the rest of its pages, Homo Ludens resembles a philosophical investigation on human nature – a perspective from which other Continental thinkers of the twentieth century considered the world of play (Hans Georg Gadamer, Eugen Fink).7 More precisely, as has been shown by his critics, the author’s deep religious concerns turned him into a passionate critic of his time. Thus the book, by paying attention to a ‘spiritual’ aspect of human life, is meant as an attack against materialism; its final appeal to God, as the only way out of the opposition between play and ‘in earnest’, also clearly belongs in such a moral and cultural battle.8 In that respect Huizinga’s work can be perceived as dated: historians of subsequent generations have usually preferred to refrain both from a similar level of generalization, and from the ideologically burdened expression of their prognosis of the evils that affect humankind and prescription of the means to cure them. Huizinga’s most refreshing contribution was his ability to bring together a series of aspects of human life that do not immediately display connections with one another, and recognize a ‘play element’ in such fields as law, war, poetry, art and so on. This can be seen at the same time as a point of strength and a weakness of his book. Twenty

6


years later, Roger Caillois found that Huizinga’s notion of play was at the same time too broad and too narrow. It was too broad because it did not introduce a clear distinction between play and other spheres of human activity. It was too narrow because it concentrated only on the element of competition, while according to Caillois’s influential categorization there are three more different factors (and subsequent families) of play, namely chance, mimesis and vertigo. Caillois combined these four categories with other elements – for instance, in one table, with the continuum that goes from improvisation (paidia) to a rule (ludus), purely chosen for the pleasure that one may derive from facing self-imposed difficulties. The result is an articulated general theory of games that has been welcomed by many scholars.9 His theory allows Caillois to propose both a sociology of play and a more ambitious sociological approach to human behaviour that uses the categories of play to identify general characteristics of human behaviour. In the 1960s, Jacques Ehrmann provided a combined philosophical critique of the relation between play and culture as stated by both Huizinga and Caillois, as well as by the linguist Émile Benveniste. He showed how these interpretations are based on a series of oppositions – between play and serious ‘ordinary life’, play and the sacred, play and work – all of which take for granted a distinction between what is real and what is imaginary; such distinction, instead, should be put into question, if we really want to understand more about the nature of play. On the whole, play appears as a luxury, an inessential adornment: life would substantially be the same without it. More specifically, play is set by those authors in a (metaphysically) separate sphere, its relation with ‘the real’ being that of an ideal taming the potentially destructive tendencies of human beings. Ehrmann also denounces the circularity and contradiction of a position that at the same time sees play as a civilizing force and then finds modern society as becoming progressively more ‘serious’. Play is assimilated to a remote stage of history where it pervaded the whole of human culture; to a type of mentality which is ‘infantile, animal, savage, visionary, as opposed to an adult, “civilized”, reasonable mentality’; to a type of behaviour and a form of awareness that are illogical – all of which traits have left us in the course of the process of rationalization. Although the theorists reviewed by Ehrmann tended to distinguish play from the sacred, and locate the former in a grey area between the sacred and the real, it is also clear that Caillois and others linked the fate of play to that of the sacred: they are both seen as the victims of increasing secularization. As a literary critic, Ehrmann advocated a deconstruction of this series of oppositions,

Introduction 7

which could exploit the power of play to escape constraints and definitions; and thus a reconsideration of critical methods that apprehended play and reality together.10 In their Quest for Excitement, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning – who at Leicester pioneered the sociological study of sport – provided a stimulating classification of spare-time activities via two subsequent lists. A preliminary classification – which dates from a conference paper delivered in 1967 – included private work and family management, rest, catering for biological needs, sociability, and the class of mimetic or play activities. The main headings of the later, more comprehensive ‘spare-time spectrum’ are ‘spare-time routines’, ‘intermediary spare-time activities mainly serving recurrent needs for orientation and/or self-fulfilment and self-expansion’, and lastly ‘leisure activities’. The intermediary group includes, for instance, voluntary work, private study, news reading or listening, and religious activities. Leisure activities are, in turn, divided into ‘purely or mainly sociable activities’, ‘ “mimetic” or play activities’, and ‘miscellaneous less highly specialized leisure activities, largely of a pleasurable de-routinizing character and often multi-functional’, such as holiday travelling or eating out. It may prove quite difficult to use such broad categories directly as historical research tools. However, the theoretical reflection provided by the two sociologists can help in identifying and interpreting a variety of topics that, needless to say, in the past have been considered separately and/or reorganized into different groups (consequently, one has to look for traces of them in various types of source and disciplinary contexts). One of Elias and Dunning’s primary purposes was to distinguish between the more specific field of leisure activities and the broader range of spare time, and by doing so to criticize the commonplace simplistic opposition between leisure and work: when people do not work, they engage in numerous other activities; the function of leisure needs therefore more specific investigation. Elias and Dunning’s answer is to explore the particular sort of excitement that seems to be experienced in many of these activities; the result is an analysis that is significantly elaborated in a dialogue with Aristotle’s theory of theatrical catharsis. Although the relevant passages of his Poetics have proved challenging to interpreters and historically produced a variety of different readings, Aristotle’s well-known reflection on the experience of assisting at the performance of a Greek tragedy could be summarized as follows. Music and drama have the power of affecting the audience, by causing the psychic equivalent to a purgation of the body: the theatrical imitation of events causes a tension, which however is controlled and successfully

8


resolved by the competent use of artistic techniques. Elias and Dunning find something similar occurs in leisure activities. They do not simply ‘relax’. On the contrary, people seem to prefer activities that cause some tension. They also sit down, watch television and do little else; however, in the classification proposed by the two sociologists, this use of spare time belongs to mere rest, not to the specific class of mimetic or play activities. (A sociologist who commented on a survey on spare time in the United States in the 1950s, S. de Grazia, found most of the activities which people performed outside work as not leisurely, and subsequently contested the dominant assumption that fewer hours spent at the workplace automatically mean or ensure more leisure.) The difference from ‘real life’ is that this particular sort of tension provokes some pleasure, and usually is successfully managed (although it could go astray and lead to unsatisfactory results for a variety of reasons). Elias and Dunning’s case studies are taken from the history of fox-hunting and of football (including the latter’s medieval and early modern ancestor).11 By setting the rise of modern sports within the context of a historical sociology of Western civilization, to a certain extent Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, in spite of their methodological awareness and subtle analysis, have proceeded on similar lines as the theorists criticized by Ehrmann: they could therefore be subjected to the same range of objections (inappropriate separation between play and other social experiences, ambiguous civilizing role of play in history). Some subsequent scholarship has aimed at correcting these limits. A methodological leitmotiv of Elias’s was ‘figurational’ sociology, that is, the idea that individual and society would be better understood if studied as a whole, without a primacy of either element, as a web of independent people bonded together in different ways. This approach is one of the cultural influences that shaped the research style of another German scholar, Henning Eichberg, a man whose political orientation (first towards the far right, then to the new left and green movement) and disciplinary crossing have not helped to ensure him an academic career in his own country. Back in the 1970s, some earlier work of Eichberg’s had fed the mainstream English-speaking history of sport (or rather, a few leading historians who were acquainted with his writing, namely Allen Guttmann and Richard Mandell) with fresh ideas. Out of those parallel research itineraries came a reconstruction of the modern emergence of sport as the result of a shift from ritual to record, where the stress on achievement was linked with comparable developments in the newly born industrial society. Subsequently Eichberg detached himself from

Introduction 9

this view, and worked at a critique of achievement sports, in which an anthropological approach, the consideration of the different role played by sport in non-Western societies and thus the idea that the Olympic way was only one of many possible human experiences in the field, became prominent. Eichberg’s work is better understood if we consider a wider group of German-speaking researchers (for instance, Rudolph zur Lippe and August Nitschke), who during the past few decades have experimented with innovative forms of cultural history of the body, which are still little known abroad. As a historical tool, it has highlighted the varying of the human experience of space (as with the control of the ground in dance) with particular efficacy. On the whole, Eichberg’s critique aims at proposing the establishment of a different experience of human behaviour and relationship – in a way, both something more and something less, certainly something different than scholarship as it is usually understood. Nevertheless (or perhaps, thanks to this unconventional approach), it can be duly regarded as a wholesome correction to the excesses of a linear conception of history, in which hindsight tends to orient the view and to make historical trends appear positive and necessary; and may help us developing a less biased gaze at the festive culture of the past.12

2 The Need for Recreation

In December 1646 – when the Puritan revolution was bent on eliminating, together with traditional holy days, any occasion for fun – London apprentices presented a petition to Parliament for ‘lawful recreations for the needful refreshments of their spirits, without which life itself is unpleasant and an intolerable burden’.1 The language they adopted connects their perception of their own life and needs with a system of thought that had wide implications and a long cultural tradition. If Europeans had long been used to see their pastimes from different perspectives, all the latter found a common ground in the general acknowledgement of a human need for recreation. This topos will form the subject of the present chapter.

Paradise lost In the opening passage of his Traité des jeux et divertissemens (1686), the Jansenist theologian Jean Baptiste Thiers offers the reader the following moral archaeology of play: Man would not have needed either play or amusements, had he remained in the blessed state of innocence in which God had created him. In fact, although, according to the Holy Scripture, in the Garden of Eden it was his duty to work, his work would have been pleasant for him, far from being a pain; he would have made it a pleasure for himself, rather than becoming tired because of it, as Augustine puts it [. . .]. Consequently, he would not have needed to relax either his spirit or his body. Therefore, to be accurate, play and amusements have become necessary for us because of sin.2 10

The Need for Recreation 11

The Garden of Eden sets the scene for a mythical origin of humankind, where the notion of work and pleasure blur, tiredness is absent and rest unnecessary. In this utopian world, there would be no need for recreation. If we take it that Adam, l’homme in the story, is the only inhabitant of this world, he would also have no partner to play with. It took two to sin. Work as a painful and tiring activity began with the Fall, and the need to interrupt it periodically and restore strength came with it. This passage shows resemblance with other familiar narratives. Alongside the land-of-Cockaigne utopia of a life without work (‘the more you sleep, the more you earn’, goes the medieval fabliau that represents the earliest documentation of this tradition)3 stands a social theory such as that represented by Karl Marx. His critique of alienated labour rested on the assumption that outside given historical constraints human activity would be creative and satisfactory (within his philosophy of history, a condition to be found in both prehistoric and forthcoming communist society). In the context of Marxist discourse, social division of labour is the Fall that separated work from pleasure. Marx’s own sonin-law, Paul Lafargue, wrote Le droit à la paresse (The Right To Be Idle), the most famous treatise on the subject.4 Twentieth-century critical theory, represented at its best by the Frankfurt School, adapted the scheme to the postmodern and post-industrial society, wherein technological progress has created the possibility of drastically reducing the amount of time and energy that is invested in work. Eventually work may turn into play, free and creative activity.5 Thiers had been preceded, a year before, by another French moralist, Jean Frain du Tremblay (1641–1724). In fact, the latter may well have suggested the topic to the former, given the fact that they also share the same Augustinian citation. Towards the opening of Frain du Tremblay’s book, written in the form of a dialogue (on which we will say more below, Chapter 6), one interlocutor asks the other whether man would have to recreate himself at all (‘ne se seroit-il point diverti?’), had he not sinned. ‘Recreate’, rather than ‘amuse’ or ‘enjoy themselves’, is the only possible translation for se divertir here, since the question is not about having fun or not, but rather – as we have seen in Thiers – deriving pleasure from one’s ordinary occupation, rather than having to cast some special one for the purpose. Consistently, the interlocutor replies: ‘I think he would not have recreated himself, because he would have never tired himself, and his life would have been a continuous succession of pleasures. He would always have made pleasure of his duty.’6 After the quotation from Augustine, the point is reinforced by return-

12


ing to the example of gardening, as an activity which some enjoy regardless of the physical energies it consumes: ‘In that condition, man would therefore have worked in the same way in which we see some people work in their gardens, without perceiving any tiredness, because it brings them much pleasure and since, not being obliged as mercenaries to work for their subsistence, they always quit work before getting tired.’7 The simile, thus, is only appropriate as long as the gardener is a man free of obligations and burdens, an issue which, in any post-Edenic society, raises questions of social hierarchy (more on that will be said below). If in these passages from Frain du Tremblay Adam has not been mentioned by name, we encounter him later in the book, at the opening of the eighth conversation. This is, however, Adam after the Fall, a different scene which by contrast confirms the earlier statements: ‘I do not doubt that Adam had some recreation, however rigorous his penance might have been. Since he became subject to illness as soon as he became a sinner, in fact, he also fell into the necessity of relaxing his spirit and his body, in order to regain new forces and resume work.’8 Recreation has here started its functional existence as a pause between unattractive obligations. In spite of the orthodox flavour of its references to the Bible and the Church Fathers, Frain du Tremblay and Thiers’s scheme is on the whole unusual within its own literary genre. The conventional moral assessment of pastimes gives them firm roots in the laws of God and nature, rather than representing them as the side-effect of a loss of innocence and a dramatic turn in the story of humankind.

A saint, an archer and his bow (story of an exemplum) The need for recreation was expressed and reinforced by a tradition of proverbs and similes, whereby either other living creatures or human artefacts proved the point, by displaying a comparable necessity for a periodic break from their ordinary occupations or uses. Even moralists who had no intention of being soft on current recreational customs were obliged to start their discussion of the topic by acknowledging the validity of this general rule. This is the case with the Apulian writer Cesare Rao, who in 1587 published a not lenient Invective against players. ‘Without any recreation or pastime’, he writes, ‘life is like a long road without any hostel.’ And he adds two more images: ‘Unless they are occasionally eased, bows tend to lose their strength, and eventually break. If fields did not periodically rest, in the end they will become bare.’9


The parallel with agriculture occurred in Seneca, and via the authority of the Latin writer had a wide circulation in humanist culture. The simile of the bow had a long cultural history as a component of a short narrative, rooted in the early Christian tradition of the apophthegms (sayings) of the Fathers of the Desert, and transmitted in the form of an exemplum (the type of moralized tale that preachers used to make a sermon livelier and more efficacious). In his Collationes the monk John Cassian (who lived c. AD 400) tells a story from the life of John the Evangelist. The saint was holding and stroking a partridge, when a huntsman arrived. The latter was surprised to find a holy man of great reputation abasing himself in such a humble pastime, and asked him the reason why he was doing it. The saint asked him: ‘What are you holding in your hands?’. ‘A bow’, the archer replied. ‘Why’ the Evangelist continued ‘do you not always keep it in tension?’. ‘Otherwise’ he answered, ‘it would weaken and lose its vigour; and, should I need to hit a wild beast, it would not be able to shoot an arrow with sufficient energy, since it would have lost its strength due to the excessively prolonged state of tension.’ ‘Likewise’, John observed, ‘do not let my soul’s little relaxation irritate you; because not even the spirit could comply with virtue, unless it periodically eases and relaxes from its tension.’ A very similar apophthegm is contained in the Vitae Patrum, the early collection of narratives on the lives of the Church Fathers. This time Anthony of Egypt (fourth–fifth century AD, a contemporary of John Cassian) is the protagonist. As an old man – the story goes – the patriarch of Christian monasticism is surprised by an archer while he is refreshing himself via conversation with fellow monks. Thus, in this case, the behaviour that causes some unease and calls for justification is relaxation from the hermit’s rule of life. The abbot asks the disappointed archer to bend his bow, and then to do it again several times, until the archer worries that it could break. At this point the saint can draw the parallel between the weapon and human occupations, and teach his interlocutor a lesson on the need for recreation.10 Both versions of the story had a medieval tradition – for instance, Jacob of Voragine’s Legenda aurea (thirteenth century) contains both. They appeared with a variety of different details, sometimes hybrids between the two original tales, and were employed within sermons. In the latter use the exemplum did not necessarily play the rhetorical function of supporting the case for moderate recreation. In a fourteenthcentury sermon by Giordano of Pisa, the story is reported not by the preacher himself, but by an imaginary interlocutor of his, someone who is engaged in justifying ‘dances, filthy and mundane games, and other

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secular vanities’. To him the preacher objects that the excuse has no effect in supporting those delights that are sinful. In this case the ancient apophthegm is thus put to use as a piece of evidence in favour of the tolerance of play, and then refused to be acknowledged as valid – a fictional, didactic, though still significant exchange of opinions between defendants and detractors of pastimes.11 However, theologians who throughout the centuries assessed the propriety of pastimes, from Thomas Aquinas to François de Sales, tended to reproduce the early Christian example without similar limitations, and to give it a prominent role within the strategies of their discourse. In the end, the tale’s moral is the praise of moderate recreation. An orientation towards the same direction was deeply rooted in Western culture.12

A right to be idle? Play has ambiguous relations with idleness. On the one hand, workaholic moralists and religious zealots alike tend to regard most pastimes as time wasted which should be better employed, the result of a human inclination to do nothing at all. It is against the influence of such a work ethic on industrial workers that Lafargue addressed his Le droit à la paresse. On the other hand, a concern for the moral and physical risks deriving from inactivity brings other writers to recommend some forms of recreation as a cure, a prescription against idleness. The alternative is striking in medicine, where different human activities occupy people’s bodies and minds to different degrees, and it is mainly on the basis of such distinctions that some recreations may qualify as rest, others as exercise: two opposite patterns of behaviour, with obviously diverging effects on human health. Notwithstanding Elias and Dunning’s opinion that mere rest is not proper leisure (see the Introduction above), the opposition between otium and negotium – and the partially overlapping contrast between vita activa and vita contemplativa – were for a long time an influential factor in the cultural evaluation of recreation. In spite of the comparative appreciation frequently enjoyed by literary otia, one should always remember that the predominant connotations of otium, from Classical Antiquity throughout the Christian Middle Ages, were strongly negative – a story to which Brian Vickers has returned in recent years. Its original opposite was officium (duty), and a frequent context the unwanted idleness to which an army was confined over the winter months. Roman leaders were so concerned for the potential corrupting


effect of ease, that they tended to keep the soldiers always occupied by fortification and road-building. Idleness was associated with shade (vs light, a condition inviting action), and effeminacy (as if leisure was after all for women, work for men – the ubiquitous cross-cultural comparison with the yin/yang dichotomy comes inevitably to one’s mind). It had a tendency to nest in particular sites: but rather than thinking of the pastoral scene, early Roman moralists, who associated the countryside with labour, were concerned with idle urban life. If lovers were considered to be in that condition, it was because their spiritual mood had paralysed them: like melancholy, in spite of its wealth of cultural significance, love was after all a pathology. The predominantly bad reputation of otium carried on through the centuries: in order to be made acceptable, leisure needed to be qualified as ‘active’ or ‘fruitful’, and thus distinguished from mere idleness. Christian moralists simply confirmed this Classical orientation. A study of late medieval Spanish manuals for confessors confirms the same strongly negative connotations for otium.13 Occasionally otium could obtain good marks, though mainly by default: when a preacher in Milan Cathedral in the mid-sixteenth century wanted to discourage his audience from play by listing the moral evils it could bring, he offered them the alternative of engaging in ‘santo ocio’.14 Within the Christian section of the cultural history of otium, a specific topos of medieval thought which contributed to shape attitudes towards idleness among European learned élites is the sin of sloth (acedia). It belonged to (some versions of) the list of capital vices and, of that list, is the element subject to the most complex history. It first emerged in late Antiquity in the experience of Oriental monasticism, where the Desert Fathers defined it as a state of mind that assaulted a hermit at midday, provoked a disgust for his cell, made him anxious and restless, thus undermining his ability to concentrate in reading and prayer. In the West, with the shift to coenobitic monasticism (houses and common life, rather than individual asceticism), the vice turned from mental and individual into a predominantly physical transgression of social duties: it became a sort of sleepiness and laziness that could only be avoided by keeping oneself always occupied, in prayer and work. During its millennial life, acedia was linked, sometimes identified, with tristitia (sadness, sorrow), a feeling to which a particular disposition of the body could be seen to contribute. When, with the end of the Middle Ages, the old vice of sloth disappeared form the scene of Christian moral theology, it merged with melancholy, a temperament which medical theory anchored to a specific humoral (im)balance.15

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Within the monastic tradition, pastimes related to acedia in the ambivalent way we have envisaged for idleness in general. Since it could be accepted that this psychological condition may have a partial physiological root, the Paris bishop and philosopher William of Auvergne (c. 1180–1249) justified curing it via some forms of recreation, among which he mentioned listening to music. Outside the monastery, however, sloth came to be mainly identified with idleness and the inclination of the faithful not to do anything useful or good; Rabanus Maurus (d. 856), therefore, lists hunting, playing dice, to conceive a passion for futile stories and games all as manifestations of it. During the latter part of the Middle Ages, the sin of the faithful (rather than of clerics) is increasingly interpreted as a neglect of religious duties: from this respect, dancing, games, theatre and hunting feature among the most common breaches of Sunday observance.16 In an early modern society increasingly intolerant of the misuse of time, the association between idleness and play (‘la ociosidad y los juegos’, as an earlyseventeenth-century cleric from Seville put it) was going to come frequently under fire (see also below, Chapter 4).17 The Renaissance heir of monastic acedia, melancholy, found its Homer in Robert Burton (1577–1640). In the structure of his Anatomy of Melancholy, physical exercise and the emotions, play and the arts intervene at different levels, from the causes of the medical condition he examines to its manifestation and means of cure, thus tightly interweaving leisure with the very identity of the melancholic. Within the first partition (1.2.2.6), the identification of idleness as a cause of the disease takes the form of a moral critique of the ‘leisure classes’ and their chief occupations: ‘And this is the true cause that so many great men, Ladies, and Gentlewomen, labour of this disease in country and citty, for idlenesse is an appendix to nobility, they count it a disgrace to worke, and spend all their daies in sports, recreations, and pastimes, and will therefore take no paines; be of no vocation: they feed liberally, fare well, want exercise, action, employment, (for to work, I say, they may not abide) and company to their desires.’18 Further on (1.2.3.13), the reader comes across a reference to beggars; however, rather than belonging to the loitering poor by birth, they are recognized as often belonging to the category of the impoverished rich, who wasted their flourishing estates ‘through immoderate lust, gaming, pleasure and riot’. Burton qualifies them as ‘sensuall Epicures and brutish prodigalls’, equates them to the prodigal son of the Gospel, and observes that ‘the ordinary rocks upon which such men doe impinge and precipitate themselves, are Cards, Dice, Hawks, and Hounds’. If, in the order of this


discourse, the critique of the passion for gambling and its obvious financial consequences can be taken for granted, the author’s insistence on the exaggerated love for hunting as a common problem of the European aristocracy is worth recording. Its presentation is enriched by a series of historical examples; one of the targets of criticism is ‘Leo decimus, that hunting Pope’ (Giovanni de’ Medici, Pope 1513–21, the Pope who excommunicated Martin Luther), who would spend months hawking and hunting in his country villa at Ostia, neglecting all his duties. Furthermore, ‘some men are consumed by mad fantasticall buildings, by making Galleries, Cloisters, Terraces, Walkes, Orchards, Gardens, Pooles, Rillets, Bowers, and such places of pleasure’. Both the passions for hunting and for leisure architecture are commented on as appropriate to some great men, unsuitable to others; the fault, in this case, would seem to derive from the lack of understanding of the occupations which are befitting an individual and his status. The list of immoderate pleasures people indulge in is completed by (excessive love for) ‘Wine and women’.19 When dealing, in the second partition, with the cure of melancholy, Burton also surveys ‘exercise rectified of body and minde’, in terms that we will revisit towards the end of the next chapter. The medical discourse on play, however, covered a much wider territory than the specific case of the melancholic. The next chapter will aim to introduce this specific cultural perspective, under which the social practices of recreation were understood by contemporaries; moreover, that will also provide the grounds for presenting Burton’s therapeutics in its appropriate context.

3 The Medical Discourse

It has already been suggested in the previous chapter that medicine provided the grounds for some of the most common justifications for leisure and recreation. Strictly speaking, it could be observed that leisure activities do not appear in medical literature for their recreational purpose; rather, for the functional role acknowledged to them in a system of beliefs and practices concerning human health. Nevertheless, the proximity and overlapping between the recreational and the medical discourses is undeniable, and makes a consideration of both perspectives compulsory, if we want to adequately represent the predominant cultural attitudes towards leisure. The time has come to develop the point and briefly introduce those elements of Western medical thought which were more directly relevant to the discussion of our topic.1

Motion and rest Throughout the early modern period, notwithstanding the epistemological changes associated with the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, humoral theory still provided by and large the predominant medical paradigm. Based on the corpus of Hippocratic writings and on its late-antique development in Galen (second century AD), it had reached the medieval West mainly through the mediation and interpretation provided by Arabic science. A protagonist in a rich tradition of translations, digests and commentaries was Hunayn ibn Ishaq ( Johannitius), a ninth-century Christian from Iraq, who searched the Byzantine empire for Galenic treatises with a spirit that reminds us of a fifteenth-century humanist hunting for classical texts ‘imprisoned’ in monastic libraries. His Medical Questions and Answers, a student textbook, 18

The Medical Discourse 19

was available in Latin translation by 1100; and, as an introduction (in Greek, Isagoge) to Galen’s The Art of Medicine, it became the first section of the Articella, the standard medieval medical textbook anthology.2 The general tenets of humoral theory are well known. Human health was believed to depend on the equilibrium between four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile or melancholy). This list was related to a series of other factors, which showed the strict connections linking the human being to the cosmos: the four elements (air, fire, earth and water), the primary qualities (hot vs cold, dry vs wet), the four seasons, and the ages of man. As well as suggesting avoidance of excess or deficiency of each of these factors, the theory was meant to explain variations between individuals, which could be interpreted as idiosyncratic balances, or humoral mixtures (‘temperaments’ or complexions). It should be stressed that in early modern Europe this belief system was shared by learned and popular medicine alike; its principles, astrological connections and dietetic implications enjoyed widespread diffusion via such media as proverbs and almanacs, as the popularity of the verse Salernitan Rule of Health easily demonstrates. When Renaissance humanism became available in the European marketplace of ideas, it provided deeper cultural meaning to concepts of balance and harmony, both within the individual and between man and cosmos, in all those aspects of traditional medical thought in which notions of equilibrium were central. In Johannitius’s adaptation of Galen’s thought and vocabulary, the theoretical part of medicine was concerned with three groups of factors which affected human health: the naturals, the ‘nonnaturals’ and the contranaturals. To the first list belonged those things which constitute the body; to the last disease, its causes and consequences. The most common series of nonnaturals comprised: 1. air; 2. food and drink; 3. motion and rest; 4. sleep and waking; 5. repletion and evacuation; 6. the accidents of the soul. It should be clear that the category was problematic. Certainly ‘nonnatural’ did not mean against nature; it was rather a middle ground, whose elements could either benefit or harm human health. It goes without saying that such occasions were unavoidable, their use in no way optional: one cannot live without breathing, eating or sleeping. The correct use of the nonnaturals was therefore one of the subjects of practical, as well as theoretical medicine. It consisted in a regimen of health.3 Preventive medicine (in Greek, hygiene) was regarded as an essential part of medicine; the idea that, concerning healthy bodies, it does not belong to medicine at all, played only a marginal role in early modern developments.4

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The two nonnaturals which are more relevant to our enquiry are ‘motion and rest’ and the accidents of the soul. The former was often referred to as ‘exercise and rest’: it therefore included a medical assessment of the value of some sports as an integral part. The latter, which implies a philosophical doctrine of the psyche, had citizenship within the medical discourse because passions were seen as influencing human health. Other nonnaturals (air, food and drink) were external factors, originating from the environment; similarly, emotions were regarded as movements of the soul affecting the equilibrium of the human body (though moral philosophers tended to see the relation in reverse). Since a variety of human activities, including pastimes, could cause joy or sorrow, their consideration was significant for the physician. We have already encountered some of its implications when we considered the case of melancholy (Chapter 2). The fact that the opposites ‘motion and rest’ were conceptualized together as occasions affecting health – as was the case for other nonnaturals (sleep and waking, repletion and evacuation) – meant that an individual was supposed to achieve a balanced combination, by making alternative use of them. A significant number of forms of recreation could find place in the medical discussion of the topic, regardless of the fact that they may require varying levels of physical effort. In fact, since the nonnatural in question also included rest, in the same chapters it was relevant to discuss restful pastimes with equal propriety as athletic ones, with the obvious caveat that each group may prove appropriate to different categories of people, or to the same people in different circumstances. Consideration of the varying conditions was crucial, and had an established tradition going back to the Greeks. In order to assess the implications of physical exercise on the health of its practitioners, a medical writer considered the general characteristics of the person involved, such as gender, age, profession and individual complexion; the amount of required physical effort; the time of day and season when exercise was practised, as well as the environment in which it took place. In general, the recognized benefits of exercise included an increase in body heat, the limbering up of muscles, the opening of the pores, and improvements in transpiration and in the expulsion of harmful substances. What activities qualified as exercise? It was distinguished from other kinds of body movements because it was vigorous (thus provoking deeper and/or quicker breathing than normal) and it was undertaken consciously, its purpose being health. Subsequently, no kind of physical work could be correctly labelled as exercise: exercise was by defini-


tion leisure, despite the fact that very similar gestures may be involved in the two human activities. This defining delimitation of the meaning of exercise may help in understanding why the discussion of sports and pastimes was not only common in medical literature on the preservation of health, but also often constituted the main subject of its ‘motion and rest’ section. Within the context of an integrated health regime which concentrated on food (most regimens of health essentially consist of an annotated list of foodstuffs), physicians discussed exercise mainly by assessing its relation to nutrition. Physical effort should not disturb digestion: it had therefore to be made before – or considerably after – mealtimes. Furthermore, moderation was recommended: both excessive effort and prolonged inactivity were regarded as harmful to the human body. It was considered more beneficial to exercise in the open air, rather than in an enclosed environment; and to do so when the weather was clement (both as an indication of the appropriate time of day and of the most convenient times of year). Writers of hygiene classified exercise with respect to medically significant categories, such as the speed and intensity of movement involved. With regard to speed, a seventeenth-century treatise published in Germany mentioned dance and ball games as examples of quickness, walking and fishing for slowness.5 In his frequently reprinted Castel of Helthe (c. 1536), the humanist and diplomat Thomas Elyot also gave the ‘daunsynge of galyardes’ and ‘foteball playe’ as examples of ‘vehement exercise’: in both cases the properties of force and speed, elsewhere separated, were united.6 There were some exercises in which the body achieved activity under its own momentum, and others in which the body was either moved or carried. Swinging or travelling by means of transport – as occurs in a cradle, a coach or a boat – featured as borderline cases, but were ordinarily judged as moderate, passive exercise (‘agitation’), befitting women, children and the elderly. As well as to different genders and age groups, there were some sorts of exercise that were more appropriate to particular classes of people according to varying temperaments and other conditions; others were commended for their benefit to a specific part of the body (for instance, dancing and running for their benefit to the feet).7 The observation that different parts of the body are involved in each sort of exercise formed the background for an evaluation of specific pastimes. It was not rare for medical writers to express their personal orientations as to which type of sports and pastimes were commendable or not; the choice could include the recommendation of one particular activity as the most

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beneficial. The opportunity to suggest his own view seems almost too tempting for a physician to resist. The story of the nomination of the best exercise goes back to Galen, who, as well as a general treatise On the Preservation of Health, wrote a shorter tract on Exercise with the Small Ball.8 In the latter (an unidentified game of ancient gymnastics) the Greek physician found that the whole body was involved in a balanced way, a strong reason for preferring it against other practices, which could have an uneven developmental impact. When fifteenth- and sixteenth-century physicians followed their ancient model by mentioning the same sport, they could also interpret it as, or substitute it with, a modern practice. In the first printed book entirely dedicated to the medical topic of physical exercise – Christoval Mendez’s Libro del exercicio corporal, published in Seville in 1553 – the description of the game of pelota, which the author regarded as the best, took up as many as four chapters.9 Similarly, according to the English physician and schoolmaster Thomas Cogan (1545?–1607), Galen commends ‘the play with the little ball, which we call tenise’.10 A Portuguese professor of medicine active in Italy, Rodrigo da Fonseca, recognized the appropriate equivalent to the ancient model in the street game played with paddles (mestole or lacchette), rather than the palla alla corda played indoors. He also added the pallamaglio, hunting with the crossbow and the dancing of galliards as further forms of exercise that involved a similar balance between the different parts of the body.11 Other writers had their own preferences. In a treatise on the preservation of health intended to serve for the use of his own children, Heinrich Ranzow (1526–98), a governor of Schleswig-Holstein, displayed his aristocratic taste by stating that he personally opted for hunting: not only does it exercise the whole body symmetrically; it also gives remarkable pleasure to the mind. To this effect a wide number of elements of this loisir contribute: from exposure to the extreme temperatures of the open air to horse-riding; from physical and mental effort to the strategic skills involved in the hunt, which are comparable to those of a military manoeuvre. Even the barking and howling of hounds is recorded as an exercise for the huntsman’s hearing, while following the animal keeps his sight in good form.12 Edmond Holling (1554–1612), an English Catholic physician who taught in Bavaria, gave his preference to the country walk: the mountains of southern Germany oblige you to walk up and down, and by doing so you keep a variety of different muscles exercised. As for your back and arms, they will also be fit, as long as you periodically bend down to pick a flower. Holling’s


book addressed a specific social group: the literate – Lat. studiosi (an aspect of his work on which more will be said below).13

Ancient and modern forms of exercise If we now abandon the specific quest for the best sport of all, it is worth noticing that Holling’s walking, Fonseca’s dancing and Ranzow’s hunting had long been physicians’ examples for appropriate exercise. For example, an influential medieval medical text which included consideration of a selection of pastimes was the Taqwim al-Sihha, an Arabic work by Ibn Butlan, an eleventh-century Christian physician from Baghdad. The book consisted in a series of synoptic tables, which provided the reader with an accessible assessment of the health implications of a variety of dietary choices. While foodstuffs are its main subject, the environment and what would now be called lifestyle provide interesting additional material for some of the tables. For each topic, the text provides a definition of its nature, benefits, damages, remedies, and suitability to particular temperaments, age groups, seasons and regions.14 A number of codices of the Tacuini (or Theatrum) sanitatis were illuminated by fifteenth-century Italian workshops. They contain an abridged version of Ibn Butlan’s text, which, along with foodstuffs, could be found assessing the hygienic implications of hunting on the ground, moderate play with a ball, wrestling, rest, horse-riding, motion, light exercise, singing, and dancing and music-making. Their images are simple – in one of the manuscripts held at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, they are left as colourless, sketched line drawings (Figure 3.1). But it may well be true that it is exactly by their portrayal of only that which is essential that they are an effective means of communication and best fulfil their purpose. Both men and women appear represented in them, according to the gender destination which is regarded as appropriate to each form of exercise. In spite of a series of modern adaptations, the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature I have been quoting was firmly rooted in the classical tradition, to the extent that it often borrowed examples that were quite old-fashioned. Ranzow was aware of the lesson of Xenophon, and quotes directly from his treatise on hunting. A specific ancient flavour transpires from examples referring to gymnastics. Among the Renaissance literate, humanism had stimulated detailed interest in all aspects of life at the time of classical antiquity, including

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Figure 3.1 Singing as an exercise, from a Tacuinum sanitatis compiled in Northern Italy, c. 1500. The accompanying text warns the reader that it will free you from diseases, yet can produce addiction to its delights.

games and gymnastics. In parallel with Renaissance antiquarianism, sixteenth-century medical humanism thus exhibited a detailed interest in classical gymnastics, to the extent that the earliest modern literature on physical exercise barely referred to contemporary practice. This is true of the protagonist of this revival, Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606), a professor of medicine at Padua, Bologna and Pisa. His six books De arte gymnastica, first published in 1569, claimed to be based on the writings of over a hundred ancient authors; they quickly became a work of reference on the subject and had a wide European circulation for more than a century. In one of his few references to modern amusements, Mercuriale criticized the effects that contemporary dances had on health, although only because they were performed at inappropriate times (after meals and at night, when people should really be sleeping).15


From its second edition, the product of the publishing firm Giunta of Venice in 1573, Mercuriale’s text was integrated by illustrations designed by the Neapolitan antiquarian Pirro Ligorio. Gender roles are no less evident here, if we compare the light exercise of a young woman on the swing with the muscular figures of some male bodies (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). As we mentioned before, swinging was classified in medical literature as passive exercise befitting the human beings of most delicate complexions. The fact that the swinging scene is a girls-only business (the two helpers holding chords being women as well) may be partly due to the artist’s intention to reproduce a classical custom according to the manner in which it was historically practised; whatever the case, it adds here an aura of purity that would be spoiled by sexual promiscuity. Ligorio was also responsible for the iconography of one of the most specific cycles of games represented in Renaissance art, which presents some points of contact with the visual representation of athletics in Mercuriale’s book.16 The cycle is found in Este Castle, the principal residence of the ruling family in Ferrara. Duke Alfonso II (ruled 1559–97), the son of Renée of France, had had a remarkable education, both literary and chivalric; on the eve of inheriting his title, he was jousting in Henry II of France’s team on the occasion in which the king was the victim of a fatal accident.17 The rooms known as the ‘Apartment of the Mirror’ (Appartamento dello Specchio) were renewed after a serious earthquake had hit the city in 1570. The apartment includes a ‘Salone dei giuochi’ and a ‘Saletta dei giuochi’; the vaulted ceilings of both rooms were frescoed by Leonardo da Brescia, Sabastiano Filippi (il Bastianino) and Ludovico Settevecchi, and represent a generous selection of games – the Saletta rather concentrating on children’s play. The sports and pastimes portrayed in the individual panels of the Salone are swimming, the swing, the trigonal (a game of skill with balls), the quadriga race, the pyrrhic (ancient martial dance), throwing the discus, the game of hoop and tintinnabulae, the ball game with armlet, the wrestling match, weightlifting and the pancratium (a mixture of wrestling and boxing). With the exception of the feminine connotation of swinging, the ceiling is dominated by a display of male bodies, usually naked, in the fashion of ancient gymnastics. In the Saletta, around a central representation of the Four Seasons (who are holding hands in a circle), we find the cestus (boxing), the game of wineskins, the gladiatorial contest, the telesia (armed dancing exercise), the game of skittles, spinning the top, the sling, the wrestling match, fishing, the game with ball and hoop, that with racquet, and ring-a-roses, together with music and poetry (school of reading and writing). Allegories of human life domi-

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Figure 3.2 Ligorio’s representation of young ladies swinging, from Mercurialis’s De arte gymnastica.


Figure 3.3 Rope jumpers and dancers, from Mercurialis.

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nate the iconographic programme of a further, connected room (‘Camera dell’aurora’). While the choice of games from the classical past testifies for the passion for Antiquity characteristic of Renaissance taste, the Ferrarese environment seems to have developed a special interest in the world of play, documented by a variety of clues such as the play element in Guarino da Verona’s educational programme, or the juristic work of Ugo Trotti. One should also take into account that it is once more in the Ferrara of Alfonso II that we will find Torquato Tasso taking a more than cursory interest in the interpretation of play (see below, Chapter 6). The apartment, on the top floor of the Castle, was reached through an impressive stairway, and was also meant to receive honoured guests, one of its first visitors being King Henry III of France and Poland, who was in Ferrara in July 1574 when the decoration was still not entirely complete. Recent research on the iconographic plan for the whole apartment has revealed a much higher degree of consistency than previously acknowledged, a conclusion that makes the choice of the play topic for the frescoes all the more interesting. It seems that, after the earthquake, the decoration of the apartment was meant to display and embody a complex project of renewal, where play and a specific Renaissance philosophy of time, with human life interpreted in the light of a cosmic cycle, kept central ground. It is now clear that what is represented in the Saletta is the range of activities that were typical of an ancient school (gymnasium, or ludus), with its characteristic pursuit of a harmonic balance between body and mind. It has been noticed that some of the scenes that would look more problematic for an educational purpose, such as the gladiatorial contest, are not in fact depicting a real fight, but rather a mock one performed as a form of exercise, or a dance miming the contest (the musicians playing in a corner being common in treatises of education as a specific requirement for that form of training). The presence in the panels of the figure of the tutor supervising the exercise also confirms that we are looking at scenes from a school. Other children’s games represented in the same room – spinning-top and skittles – had a philosophical, neo-Platonic tradition of allegorical meaning. The traditional ludi, which are depicted on the ceiling of the Salone, express the Duke’s passion for athletics more directly. Although the figures appear mannerist rather than neo-classical in style, they are filtered through a humanist antiquarianism, which Ligorio had also the opportunity to nourish by actually observing contemporary archaeological excavations (at the Villa Adriana at Tivoli). In the overall


iconographic programme, they may express the wish to celebrate, with public rejoicing and display, the successful reinstatement of order and harmony after a cataclysm. Within a few years, however, the hope for a new age for the Este dynasty was to be frustrated: Alfonso did not manage to father a legitimate heir, and – while the family maintained the rule of Modena – the Papal State took over Ferrara in 1598. The Castle frescoes remain thus as the document of a cultural dream at the waning of the Italian Renaissance.18

As the reference to Guarino will suggest, as well as a revival of ancient gymnastics, Renaissance humanism was responsible for a renewal of the classical tradition of education (as represented by Plutarch’s treatise On the Education of Children). In this context play and physical education had a very significant role.19 This is particularly true in the case of Richard Mulcaster (1530?–1611), Headmaster of Merchants Taylor School in Elizabethan London, the author of Positions, Wherin Those Primitive Circumstances Be Examined, Which Are Necessarie for the Training up of Children, Either for Skill in Their Booke, Or Healthe in Their Bodie. A third of the book deals with physical exercise, the diversity of which is explored in a series of specific chapters.20 Mulcaster’s deep interest constitutes a striking precedent of the role played by English public schools in the invention of modern sport. Antiquarianism and humanist education were not the whole story, however, and the century spanning from the mid-sixteenth to the midseventeenth saw a rise of medical texts from which reference to modern practice was not wanting. Not surprisingly, given the importance of a variety of forms of dance in contemporary society, a number of French writers pay particular attention to that pastime. In a commentary on dietetics based on the list of the nonnaturals and published in the 1550s, Jérôme de Monteux mentions dancing first in a list of the exercises which are beneficial to specific parts of the body (in this case, together with walking and running, to the legs: ‘le marcher, le courir, et la dance exercent fort les jambes’); later, more extensively, while commenting on a passage from Plato. The Greek philosopher had recommended two forms of exercise as the most appropriate for the literate (a narrower audience on which there will be more to say later): wrestling and dancing. According to Monteux, they both have the positive benefit of attracting the blood and spirits towards the surface of the body, after intensive intellectual effort had driven them deep inside. Against Plato,

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however, he finds wrestling not to be a sufficiently decorous activity. In contrast, dances are useful, because they do not only delight the spirit, but also make the body more agile and strong. Following Galen, Monteux subsequently investigates which of the exercises is most efficacious. His recommendation is for that which gives one the opportunity to deploy differing levels of effort, from the smallest to the most vigorous movements, as is the case with hunting and dancing. In favour of dance he reminds the reader that it was practised by ancient Indian priests; furthermore, ‘do we not read, in the second book of Kings, how the good and regal prophet David danced and jumped in honour of the great living God?’ In the light of its contents and register, it is not meaningless that Monteux, a graduate of Montpellier who practised as a physician and a surgeon in Lyons, published his work both in Latin and in the vernacular.21 Bilingualism is again the choice made, fifty years later, by Joseph Duchesne (Quercetanus, c. 1544–1609), whose treatise on hygiene was published in Latin and French versions by one and the same printer and during the same year. Within his chapter on exercise and rest, an unusual prominence is given to a survey of its varying forms. From ancient gymnastics, Duchesne derives a principal list of five sports and pastimes which he discusses with reference to modern practice: running, wrestling, boxing, dancing and throwing. Since the author was a French Calvinist who belonged to the medical entourage of King Henry IV, and at that time his co-religionists were conducting a printed assault on dance and other profane pastimes, he must have felt the need to justify his approval for them. He drew a parallel between ancient and modern dance genres, as could be found in the Bible and had been approved and practised by kings and philosophers alike. Then he resorted to the argument from the respectable social grounds of this activity: ‘Today still, when we choose to let our boys and girls learn that art, it is a custom here to do so particularly for the purpose of granting them elegant manners and a well-balanced configuration of the body. There is a great difference between those who have and those who have not been taught it; between those who have and those who have not learned it well.’ Duchesne cannot avoid mentioning classical and Christian censorship of dancing. But he argues that ancient writers only criticized immoral dances, whereas his praise pertained to the lawful kind, which is useful and necessary ‘both to preserve health, and to acquire good manners’. To the main series of forms of exercise the author adds a few more, from horse-riding to the jeu de paume, from hunting to swimming. He concludes his discussion by distinguishing


among different forms of exercise of varying energetic character, recommending them to different categories of people, and analysing the best conditions under which they should be practised.22 Another half century later, in the late 1660s, two more significant treatises are published by French physicians in two subsequent years, this time splitting from each other in their linguistic choice: the former is printed only in Latin, the latter only in the vernacular. The Latin text bears, as a subtitle, the fairly standard phrase ‘de sanitate tuenda, et vita producenda’, in which an extremely popular theme in Renaissance culture, the quest for a long life, is significantly juxtaposed to that of the preservation of health. During the previous century, the Venetian aristocrat Alvise Cornaro had published a blockbuster guide to a long life, based on a proto-macrobiotic diet and allegedly drawn from his own experience (although the author lied about his own age).23 The work of Pierre Gontier from Rouen, it still adopts as headlines the antiquarian categories of medical gymnastics: saltatoria, or the art of jumping (including dancing); palestrica exercitatio, or exercise in gymnasium; ambulatio, or walking for fitness. Nevertheless, inside the old framework, the content does not remain unchanged, and a significant number of references to modern pastimes are added. He mentions such specific French dances (Gallorum saltationes) as pavanes, gaillardes, courantes, bourrées, and voltes; and provides some generally encouraging accounts of their effect on human life. Gontier is also unusually explicit in introducing a class distinction between those musical instruments which are suited to accompanying ‘rustic’ dancing (viols and wind instruments) and those appropriate for aristocratic and refined people (violins and plucked instruments). In the medical judgement of contemporary dance forms, the French physician singles out the volta for strong criticism – an evaluation which is significantly in line with moral concerns about that ancestor of the waltz: it puts the body into too violent agitation; and, by whirling many times and too quickly, provokes vertigo.24 Gontier’s text also accommodates some French vocabulary when he lists and describes a series of modern ball games (balle, ballon, jeu de paume, longue paume, raquette, battoir, prendre à la volée). He also refers to dice and card games, though only to blame them for not exercising the body at all; whereas about trictrac (backgammon) he acknowledges, at least, that it keeps sight and memory well occupied. A quite different playing instrument, the catapult, obliges Gontier to mention the recent French civil revolts (the Frondes); as for the ritual fights during which the Parisians commonly used it, he observes that – rather than

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preserving people’s health – it frequently causes serious wounds and, occasionally, deaths.25 The nearly simultaneous book written in French is, to my knowledge, the most programmatic and systematic early modern medical evaluation of physical exercise.

‘The manner of governing health’ Its author, Michel Bicaise, was professor of medicine at Aix-en-Provence. La manière de régler la santé (The manner of governing health) had its subject matter distributed into three books. The first is concerned with ‘those things that surround us’, the second with ‘those which we receive’ or assume, the third with jeux, exercices, or the gymnastique moderne. The matter is, therefore, the traditional nonnaturals. What is unusual is that we have a treatise of hygiene which is entirely dedicated to them, and which gives pre-eminence to exercise among them. In his first book, Bicaise declares to have specifically selected topics that have been neglected by his predecessors, and offers interesting sections on clothing. The same intention to complement existing literature is expressed in the second book, where the recent habit of smoking tobacco is covered. If we remember the predominance of nutrition that was common in regimens of health, Bicaise’s second book appears comparatively brief on the matter. His explicit favourite is the third book, whose subject is also qualified as ‘games’, as if that was an interchangeable name for all that category of healthy activities: from this linguistic choice we can already appreciate the importance Bicaise gave to the play element. The book dealt with a wide range of human activities. The author self-consciously stated that, while sixteenth-century scholars had only focused on ancient types of exercise, it was time to turn to, and examine, their modern equivalent (hence ‘la gymnastique moderne’ announced in the frontispiece). Bicaise starts with a chapter on exercise in general, followed by reflections on exercise for children: here he scrutinizes the pros and cons of the spinning-top, snowballs, the catapult and other throwing games. Next comes a detailed discussion of the paume (tennis) and mail (croquet). According to Bicaise, the former requires too sudden and quick running forward, resulting in excessive sweating and fatigue; it is particularly harmful after a meal, when it would agitate your humours like a tempest at sea. The latter (croquet) demands a huge effort from one’s arm, which causes chest pains and explains why players often cry out during their games.


After a survey of a series of means of transport, and their effect on the human body, a specific chapter is on the subject du jeu. From its very beginning, the author stresses parallels and interactions between medical and moral discourse. Play brings with it pleasure, which is perceived as harmless but open to abuse. Morals, acting as a spiritual medicine, have therefore introduced laws and instructions to regulate players’ behaviour; medicine proper has followed the same path, and fixed its own rules. These are enumerated in a list of nine articles, consisting of situations to be avoided, and of miscellaneous observations on the relationship between play and health. One should avoid: (i) playing games that are too serious or (ii) games only determined by luck (the sudden changes of mood they bring with them tend to upset the humoral balance), as well as (iii) contention (it triggers one’s bile), (iv) subsequent disappointment, and (v) war simulations. Subsequent remarks include the indication that (vi) ‘from play you can tell the inclination and temperament of the players’ (and that everyone should choose the most appropriate to his or her constitution); that (vii) ‘the force of imagination is the cause of the excesses we find in play’; (viii) that ‘one feels stunned and heavy after playing’; and last, according to astrology, (ix) ‘Venus, Mars and Saturn are the masters of play’. On the whole, the reader is given the impression that the moral concern, expressed by Bicaise at the beginning of these pages, had firmly oriented his scrutiny and led him to discover rather les maux than les biens of play and games. In the following chapters he discusses a broad series of specific amusements and physical activities: dance, military exercises, hunting, comedy, music, laughter, walks, and horse-riding. After the concern expressed about play and games, an enthusiastic assessment of dance brings a sudden change of mood, while reminding us of the emergence of the importance of dance in French society, which was already visible in Duchesne. Dancing loosens the whole body, being the best preparation for gymnastics; makes you moderately thin; and helps transpiration, which is particularly useful for the health of women. Above all, while other sorts of exercise only employ one limb, the whole body participates in dance, whose harmonious movements favour a salutary equilibrium. With his last remark Bicaise has joined the game of choosing which exercise is best for you. While his preference for dance originated outside medical literature, it even antedated Galen’s ‘small ball’: it had in fact been advanced by an ageing Socrates in a well-known passage from Xenophon’s Banquet.26 Once he has listed the range of physical benefits, Bicaise moves to

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discuss the relationship between dance and music and its implications for health, and does so with a wealth of detail which was extremely unusual for a treatise on hygiene. First he introduces the classical topos of the effects upon the mind of music and poetry (which stand here for the melodies and texts of dance tunes): music and sound make the mind dance by making the spirits dance, that is to say by putting them into a harmonic motion, rhythm and swing (bransle); poetry immediately impresses it in this way, until it ravishes [the mind] and lets it be moved to enthusiasm; and dance is an effect of the mind’s movements, by which it moves and swings the body in accordance with all that the mind receives from musical sounds, poetry and songs.27 Thus, according to contemporary physiology, music moves the mind, and the latter in turn determines bodily motions. Significantly, Bicaise here employs the word ‘dance’ even before getting to the level of bodily movement: he uses it as the most appropriate metaphor for describing the commotion of the spirits. Behind these expressions is a rich stock of neo-Platonic beliefs on the effects of music and on its therapeutic power.28 Bicaise proceeds by establishing a direct correlation between the characteristics of the sounds and of the movements which derive from them, adding that specific kinds of music and dance are most appropriate to particular temperaments: Melody leads us to dance in a certain manner according to its measure and its different sounds. Thus, for instance, high-pitched sounds make us jump and inspire a very quick dance, while lowpitched and slow sounds do the opposite; as the mind, following the same paths, thus communicates them to our body, which imitates the source of their movement with marvellous reflexion. That is why, as high-pitched sounds awake melancholics, while low-pitched ones moderate the impetuosity and ardour of the bilious [. . .], so dances deriving from those sounds have the same effects, and consequently have to be proportioned, or rather regulated according to the kind of temperament. The same can be said of differences in sex and age; and one can find the reason why some people like some dances, while some prefer others.29 After borrowing from the late-antique writer Lucian the motif of ballet as poetics of imitation, Bicaise brings his chapter to an end by recom-


mending to keep a correct upright gait, in dance and in the other exercises alike. Dancing masters warmly suggest it too, he reminds the reader. Such posture, with its symmetry, ensures results on both aesthetic and hygienic grounds, by regularly balancing our movements in that vertical equilibrium which distinguishes human beings from other animals, and puts them in agreement with the order of the universe, itself vertically oriented. Conversely, all exercises which compel the body to adopt bending positions will alter its shape, and shorten life. From this respect, medical thought could also observe and recommend specific dances as suitable for particular bodies, and take into account differences based on age and gender, or in social and professional background, or else in an individual’s temperament. Bicaise indeed blamed disordered and violent dancing, as that practised by town and country folk, which is totally harmful, because it disharmoniously shakes the body up. Furthermore, it is arranged without skill or measure, and therefore bears no relations to lyrics and music. That is why, to stir up the spirits of people and put into motion those massive, hard and muscular bodies, which all week grew numb by continuous application to manual labouring, there is a need to awaken them by resorting to extraordinary means. In the subsequent chapter on songs, instruments and music, the author specified that which was needed to move those coarse spirits and bodies, who were insensitive to sweet and enchanting music: it was high-pitched notes, noisy sounds, and ridiculous and irregular songs.30 Among the other activities, in the following chapters Bicaise judges military exercises and hunting to be utterly unsuitable for individuals of particular temperaments; comedy is examined for its remarkable effect on spectators; singing and playing musical instruments (which he acknowledges as curative, as well as preservative) are considered from the points of view of both the performer and the audience. Laughter can be helpful in moderation, dangerous and even deadly in excess. Walks are classified according to a remarkable number of characteristics, including their spatial pattern. Circular movement is singled out as being the best, in an explanation that bears witness to the longue durée of astrological medicine (a significant component of Bicaise’s Weltanschauung from the first chapter of his treatise, ‘Des astres’), as will be clear from the opening sentence: Circular promenades are more befitting to us than linear, not only because they are in harmony (proportionnées) with that circulation of the blood and with the three circles of fire which Hippocrates

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has identified in our body; but also because our spirit is heavenly, the only way it can move is by rolling, and, being connected (proportionné) with the element of which the stars are made, it must imitate their route and do in our limbs as the intelligences do in the sky.31 As for where to go, the ideal place should be well equipped with singing birds, flowing streams, trees and flowers. Although, on the whole, Bicaise’s book may look almost unique in its focus on exercise and somehow idiosyncratic in the opinions it expresses, it offers a selection of topics that is highly representative of the cultural and social orientations predominant at the time.

Amor et alea If from France we move north to the southern Low Countries, one year after Bicaise yet another treatise on the preservation of the health of the literate (Lat. togati) sees its way through the press. The author of the 1670 publication was Vopiscus Fortunatus Plemp of Amsterdam (1601–71), a professor of medicine at Leuven. While obviously everyone recommended exercise as an antidote to the drawbacks of a sedentary life, Plemp pays more attention than average to listing and describing the different types of exercise. They include some professionally orientated activities, such as practising speech (pronunciatio); but also walking, ball games (with reference to the Italian game of pallamaglio), dancing, being transported in various ways, throwing sports, and end with the game of bowling a hoop (Lat. circilasia; ‘very popular among us Netherlanders, and it is called reepen, by the Dutch hoepen’).32 Similar practices were also referred to a couple of years earlier by the German physician Valentin Heinrich Vogler (1622–77), professor of medicine at Frankfurt an der Oder, although in a context where antiquarian references were still predominant. Vogler was sometimes more explicit in indicating the negative effects produced by playing, as in the case of games consisting in hitting a ball towards a target (‘lusus metatorius noster’), in which the parts of the human body are unevenly engaged, and people tend to tire both their arms and their backs to excess.33 As Gontier (and Holling), Vogler also attacked as unhealthy the volta, the quick Renaissance dance that raised both the bodies of women and the eyebrows of moralists.34 The century-and-a-half which we roughly surveyed – from midsixteenth to late seventeenth – sees the most characteristic develop-


ments of early modern hygienic literature. From that point the humoral creed undergoes a progressive crisis, coming under attack from different medical paradigms. However, changes are not sudden and one can find similar health manuals and recommendations repeated for generations. In the mid-eighteenth century, a generally positive medical advice on sports and physical exercise was still present in the articles of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, although coverage of contemporary practice is limited to the ‘jeux d’addresse et de force’ (games of skill and force) most common among the French urban male élite: bowling, skittles (jeu de quilles), croquet, billiards and tennis. By comparison, the antiquarian material is much richer, although not unproblematic: preference is given to Greek athletics rather than to Roman games of the circus, and some particular sports are criticized for their brutality. The entry on ‘Hygiene’, a contribution by the physician Louis de Jaucourt, reinforces the traditional belief in the benefits of regular exercise.35 While the majority of the hygienic literature dealt with the health of a generic individual, some of the books we have considered provided medical advice for a specific social group. The most frequently considered is that of the literate, a class which had the advantage of including the writers of medical treatises themselves, and thus was inevitably favoured by them. The genre of treatises on the health of that particular category of people had a tradition established at the end of the fifteenth century by the neo-Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, and Monteux traced it expressly back to Plato.36 Within this group we have found the treatises published by Holling and Plemp. Holling excluded athletic and military exercises as unsuitable practices for the literate. The attention for the environment which he displayed in his preference for the country walk also oriented his discussion of the subject of dance. While the latter was included among the acceptable forms of exercise, its outcome – as that of any other exercise – was to be beneficial or harmful according to the place where it was practised: green, shaded and quiet venues were much to be preferred against closed or sunny, dusty and crowded ones (very similar concerns will dominate nineteenth-century literature on public hygiene).37 Holling’s objections against athletics offer us the opportunity to consider both the fact that different categories of people could be recommended different practices, but also that different medical writers might offer diverging, even conflicting advice. So far we have encountered the hygienic system as rooted in the humoral paradigm. However, it should be added on one hand that a very similar approach was shared by physi-

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cians who stood outside the Galenic orthodoxy, such as Duchesne, who was a Paracelsian; while on the other hand, that Galen’s authority on the matter did not go unchallenged throughout the period. The sixteenth-century Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) offers, in his books De sanitate tuenda a fairly uncommon but authoritative example of criticism directed against Galen. He openly criticized the ancient Greek authority, accusing him of proposing intensive athletic exercise, appropriate more to a soldier’s than to a civilian’s requirements. Consequently, Cardano confirmed that physical exercise favours human health, but he denied that it helps in prolonging life. One has to understand – says Cardano – that vigorous physical condition and long life are two incompatible goals: if you are strong you will be in excellent health, but will exhaust your resources more quickly; if, on the contrary, long life is what you desire (and that, as we have seen, was a very popular topic in Renaissance culture), you will have to aim for a lower standard of physical vigour.38 Although Cardano and his followers were making a point against Galen, they did nevertheless share with him some fundamental opinions. Criticizing excessive body-building and proposing, rather, a mean model between muscular strength and weakness was not a novelty in the field of medical literature. Galen himself had constructed the type of harmoniously developed body by referring to the body of the athlete or gladiator as a negative example: according to Western medical tradition, a healthy body should not look like that of a modern bodybuilder’s.39 The literature on the preservation of health was a very important component of the cultural scenario and of the scientific knowledge and practice of its age. It differs from modern preventive medicine particularly in the fact that today’s prophylaxis provides a set of rules which aim to avoid particular diseases, while early hygiene was supposed to keep the human body in a general balance that would have prevented the development of any health problem. The literature on the subject came in a variety of genres, from the strictly professional and academic to those addressing the general public, and various levels of literacy (from the learned book to the almanac). Generally speaking, it contained a strong self-help element: by following reliable health advice you were expected to stay well without the need to resort to the help of a doctor. A confirmation of the importance of this relevance to a wider audience can be found in the fact that a significant number of authors of representative texts in this tradition – among them Elyot, Cornaro and Ranzow – were laymen rather than physicians.


So far we have explored the role played by physical exercise as a component of preventive medicine. Its role within therapeutics was much less prominent, although Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (which we introduced above, Chapter 2) offers a good example of humoral balances and medical conditions for which music and play could be regarded as effective curative strategies. ‘Exercise Rectified of Body and Minde’ appears within the author’s exposition of the cure of melancholy. In the style of the whole volume, a good deal of the substantial chapter (membrum 2.2.4) is descriptive, anecdotal and antiquarian; nonetheless, it provides an interesting example of Renaissance writing on the topic, and evidence of the longue durée of the humoral paradigm. Rectification is required here because inconvenience had previously been caused to the melancholic ‘on the one side by immoderate and unseasonable exercise, too much solitarinesse and idlenesse on the other’. The antidote will consist of ‘a moderate and seasonable use of it’. Initial proof for the statement that ‘we should ever be in action’ comes from cosmology: heavens, stars, air and water are always in motion.40 Here Burton summarizes his previous grievance against the idleness of nobility, this time defining it as a European problem, in contrast with the patterns of behaviour characteristic of other cultures: ‘They knowe not how to spend their times (disports excepted, which are all their businesse) what to doe or otherwise how to bestow themselves: like our moderne Frenchmen, that had rather loose a pound of blood in a single combate, then a drop of sweat in any honest labour.’41 Burton refers to the exhortations to correct these errors that come from divines (among them, the Puritan William Perkins), physicians and politicians. Thus far, our setting could be that of a work ideology censoring all pastimes. The author’s discourse is naturally more articulated, and contains indications for an appropriate use of exercise. Consistently with the nature of his book, he cites some details of medical advice, while not passing over in silence the fact that different physicians have provided contradictory rules. ‘Of these labours, exercises, and recreations, which are likewise included, some properly belong to the body, some to the mind, some more easy, some hard, some with delight, some without, some within doores, some naturall, some are artificiall.’42 The series is opened by Galen’s ball game. In the subsequent section on hunting and fishing, if it was not for some generic advice on moderation, the reader tends to miss the reason why they have become curative, after appearing in the previous partition as symptoms of the disease. ‘Many other sports and recreations there be, much in use, as Ringing, bowling, shooting [. . .]. But the most pleasant of all outward

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pastimes, is that of Areteus, deambulatio per amoena loca, to make a petty progresse, a merry journy now and then with some good companions, to visit friends, see citties, castles, townes.’43 Burton’s eulogy of the walk deploys a variety of cultural references and historical contexts, from the medieval monastery of Bernard of Clairvaux to ‘the Princes garden at Ferrara’ as described in Schottus’s popular Itinerary to Italy. It is significant to find here explicit reference to a traveller’s guide, since the following recommended settings cluster together in what looks like an early piece of travel journalism, attracting the reader’s attention to a selection of Renaissance top tourist attractions: ‘the sight of such a Palace as that of Escuriall in Spaine, or to that which the Moores built at Granada, Fountenblewe in France, the Turkes gardens in his Seraglio, [. . .] the Popes Belvedere in Rome [. . .]; or those famous gardens of the Lord Chantelou in France [. . .]; or many of our Noblemens gardens at home. To take a boat in a pleasant evening, and with musicke to row upon the waters [. . .]; or in a Gundilo through the grand Canale in Venice, to see those goodly Palaces, must needs refresh and give content to a melancholy dull spirit.’44 Here the problems deriving from the specific humoral balance of the melancholic govern a selection which is not solely about walking, but includes a variety of recommended sensorial experiences that are expected to play a curative role: pleasant odours and drinks, the sight of lavishly decorated and furnished interiors, and so on. The importance of vision, the positive impact of an amazement on the beholder, brings the author to introduce the subject of spectacles, from all sorts of pageants to the re-enactment of historical battles. Burton continues with a list of recreations specific to either country or town: ‘May-games, Feasts, Wakes, and merry meetings’ on the one side; on the other, ‘walks, Cloysters, Tarraces, Groves, Theatres, Pageants, Games, and severall recreations’.45 He also cites keeping animals for pleasure, and distinguishes between pastimes appropriate to different seasons. He adds: ‘Some mens whole delight is, to take Tobacco, and drinke all day long in a Taverne or Ale-house, to discourse, sing, jest, roare, talke of a Cock and Bull over a pot, etc.’ – a subject which gives way to a conventional critique of gambling, for which the physician makes use of some of the Calvinist literature we will consider in the next chapter (Daneau, Souter).46 Burton’s survey continues: ‘Chesse-play, is a good and witty exercise of the minde, for some kinde of men’; ‘Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage plaies, howsoever they bee heavily censured by some severe Catoes, yet if opportunely and soberly used, may justly be approved.’47 The description of appropriate occupations reaches a climax when Burton observes: ‘But amongst those


exercises, or recreations of the minde within doores, there is none so generall, so aptly to be applyed to all sorts of men, so fit and proper to expell Idleness and Melancholy, as that of Study’ – a topic which he finds particularly congenial and which occupies him for several pages.48 Towards the end of the chapter it is revealed to the reader that reference to ‘all sorts of men’ was not generic, and the matter is heavily gendered: study is only recommended to male subjects, while a woman has her own occupations ‘for she eats not the bread of idlenesse’ (Proverbs, 31: 27); we will return to them later (Chapter 6). As the case of Burton should have widely proved, physical exercise does not exhaust the relevance of play to human health. There are various forms of play which are marginally, if at all, physical. This does not mean that they could not be regarded as helpful for physical wellbeing. After all, emotions were one of the nonnaturals, and their balance had to be taken into consideration. Thus medical literature also valued spiritual recreation, as having a positive effect on one’s health. Both the Italian physician Bartolomeo Traffichetti in the sixteenth century and the English Everard Maynwaring (1628–99?) during the seventeenth, wrote in similar terms that ‘that which is most delightful, will probably prove most beneficial’.49 This, once more, is evident in Burton, where the mind appears as rectified by mirth, and music as a significant remedy for it (2.2.6.3–4).50 A particular case is offered by the medical assessment of gambling. Playing cards or dice could not be justifiable as a form of exercise; moreover, the emotional stress that accompanied the betting and the positive or negative outcome of the game could hardly be seen as beneficial. While hints of its dangers for human health are found in a variety of sources, a systematic medical enquiry on the harmful passion for gambling (ludendi in pecuniam cupiditas) is produced in the mid-sixteenth century by the Netherlandish physician Paschier Joostens. Having travelled for many years throughout Spain and Italy, the author found the Spaniards to be naturally ‘hot’ and particularly inclined to gambling, contrary to his fellow-countrymen; to the extent that he declares to have found Spanish villages where no food or drink was available for sale, while cards were ubiquitous. As a background to such remarks, it may be worth remembering that, from Antiquity to the Renaissance, humoral theory combined with a deterministic doctrine that believed in an environmental influence on people’s complexions and health. A chief purpose of the volume is to define gambling and identify the origin of the passion for it. According to the author – who claims that the topic has been undeservedly neglected until his date – ‘sex and gam-

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bling are life’s two main evils’ (amor et alea duo vitae praecipua mala); but the latter is more harmful than the former. In his definition, gambling is an unbridled desire to play and bet, springing from a vivid and credulous hope for gain.51 Joostens also fully develops the topic of the antisocial implications of an activity in which gain is possible solely as long as someone else loses: consequently, if everyone behaved in the same way, society would crumble – an argument mindful of medieval ethical economics, which also brings to mind Immanuel Kant’s argument against borrowing money, if you know you are not likely to be in a condition to restitute it.52 In the second part of his book, the author proposed a strategy for curing the gambling passion, based on the consideration of passions as nonnaturals. It relies on the effects of knowledge and reason, starting with the very knowledge which the patient can develop of his own condition; and regards cogitation as able to move (Lat. compellere) the passions of the soul. The theme is so closely associated with the self-control traditionally preached by late-antique philosophy, and by its Renaissance revivalists, that the physician can here directly indicate stoicism (Stoicorum severissima disciplina) as one of his recommended curing strategies. In the closing pages, a poetic image is introduced in order to leave in the readers’ minds a clearer image of the alternative options one has to choose: for the purpose, Joostens retells the story of Dido and Aeneas. The Trojan hero was enthralled by passion for his lover, but he paid attention to divine warning (Mercury), re-established self-control and gained safety. The queen, instead, only followed lust, thus losing both sanity and life. If the tale is little gambling-specific, it stresses the relationship between play and love, and offers the modern reader a significant sample of the humanist culture of the writer and of his readers (who knew their Vergil). Joosten’s therapy may not have found many followers, or else not have proved very successful: a few generations later the disease had not yet been eradicated, and his treatise was reprinted at least twice over the following sixty years. A 1617 edition was published, on the behalf of a Frankfurt bookseller, with a dedication, from Leiden, to another Dutch physician, an indication of a continuing popularity of the text within the medical profession; Johann von Münster, a Westphalian Calvinist aristocrat who was also the author of a remarkably lengthy treatise against dance, added an extensive appendix to it, where he collected opinions against gambling from twenty-seven different authorities, from third-century (pseudo-)Cyprian to the Reformation laws of Nuremberg and Geneva.53 A further edition was published in Amsterdam in 1642, its particu-


larly small size suggesting use as a pocket book. In an engraved frontispiece (Figure 3.4) three men are sitting in the open at a long table, fully engaged in gambling. They are playing with three dice, and all have heaps of coins in front of them. A woman is watching them from a window closely behind. She is fully part of the scene, one hand pointing at one of the players. Were they playing cards, one could suspect she was signalling a partner, revealing what someone had in hand. In fact, the group may only recently have stopped playing cards, since a pack of them has been dropped, and lies scattered untidily on the steps below the table. A monkey has picked some cards up and joined in, a visual reflection on human nature, presumably suggestive that play requires and develops less than human passions and skills. In the background, within a walled city which is consistent with the appearance of the southern countries visited during the author’s travels, two pairs of men are fighting with fists and swords, perhaps to show the reader the challenges and contests that may derive from disagreements generated at the gambling table.54 Joostens’s critique of the passion for gambling reminds us of the proximity between the medical and the ethical discourse in approaching the world of play. The generally encouraging medical assessment of current pastimes could not go unnoticed by moralists, who usually had to agree both that some form of recreation was necessary, and that a certain number of contemporary customs were physically appropriate to provide it. However, as we have seen throughout this chapter, experts providing advice on both medical and moral grounds could have something to say about the suitability of specific practices either to particular human groups, or altogether to their alleged beneficial purpose. The conceptual framework of a necessary balance between motion and rest played an important role here, although it did so in more than one way. On one side, some social practices could be criticized for not providing vigorous enough activity, particularly for social groups whose sedentary lifestyle was most in need of amendment. The fact that the main justification of loisirs was functional, as recreations needed to enable either one’s body or one’s mind to be fitter for subsequent serious occupations, could be taken strictly, and work as a criterion for granting or rejecting moral or legal approval to individual pastimes. Thus, it suggests to the late-seventeenth-century Catholic theologian Jean Baptiste Thiers the unusual step of condemning the game of chess, which fails to exercise the body and tires the mind excessively.55 On the other side, those pastimes that could be perceived as physically too tiring also failed to deliver an intended benefit, that of rest from ordinary duties. This is

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Figure 3.4 The passion for gambling: the physician’s view. From the Elzevir edition of Justus’s De alea.


one of the grounds on which William Prynne, the arch-enemy of early Stuart drama, based his uncompromising rejection of folk dancing (see further below, Chapter 6). It is now the turn to address more directly the moral issues which Renaissance culture attached to its recreational practices.

4 The Moral Discourse

In François de Sales’s Introduction to a Devout Life the exemplum of John the Evangelist (‘It is sometimes necessary to ease our spirit . . .’) opens a series of three chapters, respectively dedicated to an examination ‘Of honest and commendable pastimes and recreations’, ‘Of dauncing and some other passetimes which are lawfull, but dangerous withall’, and of ‘The times to sport and dance’.1 In one of its opening statements, the Bishop of Geneva observes that To take the ayre, to walke, and talk merrily and lovingly together, to play on the lute, and other such instruments, to sing in musick, to goe a hunting, are recreations so honest, that to use them well, there needs but ordinarie prudence, which giveth every thing due order, place, season, and measure. A subsequent list includes ‘those games in which the gaine gotten by them serveth for a price and recompence of nimblenes of the bodie or industrie of the mind’ (‘tennis, baloone, stoole bale, chesse, tables, running at the ringe’). Here, again, only excess is to be avoided (it would wear the body and dull the mind). François de Sales’s ethics of moderation allows him to acknowledge that ‘without pleasure there can be no recreation’. His subtle advice is confined to suggestions that, as well as limiting the amount of time you set aside for it, ‘thou shouldst not so place thy hart upon these passetimes, as to be allways desirous of them, and not to be content without of them’. With their combination of an acknowledgement of human nature and of a moral concern for the dangers arising from social life, these recommendations may offer one of the most representative examples of early modern attitudes and prescriptions in the matter of recreation. 46

The Moral Discourse 47

However, the area was by no means one of unanimously held tenets, and had certainly witnessed positions of stricter ethical disapproval of the world of play.

Reason versus Joy Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74) was internationally known as a moral philosopher, as well as a poet and a humanist. His Remedies against Both Kinds of Fortune had an enormous circulation, in manuscripts and subsequently as printed books, in its original Latin and in a wealth of vernacular translations. The title of the sixteenth-century English translation, Physicke against Fortune, may itself give an indication of how close such remedies could come to the language of medicine (even though Petrarch himself was the author of some Invectives against a Physician). In the fashion of late ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, where wisdom used to be described as a pharmakon preservative from the troubles of everyday life, the Tuscan writer warned the reader of this work against the detrimental effects that both success and failure have on the stability of the human soul. The first book deals with remedies against good fortune and, for the section that is relevant to our enquiry, is written as a dialogue between Joy (gaudium) and Reason (ratio). This series of chapters springs from a discussion of the implications of a prosperous life. In this context, rest from labour is considered after the consideration of banquets and dress, and followed by the topics of pleasant smells and sweet music, dance, gambling (with dice and tables), watching a multiplicity of performances, horse-riding and hunting. Until this point the list of pastimes owes a significant debt to the medical tradition, thus further suggesting the closeness that existed between the dominant discourses on the body and those on the soul; it subsequently gives way to a concern for the display of prosperity that is no longer related to recreation (availability of servants, magnificence of houses and castles, and so on). Joy, who takes no notice of its interlocutor’s objections, displays a naïve approval for all that which seems pleasant: ‘I lye idly in my bed chamber’, ‘I enjoy a long, and uninterrupted sleepe’, ‘I delyght in dauncing’, ‘I have played and won’, ‘I take delyght in the pastyme of jesters’, ‘I am very willing to see playes’. Reason attempts to undermine the emotion’s certainties. In its speeches the reader can easily identify the author’s standpoint – though one should never underestimate the restrictions imposed by a literary genre, which require that one writes in the prescribed style, rather than expressing personal feelings. Reason’s speeches present clear affinity

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with the monastic tradition of contempt for the world (contemptus mundi), the subject of a treatise by Pope Innocent III and of extensive pastoral literature.2 Petrarch’s references, however, are predominantly classical, his moral position is stoic, and his chapters form an anthology of instructive examples from Antiquity. Reason is objectionable in the extreme, even on apparently innocent topics (from Dialogue I, 31 – Joy: ‘I take pleasure in a nimble horse’; Reason: ‘A most fierce and unquiet beast, which sleepeth not, and is never satisfied’). It warns against dangers of different nature, to your mind, your body or your goods (what you may win at gambling, you will subsequently certainly lose). When it seems unreasonable to condemn an activity altogether, distinctions are made in order to praise moderate use, blame excess, while never conceding too much to the opposition: thus ‘there are two kindes of quietnesse: one is busie, whiche even in very rest is doing somewhat, and busie about honest affayres, and this is very sweete; the other is slouthful and idle, and given only to sluggyshnes’ (Dialogue I, 21); and ‘it is profitable somtime’ to ride a horse, provided that you choose a good one. The humanist concentration in ancient sources leaves little room for references to contemporary practices: thus Petrarch’s discourse on theatre seems to bear the classical scene in mind, and the case of watching wrestling matches does not point clearly to any medieval use (although Joy claims to ‘exercise wrestlyng’ personally); of hunting it is mentioned that passion for it passed from the Romans to the French, only to warn Italians not to follow their example.3 One-hundred-and-fifty years later, hunting still offered the scope for moral criticism of recreational violence in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1511). As Keith Thomas has shown, later in the early modern period this moral critique was linked with the emergence of a new sensibility towards animals and the natural world, a development which encouraged the group of critics of sports involving cruelty towards or between animals to increase.4

A virtue to remember On the subject of hunting, a four-chapter section is included in Pedro Covarrubias’s Remedio de jugadores – an early sixteenth-century treatise of moral theology to which we will return later in this chapter. The author introduces the subject by using the term ‘hunting’ (Spanish caça) in a broader than usual sense. There are four genres of hunting, he writes. The first, not dissimilar in its forms from the hunting of fierce


animals, is the one adopted by human beings for killing and capturing one another. This variety is typically exemplified by the way Saracens murder and enslave Christians, who should rather be more consistent in taking up their arms and hunting down the unfaithful in their turn. A second sort of hunting is that by which buffoons and flatterers ‘hunt’ for the favour of patrons. Hunting in a more literal sense is the subject of the last two subdivisions. The third, the hunting of wild, fierce animals, is morally disputable for the reason than it puts human life in danger. For the same reason canon law forbade tournaments; but hunting is even less justifiable than tournaments on the grounds of its value as a form of military training. The fourth avoids this danger, and is therefore normally lawful for lay people. It is defined by the characteristics of being performed ‘merrily, with agitation, hounds and the noise of voices’. The selection of characteristics is certainly idiosyncratic, but somehow representative of some aspects of contemporary culture and developments in the art of hunting. The explicit mentioning of ‘hounds’, for instance, reminds us how a physical exercise was not supposed to prove excessively energetic; in the social practice of hunting throughout the early modern period, one can see the progressive diminution of the human role, while dogs became protagonists of the chase. (In so far as the indirect participation of hunters implies a limited use of force and weapons, Norbert Elias has linked this development in fox-hunting to a central feature of the civilizing process: the appropriation of control of the means of violence by the state.) The author continues by listing standard conditions under which this practice would be tolerated. Not during a period devoted to penitence, such as Lent; not during a religious service; acceptable otherwise on Sundays, provided that it is undertaken only as a pastime and not for profit, and it does not occupy too large a portion of the day. Fishing is preferable (the Holy Scripture shows good examples of fishermen, not of huntsmen). The Spanish divine writes a specific invective against the ‘vanity of those, who take great care (con gran estudio) in devoting themselves to hunting’, where, quoting Petrarch, he singles out the oddities of the passion for falconry. Since canon law has a specific interest in the behaviour of clerics, Covarrubias pays particular attention to the condition under which members of the clergy could be allowed to hunt – exceptionally so, since it would normally be forbidden for them. Although the modern reader may not find the rules about the clergy tremendously interesting per se, the circumstances that are considered as aggravating or excusing are more relevant to us because they cast light on the conditions under which hunting – as well as other leisure activities – could

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acquire positive or negative connotations in the eyes of Christian moralists. Among the conditions that could allow clerics to hunt we find the purpose (mere recreation), and illness (hunting as an exercise for recovering health). The most peculiar is the recommendation to avoid the noise and resort to loops (traps), nets, and crossbows. The raison d’être of this rule is, explicitly, the fact that, by keeping the hunting cleric in the hide, it avoids scandal. What is peculiar about it is the fact that it coincides with the forms of hunting that were practised by poachers – and for the very same reasons, that is because they could be done without attracting attention. That these two social categories in sixteenth-century Europe could be singled out for sharing ways (and times?) of their presence in the woods is an intriguing hypothesis.5 Early modern treatises on hunting expressly included the requirement to be ‘master of one’s own time’: if one is seriously committed, one needs to be free from other obligations;6 and the example could be extended to many other aristocratic leisure activities. This recalls the issue of ‘being in control of one’s own time’ as it occurs in Aristotle’s Politics. In Aristotle, moral and political philosophy is indeed intrinsically linked to the existence of a leisured class. I am obviously borrowing the latter term from Thorstein Veblen, although one should be aware of the ideological and chronological connotations with which it was charged in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which included evolutionary aspects and a nostalgia for the pre-monetary economy.7 But there is no doubt of the presence of a similar social component in Aristotle and classical thought altogether: ‘free activities’ are possible, indeed conceivable solely as long as someone else is charged with the ‘unfree’ business of providing food and shelter. To the extent that, while we moderns define free time as residual after work, the Greek ‘free time’ (scholé) was a primary term, and the need for work was defined as lack of it (ascholia). The contrast between the Greek scholé and the Latin otium is patent, in spite of the fact that the terms are often given as synonyms. It is partly rooted in a contrast between Greek and Roman cultures generally, of which the Roman eulogists of action versus leisure or meditation were well aware. Plato and Aristotle shared the idea of the philosopher as a man of leisure, devoted to the ‘contemplative life’ of academia, also politically engaged, but surely not burdened with any working duty.8 Aristotle provides a good starting point to set the scene for the Western tradition of moral evaluation of leisure activities. His Nicomachean Ethics included a brief discussion of the virtue of eutrapelia, a term which described the art of moderately amusing oneself and one’s


interlocutors in civilized intercourse, by keeping the mean between excessive laughter and excessive seriousness. The philosopher caricatured both these extremes as lacking in civility. To our reflection, it is remarkable that not only the lack of gravitas of a buffoon, but also the tedious seriousness of a bore were classified as anti-social. Aristotle’s term for the latter, àgrios, meant ‘rustic’, an appropriate rural counterpart to the ‘urbanity’ of the eutràpelos – a connotation that gets lost in the standard English translation as ‘the boor’. In the early modern period, the translation of the Greek terms could offer the opportunity for cultural adaptations. For instance, the uncivilized neighbours selected in the mid-sixteenth century by the Spanish friar Francisco de Alcocer include ‘mountaineers’ (‘Ya los tales [el Philosopho] los llama duros, agrestes y montesinos’).9 Although a twentieth-century scholar deservedly labelled eutrapelia ‘a forgotten virtue’, this was not the case during the Renaissance, when the notion proved quite influential.10 Since Aristotle’s Ethics formed the basis of the teaching of moral philosophy in European universities from the twelfth century onwards, the principal structure of that teaching, that is the lecturer’s commentary to the classical authoritative text, provides us with a well-documented source for the intellectual history of moral ideas and attitudes. Commentators chiefly developed this category – sometimes in specific dissertations – with reference to the skills that were required for achieving pleasant conversation.11 Apart from specialists, a wider range of educated people were familiar with the term, which also occurs in a few interesting sixteenth-century literary contexts. ‘Eutrapelus’ was the nickname of one of Cicero’s correspondents, who was the addressee of two of his Epistolae familiares and was also mentioned in one of Horace’s letters. As a name of a fictional character it was used by Martial. Erasmus made Eutrapelus a character in two of his Colloquia (‘Puerpera’ and ‘Convivium fabulosum’), who works as the author’s porte-parole. After those influential precedents, Eutrapel is the name given to the picaresque protagonist of two collections of short stories by the French conteur Noël du Fail, Les baliverneries d’Eutrapel (1548) and Contes et Discours d’Eutrapel (1585).12 In all these contexts, the Greek noun serves to mark an individual whose distinctive characteristics are good humour and an ability to entertain. Also Cristóbal de Villalón, a Spanish humanist who was a contemporary of Du Fail, discussed the Aristotelean topic and term in his El scholástico, a dialogue on the education of the ideal university student, dedicated to the future Philip II. In another work attributed to the same Villalón, El crótalon, the elaborate pseudonym used by the author is ‘Christóforo Gnophoso,

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natural de la ínsula Eutrapelia, una de las ínsulas Fortunadas’. If the classical term had this literary fortune, it may be less surprising to find it in more technical literature. For instance, it appears in the ludus entry of a fourteenth-century dictionary of civil and ecclesiastical law (the work of Alberico da Rosate); and the summa for confessors assembled at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the Dominican Giovanni Cagnazzo sets a special place for eutrapelia in its alphabetical arrangement of the matter.13 Within a seventeenth-century Spanish controversy on the morality of theatre, the notion could prove so crucial as to function as the title of one of the publications.14 Furthermore, the Aristotelean virtue could be seen not solely as justifying, but even requiring some recreation from human beings, as the polemic rejection of such argument by an Italian moralist seems to suggest.15

A view from Paris Christian literature, particularly since the eleventh-century rediscovery of the corpus of Aristotle’s work (and after the contributions of commentators of the stature of Thomas Aquinas), inherited his idea of the essential moral neutrality of the world of play, although it could season the dish with so many caveats as to make it totally unrecognizable. The reproposition of the Aristotelean praise of moderate play encountered a certain amount of resistance. In the exposition of the Nicomachean Ethics written in the first half of the fourteenth century by Walter Burley (c. 1275–1345), fellow of Merton College and tutor to Edward III, we read that some critics denied that play could be an exercise field for virtue, since it is childish and not difficult (virtues in fact require effort). Burley, however, rejected the objection, by recurring to the bow argument (in the form of a simile) and – in the footsteps of Aquinas – allowing for a moderate remuneration for the work of theatrical performers (histriones).16 The thirteenth-century Parisian faculty of theology produced the most influential texts. As well as in the form of commentaries on Aristotle, they were written in response to a passage on a Latin work On True and False Penitence (De vera et falsa poenitentia), which circulated from the late eleventh century with the false attribution to Augustine. The phrase in question required the penitent, in order to obtain full pardon, to abstain from amusements and profane performances (‘a ludis, a spectaculis saeculi’). During the following century, the text was included both in Gratian’s Decretum and in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Via these two fundamental compilations it was available for commen-


tary, on one hand, to canonists, on the other, to theologians, whose university instruction was based on the Sententiae.17 Early interest in the topic is testified in the late 1220s by the first Dominican friar to become a master of theology at Paris, Rolando of Cremona, whose Summa includes a chapter ‘de ludo’, in which the problems concerning professional performers (histriones et ioculatores) hold the stage.18 When his fellow Dominican Albert the Great (c. 1200–80) encountered the pseudo-Augustinian passage in his commentaries on Peter Lombard, he fully developed a scholastic question de ludis, in which he discusses whether and/or which of them constitute a mortal sin. Here, dance is his primary concern and tolerance the predominant attitude. Albert’s pupil Aquinas (1225–74) supported and propagated the Aristotelean approach to play. He dealt with the subject in a variety of texts. The most detailed and specific is a question from his Summa theologica (II/II, 168) on good manners (‘modesty in our outward bodily actions’). The subject is developed into four points: ‘1. whether there can be virtue or vice in these acts we do seriously; 2. whether there can be virtue in these acts we do in play; 3. of the sin of playing too much; 4. and of that of playing too little.’ In answering the second point according to the dialectic, dramatized rhetoric of scholasticism, Aquinas starts with the thesis that denies any possible virtue in playing. He subsequently overturns it and confirms the opportunity of appropriate rest for both body and soul. Aristotle’s authority and the example of John the Evangelist feature among the pieces of evidence he employs to support his standpoint. In the last two points of his question, Aquinas keeps allegiance to the Aristotelean mean, and rejects both sorts of excess.19 Similar attitudes can be found in the first Franciscan counterpart of the Dominican masters, the Englishman Alexander of Hales (1185–1245), who dealt with the same issue in a quaestio ‘On laughter and entertainment’ (de risu et ioculatione) of his own Summa. His answer equates laughter with dance, and concludes with a distinction between different sorts of laughter: some positive, some negative. The same applies to dance and play (‘de saltatione et ludo’). One type of it derives from a dissolute disposition of the mind (ex mentis lascivia), and cannot bring anything other than sin. Another derives from a spiritual mirth of the soul, and can produce worthy deeds (Alexander’s example is the oft-quoted dance of David before the Ark). Furthermore, sometimes people can play in order to restore their tempers (ad naturae recreationem), and that will benefit their characters; or else, for the sake of exercise, and physical strength (ars), which can be morally indifferent.

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In total, a far from prohibitionist evaluation. The same Franciscan master returned to the topic later in his treatise, when discussing the moral implications of watching, rather than participating, play and games. He distinguished between two modes of watching (duplex est inspectio). One is casual and passing (in transitu), does not aim at sinful pleasures and will never constitute a serious fault. The other, on the contrary, is deliberate and persistent (inspectio studiosa), and can induce to mortal sin, particularly if one stops and watches a comic performance (ioculatio histrionica) or a dancing display made by lewd women (ioculatio chorealis mulierum lascivarum).20 Subsequent theological literature built on these foundations, and developed a detailed discussion of the circumstances (of specific games, persons, times, places, manners and reasons) which could turn playing and dancing into a sin. This is the case in the extensive body of literature that sprang from the canon by which the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 prescribed annual confession for all the faithful. During the following centuries, a vast range of books, of a variety of different types, were produced for the advice of either the confessors or the penitents; and they could include detailed discussion of the circumstances that concerned dance and ludus. By the time of the Reformation, this corpus had noticeably grown and new publications, now circulating in print, had become fairly repetitive, apart from the inevitable quarrels between individual compilers (or competing religious orders). The most influential pre-Reformation summae for confessors usually comprised entries on play and games (ludus et iocus), and dance (chorea), both generally assessed as neutral per se, though seasoned with a number of caveats. Not atypically, the Dominican Silvestro da Prierio, in the ludus entry of his Summa Sylvestrina (1515) – a confessional compilation that enjoyed a wide circulation – could go as far as repeating, on the grounds of Aquinas, that play in general was not only lawful, but also virtuous; ten years later, Cardinal Cajetan (see below) could even call playing for recreation ‘holy’ (licitus et sanctus). On the eve of the Reformation, the summae showed a tendency to be lenient, to justify and condone behaviour more often than stigmatize it. Contemporaries were aware of this orientation: Protestant reformers denounced it as typical of Catholic low moral standards, while Counter-Reformation theologians felt embarrassed about it, and produced, in some cases at least, more binding guidance for the faithful. Among the practices one finds condemned in this literature is recreational masking, a transgression that appears aggravated if a lay person dresses up as a monk or a nun.21 As late as 1686, at the end of the period here under consideration,


medieval Scholasticism could still offer the conceptual framework and basis for the organization of a lengthy treatise of Catholic moral theology, the Traité des jeux et divertissemens published in Paris by Jean Baptiste Thiers (1636–1703). The author, a theologian who is perhaps better known for his treatise against superstitions and popular beliefs, introduces, on the lines of the Latin opposition between ludus and iocus, a first general distinction between jokes (jeux de paroles et les railleries) and play or games (action). While the former group is discussed in a brief section, the latter takes most of the book. Its assessment is based on a quotation from Aquinas (in the style of medieval and modern sermons, whose structure tended to follow a list of topics based on a biblical verse). In order to ‘make play and games legal’, Aquinas required three conditions: i) that people avoided dishonourable behaviour and actions that would harm their neighbour; ii) that in recreations one never abandoned gravity (the brief section where problems relating to particular social groups are addressed); iii) that a standard set of appropriate circumstances were respected, in relation to recreation itself (the section containing the traditional classification into games of chance, those of skill and those that are mixed, to which I will return in Chapter 6), people who practise it, time, place, and its general compatibility with modesty, justice and consciousness. Each of the above topics is discussed in a number of chapters.22

Games without a chance Theologians were much less tolerant towards gambling. Playing with dice and (when they invaded Western Europe, at the end of the Middle Ages) cards was so typical a folk pastime as to often absorb all (or most) of an author’s thoughts when referring to ludus (or its vernacular equivalents). The tavern is the most characteristic site of the crime, blasphemy and drunkenness its usual companions: it is not surprising to find that the mother of all sermons against gambling, the work of Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444), interprets such a rite as a devilish counter-Mass. The author, arguably the most popular preacher of his century, was actively engaged in touring around Italian cities in a moralizing campaign, of which gambling was one of the characteristic targets. The sermon is a gem of medieval religious oratory, which exploits to the full its dramatic skills. The inventor of ludus is Lucifer who, in order to compete with the Church founded by Christ to save human souls, rallies all devils and sets play as his counter-organization aiming at increasing

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the number of the damned. The devilish institution has its clergy (the organizers of gambling), its service and Book of Common Prayer (the players’ jargon). The logic of opposition and inversion was deeply rooted in the early modern period, and had a well-known manifestation in the interpretation of witchcraft as an anti-Christian ritual system. In a typical style which served mnemonic functions, most of Bernardino’s text is arranged in the form of lengthy lists (of the evils of play and human types who take part in it). The sermon must have enjoyed some popularity over the following few generations of preachers, if we consider that in the early 1520s it was the object of French and English adaptations. They appeared together with other pastoral material as anonymous independent pamphlets, and exploit in the title the parallel between the two churches. In the frontispiece of the French booklet, La petite dyablerie, a woodcut represented a soul who is shown a player/gambler being dragged by devils into the mouth of hell (Figure 4.1). The English print, The Chirche of the Evyll, still appeared within the gigantic list of references given in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix (1633).23 Games of chance also attracted the attention of jurists, since the legal statute of the payments and debts contracted in playing was far from clear (see below, Chapter 5). From the moral point of view, they could receive little justification. As well as being useless from the standpoint of the traditional justification for recreation (of body and mind) and dangerous for the manner and the environment in which they were played and for their financial consequences (disastrous losses – easy winnings), they implied a play with fortune which defied the divine government over the future and people’s destiny. A significant amount of sources, both Catholic and Protestant, primarily discuss dice and card playing. Born in the opening year of the Council of Trent, Angelo Rocca (1545–1620), an Augustinian friar, was also a bishop and the founder of the (still operating) Angelica Library in Rome. He is the author of a book referred to in the imprimatur as a ‘Treatise on forbidden games of chance’ (Tractatus de vetito alearum ludo) – although the qualifying adjective is dropped in the title-page – and as written in both Latin and Italian (the two versions were published in 1616 and 1617 respectively). The Italian frontispiece continues: ‘[A treatise for the salvation of souls and the preservation of goods and money against card and dice games,] which are forbidden by the very holy councils, by canon and civil laws not only among Christians, but also among the gentiles or pagan, for the many sins and really horrendous cases that originate from such abominable games. Finally, for recreation


Figure 4.1 A look at the sinner (the gambler?) and his retribution, from a safe distance. From the French adaptation of a sermon by Bernardino da Siena.

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of the soul and to avoid idleness, an ingenious and honest game is proposed, which is lawful for any sort of people.’ While the work concentrates on card and dice games, the alternative the author promises in the frontispiece is, typically, chess.24 In the middle of the century a work of the same genre was published by Giovanni Domenigo Ottonelli (1583–1670). The author, a Jesuit professor of literature, also compiled a lengthy work on the moralization of theatre.25 The text alternates twenty-six ‘conclusions’ with as many ‘cases’. The former are rationally argued theses of moral theology; the latter exempla totally indistinguishable from the medieval tradition. In fact, they borrow heavily from medieval collections of moralized horror narratives – tales of what could happen to you if you play, with a few more recent additions. In the tales, players tend to appear enraged (conclusion 7: ‘sometimes playing drives people into fits of madness’): they regularly swear, they often assault other people, including their innocent relatives. (In a similar series of tales collected, before Ottonelli, by Rocca, they also insist in disfiguring sacred images, a sin significantly à la mode in the aftermath of Protestant iconoclastic campaigns.) Consequently, for divine retribution, the death rate is impressive. The oldfashioned flavour of the text does not automatically require from the author to be a precise moralist who denies the faithful any chance for relaxation. On the contrary, Ottonelli allows, at least in theory, both playing for winning and playing for fun (‘il giuoco esercitato per spasso’) as per se non-sinful.26 In the Protestant field, Rocca and Ottonelli had been preceded by Lambert Daneau, who, together with a treatise on Christian friendship, published in 1579 a second treatise, whose summary (from the subsequent English translation) will provide a fairly good indication of its contents:

A DISCOURSE OF GAMING, AND SPECIALLY OF DYCEPLAY Chapter 1. Whether it bee lawfull at all for a Christian man or woman to play and use recreation of their minde 2. Whether it be lawfull for a man to play for money: and the same being wonne, to keepe to his owne use 3. Of Games, Playes and publique Exercises: and of the Rewardes thereunto assigned by the Common Wealth 4. Of them, that bestowe their Winnings gained by play, upon a Banquet, or good cheare for the Whole Companie 5. What kinde of Games and Playes bee lawfull, and what be forbidden and unlawfull

The Moral Discourse 59 6. What the meaning of this Worde Alea properly is: and What Games and Playes are contained and comprehended under the name thereof 7. Dycing and Carding reproved and condemned even by the Heathen and Infidelles that knewe not God 8. That the auncient fathers of the Church have ever misliked and written against Dyceplay 9. That Dyceplay is directly condemned and reproved by manifest texts of the sacred Scriptures 10. The answer to their obiections, that stoutly [defend] and stiffely maintaine this kinde of Play

Daneau was an influential theologian in Calvinist Geneva. In the same year, 1579, he also wrote a Traité des danses, which he published anonymously as the official (precise) position of the French Reformed Churches on the matter. In the early 1580s he was at work in the Netherlands, to help establishing the discipline of the Reformed Churches; when, during the following decade, the Walloon minister Jean Taffin the Elder, in his treatise on the amendment of life, discussed dance and play in two adjoining chapters, what he did was to summarize Daneau’s works and to recommend them to his audience as further reading.27 Another Protestant publication on the subject was Daniel Souter’s Palamedes, which was printed in Leiden in 1622. According to a tradition, during the siege of Troy the Greek warrior Palamedes invented dice and board games, including chess. Souter’s first book is antiquarian, providing a description of individual board games and games of chance. His (shorter) second book is an overview of the moral evaluation and legal restrictions on games of chance, from Antiquity to modern times. As well as the wide diffusion of this practice at all times, it informs the reader of a moral concern that was already present among ancient pagans, and reinforced by Christianity. In the last book a wider range of leisure activities is considered, and ‘honest exercises’ (honesta exercitia) allowed. Their discussion is still based on a variety of sources (from Homer, to Roman law and modern examples), and considers both physical (for instance, ball) and other (such as card) games. The examination of some of them brings the author to their condemnation. Some are clearly live popular practices, for which the author also provides vernacular names (mainly Dutch, though including the Italian morra, the game of guessing the total number of fingers at the same moment as they are flicked out by the two players). The survey continues with chess, archery, pastimes on ice, and music (as a recreation specially suited for intellectuals). In spite of Souter’s Calvinism and moral

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concern, an antiquarian interest is predominant in his work, to the extent that even his second book reads better as a historian’s collection of source material rather than as a controversialist’s argumentation of his point. Given the character of Souter’s work, it is perfectly understandable why Elzevir, a protagonist in the history of the early modern printing press, choose to publish it together with an even more specifically antiquarian study of Olympics and similar Greek games by the Dutch humanist Johannes van Meurs (Meursius). By dealing with the physical sort of exercises from which modern sports have evolved, Meursius’ and Souter’s texts complement each other rather well (although there is some overlap with Souter’s third book). Four years earlier, Meursius had published a similar historical dictionary of ancient dances.28 Many other theologians of all nationalities and denominations could be added to this list.29 Not all Reformed divines, however, were ‘puritan’ in matters of recreation. For instance, Pietro Martire Vermigli – an influential Tuscan émigré in England during the reign of Edward VI, where he was known as Peter Martyr – wrote lengthy annotations (loci communes) on two passages from the Bible referring to dance and play, which could pass as precise moral theology only by forcing them to say that which they do not (this was indeed the destiny of his commonplace on dance, which was also published in Elizabethan London in a separate posthumous edition, preceded by a preface twice as long as the text). Peter’s comments on dance were partly antiquarian, and displayed the intention to draw a moral line between good dances from ancient Israel and bad ones from modern Europe. More relevant here is discussion ‘de ludis’. This starts with the acknowledgement that ‘some of the Fathers seeme to mislike all kind of plaies’. The author, however, draws a number of distinctions between different sorts of games, by also referring to the matter as it was assessed by Roman law (see below, Chapter 5). By the end of his analysis Peter is ready to go back to the Church Fathers and deny sound biblical grounds for their generalized condemnation of amusements. He goes as far as to allow someone ‘sicke or weake’ to play at games of chance, provided that he does not bet on them, since – he states – legal prohibitions of gambling are specifically targeted to avoid the waste of goods. The scriptural occasion for the commonplace was the episode of Samson’s riddle (Judges 14), which qualifies as ludus. Peter finds it ‘honest and seemelie’; however, since ‘had it a deadlie end’ (the massacre of thirty Philistines, by which Samson obtains the clothes he needed in order to pay his betting debt),


other honest exercises besides plays and games may prove more appropriate for Christians.30

The ethics of the audience Among the leisure activities which pose different moral problems to the people taking varying roles in them, the whole world of the performing arts should be included. It is obvious that performing and watching (or listening) bear quite different implications. One should add that performing is a leisure activity only in so far as someone is not professional (nor, conversely, is drama-, ballet- or concertgoing leisure for a theatre, dance or music critic – although this would have been an anachronistic profession in early modern Europe, at least until the eighteenth-century diffusion of literary magazines). Notwithstanding such distinctions, a moral consideration of these human activities tends to consider them as a whole and, while perhaps commenting on the nuances implied by the various roles, is also likely to offer a coherent overall judgement. The specific moral perspective from which medieval and early modern writers could consider this field varied; therefore the framework and occasion of discussions is per se worth registering and analysing. At the dawn of the Christian Middle Ages, in Augustine’s Confessions (VI, 8), we find the story of Alypius, who hated gladiatorial contests. Dragged to the arena by some friends, he kept his eyes closed, but opened them when attracted by the sound of the excited crowd. Naturally, from then on he became addicted to this bloody entertainment. Curiosity compelled him to open his eyes. Both Augustine and (three hundred years later) Bede regarded the curiosity that lures people to the theatre as an effect of the ‘lust of the eyes’ (concupiscentia oculorum).31 In the thirteenth century, reference to those passages of Augustine and Bede provided the grounds for Aquinas’s treatment of the moral implications of theatregoing. The relevant question of his Summa theologica (II/II, 167) discusses curiositas, the vice opposite to studiositas. In the tradition of Christian doctrine, the latter is one of the forms of the virtue of modesty. We are therefore, here, in the religious world of binary oppositions (where one path needs to be followed, the other avoided), rather than in the ternary system of Aristotelian ethics (where virtue stands in the golden mean between two opposite vices). Aquinas divides the topic into two articles, one concerning curiosity in the field of intellectual knowledge, the other in that of sensory

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knowledge. To the sensory field belongs the more specific doubt: is there a form of curiosity in watching plays and games? As for the questions we encountered earlier, and in the whole tradition of medieval scholasticism – which in its turn may be read as a dramatic genre32 – the first answer should be read as that of a fictional interlocutor, but is eventually rejected by the author. In our case, the first answer is lenient: it approves of watching performances, by denying that it is a manifestation of curiosity. Aquinas’s own answer is more problematic: worrying, as moralists of all times do, about sex and violence, he does not condemn attendance as sinful per se, but warns against the risk that improper subject matter of theatrical representations may incline the spectator to behave accordingly.33 In mid-fifteenth-century Florence, Archbishop Antoninus still adopted the same mental framework. His theological discussion of the sin of curiositas – the first of twelve degrees of pride – includes a distinction between genres of performances of varying quality. Passion plays and other religious drama are lawful per se, though care must be taken to avoid inappropriate elements. If the subject of drama is secular, Antoninus distinguishes three further categories; for each of them, the potential sinfulness of performance and attendance is the object of separate examination. They consist of: 1. Spectacles forbidden by law, where there is a probable danger to life, or serious injury (tournaments, duels) – performance of these is always a mortal sin. 2. Spectacles not expressly forbidden by law, but which include many obscene representations – both performance and deliberate attendance are mortal sins. 3. Vain and amusing spectacles (masquerades; also watching dancing and athletic games) – not a mortal sin, provided that they do not mock religion. Half a century later this articulated classification was inserted into the ludus entry of a fellow Dominican, the already mentioned Silvestro da Prierio. With the specific concern for the danger to life, moral judgement was based on the probability of death; an issue which had made Augustine condemn the attendance at hunting scenes, while another Dominican compiler, Giovanni Cagnazzo (Summa Tabiena, 1517), applied it to rope dancing (‘qui gradiuntur per cordas in sublimi’).34 The final years of pre-Reformation Catholicism are dominated by the work of Cardinal Cajetan (Tommaso De Vio, 1469–1534), Dominican


theologian and General of his order. Supported by the author’s philosophical culture, the ludere entry of his popular Summula de peccatis (1525) benefits from clear arrangements of the subject. Play can be a sin either because of its own characteristics or on the grounds of the inappropriate circumstances of its performance. The general trend is fairly liberal, and the condemnation of that which is dangerous is cautious, allowing those moderate armed games that were usual to military training and which could be classified as physical exercise. Furthermore, while judging the behaviour of performers (histriones), caution is mainly recommended over the subject of the performance (materia); but even in evaluating the latter one should exercise moderation, since what is done or said playfully (iocose) may not deserve too harsh reprimand. Over the previous fifteen years, Cajetan had been engaged in his monumental commentary on Aquinas, a different, learned genre of work in which one can again find traces of his systematic attempt to understand and accept, rather than ignore or reject, the variety of human behaviour. When discussing attendance at theatrical performances, the distinction is once more clearly made between the subject (res presentatae) and the spectacle itself (representatio ipsa). Of the latter, he is clear in stating that it is not a sin at all. On the contrary, quoting Aristotle, he reminds the reader that representation ‘naturally delights the mind’ (naturaliter animum delectat).35 The discussion of the relevant passage of the Nicomachean Ethics within the supervision of a thesis offered also a seventeenth-century Dutch commentator, the Amsterdam academic Adriaan Heereboord, the opportunity to propose a classification of the different genres of pastimes. While it may be less interesting here to follow his judgement on which activities are liberal vs illiberal, which meaningful vs meaningless, his general way of referring to his object is worth mentioning. Following Aristotle, Heereboord distinguishes between acts and speech, with pleasantness in the two fields consisting, respectively, of ludi and ioci. He is more aware than other authors of the need to look at both sides of each of these activities, that is performance and audience. His purpose is, from a moral standpoint, the need to maintain a golden mean on all four resulting fronts. Although he does not give many examples, the partition itself is worth citing. It comprises two active roles (dicere iocos, facere ludos), and two passive ones (spectare ludos, audire iocos). In his complete awareness of the audience side of the moral problem this later philosopher may testify to the Renaissance and baroque developments in the theatrical arts, which some of his predecessors had not had the opportunity to witness.36

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Although, among the meanings of ludus/jeu/play, I do not regard the specifically theatrical as the main direct object of this book, it will appear evident from my examples that in the medieval and early modern usage this was hardly distinguishable from the more general linguistic value of ‘pastime’ and ‘entertainment’. One implication of the family relations between these fields of human activity is particularly relevant to my topic here since it formed the grounds for a category under which they were jointly grouped by several medieval authors. Its name was theatrica. As Glending Olson put it, ‘the idea of theatrics, a science of entertainments (scientia ludorum), appears first and fully developed in Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon, written in the late 1120s’.37 The term defines one of the seven mechanical arts, a list that mirrors that of the liberal ones – the remaining six being fabric making, armaments, commerce, agriculture, hunting and medicine. Altogether, the mechanical is one of four kinds of human knowledge, together with the theoretical, the practical and the logical. Theatrica represents, therefore, a family of works of human labour. Although critics have related its appearance to the emergence of medieval liturgical drama, Hugh himself speaks of it in the past tense, as if he was providing a comprehensive list of trades, where a class of activities that had not survived beyond late Antiquity could be accommodated. Its inclusion is itself a proof of some degree of tolerance. Theatres lend their name to the category by metonymy, as a part to the whole: Hugh specifies that they were not an exclusive place for ancient entertainments, which could be held elsewhere. Dance, music-making, athletic contests and dice-playing are mentioned as well as drama. The rationale of the whole category is medical, with the physiology of emotions justifying those activities both for performers and for their audience. At the opposite end of the spectrum of tolerance we find the thirteenth-century Dominican (and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury) Robert Kilwardby, who regarded the whole world of theatre as morally unfit to constitute an acceptable field of human trade, and retained only some forms of musical practice, by classifying them under medicine. From the ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’ a specific and well-known campaign against the world of the performing arts developed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe across the confessional barriers, with recourse both to the printing press and to attempts to introduce express regulations and prohibitions by law (see below, Chapter 5). In seventeenth-century France, theatre- and operagoing developed as leisure practices of high significance, thus attracting the concentrated


attention of moralists. While drama theorists consistently referred to theatre as moral instruction, as well as entertainment, rigorous religious censors often went as far as wholesale condemnation of the entire theatrical experience as morally corrupting. In their eyes, drama was even worse than gambling, the former being incompatible with Christian life per se, rather than under specific conditions.38

Juego(s) The last point may offer the opportunity to say more about national and regional variations. It goes without saying that, although a European discourse on recreation was in place during the period under examination, travelling across the Continent would allow the visitor to find not merely a varying vocabulary, but also a series of independent, albeit related, traditions. The cases of some Italian and English pastimes are discussed elsewhere in this book. An area which witnessed a particularly significant development, both in social and cultural terms, is the Iberian peninsula; and its importance is not simply due to the dominant role of the Spanish Kingdom(s) in contemporary politics. Religious theatre had a lively tradition there, and posed moral theologians problems of its own. The most striking national custom in the field of entertainment, however, was undoubtedly bullfighting. In response to such specific issues, as well as in obedience to a general strength of sixteenth- and early-seventeenthcentury Iberian Catholic theology, a significant number of specific treatises on the subject of play and games were composed and published in that part of Europe during the period.39 Also, one of the vehicles which gave prominence to the Iberian literature on the subject is the very important role played by Spanish and Portuguese theologians on the international scene of Counter-Reformation literature. Manuals for confessors and penitents such as those by Martin Azpilcueta, and many others, went through an enormous number of printed editions, both in Latin and vernacular versions, and made their views well-known in other countries on the same side of the confessional divide, like France and Italy. Three treatises, written at a distance of roughly half a century from one another by members of different religious orders, may offer a significant sample of the specific attention paid to the topic by sixteenthcentury Spanish Catholicism. We have already encountered Pedro Covarrubias (d. 1530), the author of the treatise whose Iberian flavour, while discussing hunting, was evident in the preoccupation for exhort-

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ing Christian knights to a Crusade against the Muslim. Covarrubias, from Burgos, was an eminent Dominican preacher. The treatise could claim some historical priority in the genre, and is divided into three parts. The first discusses juegos from a general point of view, classifies them and analyses the lawful sorts; the second deals specifically with forbidden games; the third with restitution of the gamblers’ gain. After the statement of the human need for recreation, the first section contains one of the classic expositions of a series of three sorts of juegos (It. giuochi) – namely spiritual, human, demonic (see below, Chapter 6). This includes discussion of specific leisure activities such as chess, dancing, joking, wearing masks and – as we have seen – hunting. Religious drama receives an obvious approval, although the author blames the way in which it is currently performed, by unworthy people and with some blurring with profane forms of popular entertainment. Bullfights are condemned by Covarrubias on the grounds of their danger. However, he explicitly refuses the argument on the side of bulls as God’s creatures, since the Creator has trusted the animal world in our hands, and we are allowed to use them to our pleasure; and would find acceptable a corrida made less dangerous by blunting the animal’s horns. Here again, the author also considers the ethical problems concerning the audience of such pastimes; and he shows awareness that the human danger in bloody sports is precisely part of their attraction, as it was for the Roman ludi, a psychological impulse that can only find reprimand in Christian ethics.40 Forty years after Covarrubias, a Tratado del juego was published by Francisco de Alcocer (also spelled Alcoçer or Alcozer). The author was an Observant Franciscan (the stricter rule that, following the path of Bernardino da Siena, developed in the fifteenth century within the family of the grey friars).41 In the initial chapters Alcocer discusses the general issues: division of the matter and its overall assessment. The tone shows close resemblance to medieval pastoral literature, including such arguments as the fact that players or gamblers (los jugadores) transgress all divine commandments. His classification (chapter 5, ‘Delas diversas maneras que ay de juegos’) is a variation on the divine/demonic/human tripartition (see below, Chapter 6). They are, respectively, defined as ‘devotional and holy’ and entertainments ‘where base and indecent matter is represented, which stirs up lust’. As for the third group, it contains pastimes that are chosen for pleasure and as recreation, sometimes also for exercising one’s strength. These are what people normally call juegos, as if they were the proper ones, in a stricter sense. The folk (los vulgares) are given as specifically


responsible for this usage; in contrast, ‘doctors’ are mentioned when introducing the further, traditional distinction between games of skill and of chance, plus the combination of the two.42 In chapter 6 (‘That by natural and divine law no sort of play is bad or forbidden, and what reasons may some people hold to condemn amusements’43) the author provides a standard acknowledgement of the moral neutrality of play per se, and supports his statement with an interesting, though inconsistent, list of causes. What makes it inconsistent is the fact that the list begins as a series of reasons for which people may play. The first three are highly representative: recreation, pleasure, gain. They are also meant as conditions to be investigated, in order to establish whether their presence turns play into a sin. Alcocer is far from strict, since, characteristically, he denies that playing for pleasure or gain provides sufficient grounds for the label of ‘mortal sin’. Subsequently, the same list continues with further circumstances that, at least according to some authors, cause play to be a mortal sin; such circumstances, though, do not belong any longer to the reasons for which some people may (choose to) play. A wide section of the work is devoted to the economic implications of games of chance: whether the gain is legitimate and restitution due (the author does so with unusually detailed attention to the problems arising from specific games). The Iberian flavour of the text fully emerges with a final series of chapters which discuss further amusements, including bullfighting. Given their character of performances, moral implications are also specifically drawn for categories of people other than the direct participants (both spectators and those involved in supporting activities, which allow the games to take place). Fifty years later another treatise appeared, a Tratado contra los juegos públicos, the work of Juan de Mariana (1563–1623 or 1624), a Jesuit. The term ‘public games’ defines a partly different sphere from the world of juego or ludus: it is the realm of theatrical performances (espectáculos). The topic of this treatise, therefore, is related to that of the early Christian critique of theatre (Tertullian, pseudo-Cyprian) and of contemporary tracts by evangelical Protestants against Elizabethan and Stuart drama. Consequently, the choice of issues is theatrical, in a fairly wide sense: from theatres as buildings and the reasons for the spectator’s pleasure, to theatrical music and dance and the prohibition for women to perform in comedies. In the Spanish tradition, a closing section of chapters discusses bullfights (‘si es lícito correr toros’), giving details of three papal decrees on the subject; Mariana goes back to a

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stricter moral reproof of such spectacles, and openly rejects the argument that they help to keep the folk orderly and satisfied.44

A time for play? In Chapter 2 we have introduced the universal acknowledgement that there is a human need for setting some time apart from ordinary occupations. We must now briefly go back to the question of time, since the appropriate way to manage this resource (or, to put it in medieval and Renaissance terms, godly gift) is at the core of Christian reflection on recreation. This discourse is not Christian in a particularly exclusive way, since in classical literature early modern moralists could find a wealth of passages which they felt close to their sensitivity. Alcocer quotes Seneca’s warnings against the waste of time, and so do many other contemporary writers.45 Nevertheless, there was a peculiar religious flavour in the concern for the improper use of a benefit that was felt to belong directly to God and his inscrutable will. The English Reformation developed this topic with particular consistency.46 Two authors – one before, one after the troubles of the Civil War – represent this discourse at its best. With its one thousand pages, William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix is the most systematic attack on the early Stuart stage, with frequent reference to the dimensions that theatregoing has taken in London. When, among the various aspects of theatre, he discusses dance, the author feels the need to answer one of the most common objections to contemporary anti-dance literature: the fact that a well-known verse in the Book of Ecclesiastes (3: 4) sets ‘a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance’. After dismissing the possibility that the Scripture is referring to any physical movement, or anyway to anything other than a religious, nonpromiscuous dancing, Prynne’s reply tackles the issue of time. The time that needs to be devoted to our religious duties surely cannot be spent in dancing. The same applies to other vocations. One cannot dance instead of working – but also, as we discussed in the previous chapter, too vigorous a pastime is no suitable recreation outside working hours: ‘They that worke hard all day, had more need to rest, then dance, all night. And yet how many are there, who after an hard iourny or a toylsome dayes worke, will take more paines at night in dancing, then they did in labouring all the day time? & because they are quite tyred out with working, they will yet tire themselves once againe in dancing; and so disable themselves the more for the workes and duties of the ensuing day; whereas every recreation should helpe, not hinder men in their


callings.’47 As for those loyterers who can find but little or no time at all for work, in Prynne’s opinion they have no right to any of the activities set out in the Bible: both their dances and their justifications are out of season. Outside the dance chapter, ‘the prodigall mispence of much precious time’ appears as the first of ‘severall pernicious effects, and dangerous fruits’, which issue from theatrical performances. Prynne details the different ways in which precious time is wasted on both side of theatrical production and attendance, without omitting to mention the time employed in rehearsals, the building of theatres or, on the public’s side, dressing up to go out, or reading drama, rather than devout literature. The imagery employed as a rhetorical device in this section depicts such waste as the theft of a treasure, or a life-devouring cancer.48 Further on, when discussing ‘sloth and idlenesse’ as another pernicious effect, going to playhouses returns as the obvious destination of the idle who do not know what to do with their afternoons. Here Prynne puns on their misuse of time by accusing them of playing it away.49 Forty years later, Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory (1673) gives firmer theological grounds to similar moral concerns. A chapter of its first part (‘Christian Ethicks’) provides ‘directions for redeeming or well improving time’. The argument is constructed through telling initial definitions: ‘Time in its most common acception is taken generally for all that space of this present life which is our opportunity for all the works of life, and the measure of them. Time is often taken more strictly, for some special opportunity which is fitted to a special work, which we call the season or the fittest time. In both these senses time must be redeemed.’50 The first of the special seasons proposed on the following page of the Directory is youth; and the sense of all this theological reflection over the fittest time to be devoted to religious duty is that this should not be residual time from other occupations, but rather the best of our times, when moral and physical vigour can ensure that our pious acts are most effective. Baxter continues: ‘To redeem time is to see that we cast none of it away in vain, but use every minute of it as a most precious thing, and spend it wholly in the way of duty.’ ‘To redeem it, is not to call back time past, nor to stop time in its hasty passage, nor to procure a long life on earth: but to save it, as it passeth, from being devoured and lost, by sluggishness and sin.’51 Within ‘directions practical for redeeming time’, the author discusses ‘the thieves or time-wasters to be watchfully avoided’. These range from the most general and obvious (sloth, excessive sleep), to a list of more specific activities, where we find ‘inordinate adorning

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of the body’, excessive pomp and ceremonial, banquets, idle talk, vain company, pastimes, needless and inordinate games, excessive mundane concerns, useless and ungoverned thoughts. It is not, however, simply a question of identifying a series of vain acts – besides, an inventory one could never hope to be complete. It is not the material gesture, but rather the attitude by which we do anything, that is chiefly responsible for the inappropriate use of time: ‘But the master-thief that robs men of their time, is an unsanctified, ungodly heart. For this loseth time whatever men are doing.’52 Baxter proceeds with further examination of specific categories of people, distinguished on the basis of their age group or occupations (including servants, who are not masters of their own time). While they differ for having smaller or larger amounts of time at their disposal, the message does not vary: time is a gift specifically given to us for Christian work – it is impious for anyone to shirk their duty. Baxter concludes the ethical part of his work with ‘directions for the government of the body’, which include some directions about sports and recreations. Definitions are, once more, crucial. Not every form of exercise is sport, but that solely which is particularly delightful. One can also delight in eating or drinking, or else in pious actions. That which distinguishes sport is that fantasie is the specific human faculty that is delighted by it. Some recreations are lawful and indeed necessary. Here again, what matters is the end for which they are performed. As Prynne, Baxter condemns pastimes that become a main occupation (‘by men that live not in any constant honest labour, but make a very trade of their recreations, and use them as the chief business of the day’). Cards, dice and theatre are explicit targets of his criticism. To direct the more sober, Baxter suggests that, when recreation is needed for the mind, it can be found in books and friends. For the body, it can be found in a walk: if solitary, it simultaneously allows meditation; if in company, conversation. The explicit sense of his recommendations is to mix business with pleasure.53 It could be objected here that the religious perception of time was part of the medieval state of mind and the authors I have selected were old-fashioned, while the Renaissance is known to have secularized that notion, in synchronicity with more accurate forms of registering the passing of time, and increasing economic concerns for its value as a resource. In a classic article first published in 1960, Jacques Le Goff opposed ‘Merchant’s time and the Church’s time in the Middle Ages’; four years later, the same historian closed his authoritative sketch of medieval Western civilization with a famous quotation from Leon


Battista Alberti’s Libri della famiglia, in which time is referred to as a human being’s most precious possession, more their own than the body itself.54 It is therefore quite clear that the interest in saving time and the concern for its waste had a long tradition. Nonetheless, my impression remains that it would prove simplistic to use this historical precedent to destitute post-Reformation developments of any peculiarity and originality. Max Weber’s thesis of a Protestant birth of modernity – as disputable as it still remains – should at least work as a warning against a too mechanical representation of the opposition between religious and secular attitudes towards time. When Weber wanted to show a seventeenth-century perception of time that he found in tune with modern economic concerns, he quoted no other author than Richard Baxter.55 This is not to say that religious concern over the appropriate use of time ordinarily brought people to reject the most common forms of recreation – an assumption which would contrast with evidence we have encountered throughout this book. Rather, the point was to remind us how much the very notion of recreation and amusement troubled some radical Renaissance and early modern divines, who may not represent a median view, but offer us nevertheless privileged access to a mode of thought that was characteristic of their time. The issue brings us back to Petrarch’s contempt of joy. That the time inappropriate for rejoicing was the time of all our lives, that the world was a vale of tears, Christ had never laughed and his example should be followed, is a litany that had wide currency in a world troubled by instability and tragedies, natural and man-made alike. In counterpoint with the learned condescension with human behaviour, which is exemplified by the Aristotelian discourse on urbanity, one should never forget that a quite different tune was always sung in medieval and early modern times: that of pastoral literature (as I said earlier, a world of binary oppositions) that demonized the flesh and the world. From this perspective, a tradition that went back to Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) listed ‘inane rejoicing’ (inepta laetitia) among the vices connected with gluttony (its ‘daughters’, filiae gulae). It was seen as the result of excessive eating and drinking, and included dancing among its manifestations. The topos enjoyed a literary fortune, and could be found virtually unchanged one thousand years after its first formulation.56 In contrast to this negative view, Renaissance philosophy brought during the fifteenth century, with such works as Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate (1431), a comparative re-appreciation of pleasure. However,

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this did not produce either a general shift in religious attitudes or a significant process of secularization, and the Christian psychomachia between stricter and looser moral attitudes always remained an openended drama. The situation did not significantly change with the Reformation, when confessional pluralism certainly added variables that could affect the spiritual orientation of individuals and communities, but – if we ignore caricatures and polemic stereotypes – without any single sect as such joining either the party of the merrymakers or that of the killjoy. On both the general issues about play, pleasure and the body and some specific social practices, one can find countless examples of rigid and tolerant orientations in both the fields of Roman Catholicism and of international Calvinism. It is well known that Catholic theologians could diverge dramatically on the matter, and indeed engaged in numerous polemics with one another, with seventeenth-century Jesuits often representing the lenient party. Should the readers find more surprising my view of the reformed movement as similarly ambivalent, and expect it to be all militant on the ‘puritan’ side, I would point to them the moderate assessment of recreation by such leading theologians as Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr; or the Aristotelian flavour and vocabulary of a series of dissertations from late-seventeenth-century Lausanne, written by students coming mainly from the Vaud region and supervised by David Constant, where specific questions give a moderate judgement of dance and theatre. The only Christian confession which marks a significant exception to the above rule is the Lutheran: although, as its competitors, it comprised pastors and divines with a variety of individual orientations, it showed a predominant inclination towards the tolerance of popular pastimes, sometimes specifically intended as a rebuttal of the Reformed ‘puritanism’. This is exactly what the prominent Lutheran theologian Balthasar Meisner did in print in the matter of dance and theatre a century after the Reformation and from its very birthplace, the University of Wittenberg; a similar tolerance characterized the German Reformation – it did so in the eyes of its contemporaries – on the sensitive issue of games of chance.57

5 Games and Law

Huizinga’s Homo Ludens includes a chapter on ‘play and law’.1 The difference in content between his chapter and the one which follows here may help to cast light on the different perspective I am adopting in the whole of the present book. Huizinga deals with the roots of the European juristic tradition. There the Dutch cultural historian looks for clues of aspects of the legal practice that may derive from an original playful dimension of human behaviour. The quest is heavily reliant on the author’s definition of that which is considered to be essential in play. Since, for Huizinga, competition and chance are two basic ingredients of play, their presence in law appears to him as a sign of the playful roots of culture in this field. From this perspective he examines the similarities between the separate place and rules governing games and the ritual attached to trials and the implementing of law; the element of competition at the heart of any litigation, and the ancient tradition of allowing chance (the gods) to decide who is right; the contended object of a litigation as the prize for the winner. While all this matter is fascinating, it should be patent that it belongs to an anthropological investigation on the meaning of legal practice that goes well beyond our purpose here. Simply, in the following pages the treatment of recreational activities by law and lawmen will be under examination: once more, something less, but also something more (concrete, specific) than the adventure undertaken by the reader of Homo Ludens. One of the ways in which accepted moral viewpoints could affect everyday life most effectively was by orientating the writing and implementation of legislation. In fact, morals and law were not entirely distinguishable in early modern mentality and social practice. Both in the moral and the legal discourse, full attention was paid to the interplay between games and money; needless to say, the very same activities 73

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could be the object of both moral reprobation and legal prosecution. The legal side of the story adds valuable information to any attempt at a chronology, though, since the grounds for its treatment of games are laid down in no less ancient or authoritative text than the sixth-century collection of the Corpus iuris civilis.

Ius commune It may be worth a reminder here that Western Europe shared a common legal tradition, which is known as ius commune, and was based on the legacy of Roman law as recorded in the Corpus iuris civilis, on feudal law, and on canonic compilations, beginning with Gratian’s Decretum in the twelfth century. This manifold tradition meant that, to some extent at least independently from local legislation, jurists from different countries referred to a common set of authoritative texts, and could take into consideration each other’s judgements on specific matters. The system underwent a first major crisis during the course of the sixteenth century, chiefly due to the shift that made kingdoms and cities become the predominant sources of legislation. Its final collapse as a common ground for European juristic thought was brought by the codification policy of the Napoleonic era.2 Both the Digest and Justinian’s Code included laws on gambling (under the titles De aleatoribus and De aleae lusu et aleatoribus, respectively); and a paragraph of a Novella issued by Justinian in AD 546 forbade clerics to play board games or even watch other people playing, while parallel prohibitions for clerics were included within the standard canonic compilations. Medieval glossators and commentators on both civil and canon law interpreted these norms; they offered jurists the opportunity to assess a wide range of social practices, which could fit into the broad category of the Latin term ludus. In fact, two of the laws from the Digest allowed betting (sponsio, or ‘in pecuniam ludere’) on the result of sport contests, a practice that must have represented some kind of prize for the winner; in the long term, this circumstance brought about the standard distinction between games of chance and games of skill. Also, one of these laws (Digest 11.5.2) specified that betting was forbidden unless it concerned ‘javelin throwing, shot putting, running, jumping or dancing (saliendo), wrestling, or boxing’ – a list which offered commentators the opportunity for discussing specific sports and pastimes. Any attempt at a translation of the items in this list requires, however, a cultural adaptation: the first task medieval scholars had to face was therefore to interpret the six named activities, by translating

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them from Byzantine Latin into practices current in their own time. The first canonist who produced such an updated version of the series of lawful sports was Henry of Susa, cardinal Hostiensis (c. 1200–71), who compiled his Summa during the 1250s. He identified them as tipcat, target practice, bowling and jousting; and he added that clerics were allowed to practise some of them, provided that they only did so among themselves, not mingling with the lay folk.3 A condition posed by the same Roman law for that series of sports, in order to be lawful, was that they should be practised causa virtutis, a clause which could be taken to mean either a generic ‘for virtuous purposes’, or rather ‘to promote and test military value’, as the classical Latin virtus more specifically tended to indicate. Consequently, medieval and Renaissance commentators developed the argument that physical exercise which strengthens the body could generally be approved. Following Digest 11.5.2, their approval tended to extend to betting and prizes, as well as on the actual practice of those sports. The moral and legal status of tournaments, however, was to be troubled. The Church regarded them as suspect both for their violence and because a prize, rather than the mere display of military value, seemed to be the main force attracting knights to fight in them. On these grounds a main thirteenth-century component of the subsequent Corpus of Canon Law, the Decretals compiled by the Catalan Dominican Raymund of Peñafort at Pope Gregory IX’s commission, included an influential prohibition of tournaments. Banquets were a further context which Roman law allowed as adequate justification for holding games legally (Digest 11.5.4). A recreational justification could also be interpreted as allowing playing for the amusement of people in particularly miserable conditions, such as illness. Games of chance and consequent economic obligations were by and large the main preoccupation of this juristic literature: had the winner the right to demand payment of the stake? Or, conversely, if he obtained it, should he give it back as illicit gain? Medieval canon law and moral theology had produced a special category, turpe lucrum (‘shameful gain’), a dustbin where income from a variety of morally suspect activities could be thrown: from prostitution to simony, from theatrical entertainment to gambling. To some extent at least, they tended to require a restitution of illicit profit, or its devolution to charity. However, the negative light in which such practices were seen did not automatically mean that their income as such was regarded as illegal. For instance, the art of the jongleurs fitted into this scheme, and some medieval writers discussed whether or not it was acceptable to pay for their per-

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formances.4 A number of solutions of the moral and legal problems arising from the world of play were devised: in a typical compromise, the thirteenth-century Franciscan Richard of Middleton (Ricardus de Mediavilla) distinguished between those which were condemned by both civil and ecclesiastical law, and those prohibited under ecclesiastical law only. Gambling fell into the former category, and for that reason both playing and the winnings were illegal; tournaments and other activities fell into the latter, and in their case it was the playing that was unlawful, not the winning. The urban development of the later Middle Ages, however, saw some softening of previous bans; in an increasingly sophisticated monetary economy, gambling could be considered under certain conditions as a form of contract. To a balanced evaluation of the whole world of play contributed the contemporary, parallel (rather, overlapping and intertwining) development of scholastic commentaries on Aristotelian Ethics by Paris masters, which we encountered in Chapter 4. From this tradition a series of juristic tracts on play and games, mainly concerned with the financial consequences of gambling, developed in mid-fifteenth-century Italy. As the dominion of canon law ordinarily covered a variety of economic issues, the matter could also be discussed by canonists.

De ludo A manuscript treatise De ludo was written in 1456 by Ugo Trotti, a canonist at the University of Ferrara, the institution to which his text is dedicated. The proximity between canon law and theology is clearly perceivable in both some topics and some procedures adopted in the author’s argumentation. In the opening section, in order to discuss those forms of recreation with which one engages for resting and giving refreshment to one’s tired mind (‘cuius finis est quies animi et mentis fatigatae refocillatio’), Trotti starts with biblical quotations which praise sadness and weeping rather than happiness and laughing. However, by following the technique of Scholasticism, he quickly objects that there is no legal prohibition of such forms of recreation; and refers the reader to Aquinas’ question 168 on ‘modesty in our outward bodily actions’ (see above, Chapter 4), supported by classical authorities (Seneca, Cicero) and examples (‘Socrates was not ashamed of playing with children’), all confirming the same moderate orientation. The general rule is subsequently adapted to fit specific circumstances which may require a different judgement. The latter include inappropriate places (not in a church), times (as those in which penitence is prescribed), or people

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(clerics). There is also a consideration for the overall amount of time which is spent in relaxing pastimes. This needs to be short ‘in the same way in which the spinning top only lasts for a short time, little food is sufficient for life, and little salt for food’. Further recommendations are added from Aristotle and Aquinas, in order to promote the keeping of one’s gravitas. Some specific activities are now examined. Chess inevitably take some space in the discussion; they are also allowed to clerics, with some provisos (for instance, not for gain, though this limitation could be extended to any player). While this discussion casts an interesting light on the cultural background of a fifteenth-century Italian canonist, it contains little thus far in strictly speaking legal terms (apart from references to legislation on specific games or circumstances of their implementation).5 When Trotti moves to physical games, which people play to exercise their strength, his discussion follows the series of sports listed in Digest 11.5.2. Each activity receives some individual attention, with reference to juristic assessment of some of their characteristics. This offers also the opportunity to refer to specific local customs, as happens when the author criticizes a running race for women, which was traditionally implemented on the festival of saint George, the patron saint of Ferrara; in his opinion, the participants inevitably incur in sin (peccatum). The Latin proximity and ambiguity between ‘jumping’ and ‘dancing’ (saltus, saltatio), is exploited to introduce discussion of the highly disputed topic of dance. Trotti’s tone is one of moral concern. To the extent that, even when quoting a theologian who had offered a fairly liberal assessment of the subject, such as Albert the Great (see above, Chapter 4), the Ferrarese canonist points the reader’s attention to his authority’s caveats and provisos, rather than general statements. Thus, when Albert specified that dance is not acceptable if performed for the sake of provoking lust, Trotti appeals to those young women who adorn themselves so much when they go in public, to reconsider their dangerous behaviour. Further warnings concern all negative circumstances, including missing the holy service for a dance. The subsequent sport, wrestling, leads the canonist to the unleisurely topic of war, which includes such specific issues as whether or not a cleric is allowed to take arms in defence (for instance, if enemies appear while he is administering baptism). Hence the discussion moves to duelling and tournaments, two customs which certainly are more easily identifiable as aristocratic pastimes. However, after weighing the opposing arguments, Trotti supports the Church’s prohibition of social practices that are rejected as violent and uncharitable. The fact that tournaments are staged before a public encourages

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the author to pose a further, more general question on the lawfulness of public games and performances (‘spectacula [. . .] que publice fiunt’), though he quickly resolves it by recurring to Aquinas’ question 167 concerning curiositas (see above, Chapter 4), and its moderate warning about the actual content of representations. Wearing masks and disguises, and women’s adornment, are subsequent objects of moral admonition, interestingly still within an inquiry on recreational activities.6 The remaining bulk of the treatise (30 folios out of 50) engages in a thorough discussion of gambling and legal obligations deriving from it, in terms that would not be possible to analyse here in any detail. However, on the whole, in spite of the final insistence on the topic of gambling (which is shared by his contemporaries), Trotti’s manuscript offers a wide-ranging assessment of the world of leisure which had little precedent in Western juristic literature. A further fifteenth-century treatise which only circulated in manuscript form was the work of another jurist, Ambrogio da Vignate, who also approves of chess and condemns games of chance. Beginning as a commentary to the prohibitions concerning the clergy, it stands on the borderline between law and ethics, moving backward and forward from the language of crime to that of sin. The range of his survey is noticeable, and invites comparison with Trotti, as well as with the Iberian canonists and theologians of the following century. This is the type of literature that better testifies to the rich and complex meaning of the term ludus. The author’s coverage includes a thorough discussion of such topics as duel, tournament and a variety of forms of spectacle. In his orientation, the presence or absence of a pious Christian use of the social practice under scrutiny plays a paramount role: predictably, he approves of religious drama and church music, while he has little to say in favour of dance music or masks.7 Some other treatises written by jurists from other Italian urban centres, all of which were university lecturers, had also a printed circulation. This was the case with Giovanni Battista Caccialupi in Siena (the pupil of Mariano Sozzini the Elder, who also had discussed the matter), Paride Del Pozzo in Naples and Stefano Costa in Pavia. Their three works De ludo could be read together as a thematic section in two sixteenthcentury anthologies of studies of Roman law.8 Stefano Costa’s treatise had been published independently in 1478, thus constituting the first known printed publication on the subject. He too was a canonist, and started his work with a discussion of which forms of celebration of Christmas festivities are to be allowed (not the exchange of gifts on New Year’s Day). After a general assessment of the

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world of play, which includes an analysis of a variety of theatrical performances (apparently, there were many histriones in France), the author concentrates as usual on the problems of the restitution of winnings and the validity of transactions made in play. Costa’s conceptual categories and ideological orientations testify to the overlapping between canon law and moral theology (see his assertion: ‘play/gambling is born out of gluttony’ – ludus est gulae filius).9 Sozzini commented on a section of Pope Gregory IX’s Decretals concerning the moral conduct of clerics, which included usury and public gambling as impediments that would forbid anyone from entering the clergy. During the first half of the fourteenth century a Breton jurist, Henri Bohic, had commented on the same passage, in an influential text that later went through the printing press. Sozzini’s commentary does not limit itself to the case of clerics, but exploits the opportunity to discuss the wider subject of play, with economic implications occupying central stage. The final statement of his text concludes that gambling (ludus) has to be avoided ‘as a detestable, dangerous, wicked and foul deed, corrupting us both in the interior of our soul and in the body’.10 In 1467, Sozzini’s pupil Caccialupi followed his master’s suit in taking the opportunity from the same canon to develop a general discussion of what is ludus, what are its species, in what cases (and to which categories of people) playing is allowed, and when it is permitted to bet.11 The same issues occupy Del Pozzo (1413–93), a doctor in both civil and canon law. From his authorities, the Neapolitan jurist derives on the one hand the general tolerance of play, which goes as far as regarding as per se lawful even such public games as those traditionally played in the Roman popular quarter of Testaccio (throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century, a site where, on the occasion of feasts, military games and pantomimes were performed), where fatal casualties were all but exceptional; on the other hand, a persistent negative tone and set of warnings, by which players are labelled as pagans, and play is particularly forbidden to scholars. As grounds for a prohibition of such an apparently harmless play as chess for intellectuals, the reason is given that they become intoxicated with it (‘quia inebriantur in ludo’).12 Together with Costa, Del Pozzo and Caccialupi, a fourth treatise De sortibus (On chance), the work of the Bolognese jurist Troilo Malvezzi, was included in the same anthologies of Roman law. As the title suggests, while similar to the others in discussing the legal implications of games of chance, it also dealt with fortune in general and the prediction of the future.13 The theological implications of the issue should be

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clear, and are often spelled out in the early modern literature: by playing with chance and future, the gambler crossed a dangerous threshold, which was charged with all the heavy weight of divine predestination and precognition of events versus human ignorance and limited freedom of action. From this perspective, gambling was related to other human activities which promised gain in case of a particular future course of events, such as insurance (itself a form of gambling on the outcome of trade, rather than dice or card-playing). Economic issues are once more the core preoccupations in On Commutative Justice, the work of João Sobrinho (d. 1486), head of the Portuguese Province of the Carmelite friars. Within a treatise concerned with such financial problems as currency exchanges, the theologian devotes a section to gambling (de ludo alearum). He distinguishes between lawful and unlawful games under two criteria. If a game is solely or partly determined by chance, by this mere reason it is unlawful, since it does not rely on human resources, and – experience says – brings many troubles to society. Also, any playing which involves a transfer of property (even if the game is of skill) is by definition illegal: play has to be primarily chosen for fun and for skilful exercise – beyond these ends it is not acceptable. Sobrinho therefore only approves of such games as military exercises with lances, on one side, skilful intellectual play, on the other (as long as they do not fall in either of the two exclusions – chance or gain).14 The Iberian peninsula, where the topic of juego was attracting special attention in a perspective in which law and moral theology blended together (see also above, Chapter 4), saw further developments during the seventeenth century. Pedro Pantoja de Aiala, a jurist from Toledo, is the author of an extensive commentary on the title ‘De aleatoribus’ (On gamblers) of Digest 11.5, written in 1621 and subsequently printed within a collection of writings of Roman law.15 In 1651 a legal divertissement (Schediasma) On Gamblers was held in Jena by the professor in civil and canon law Johannes Thomas. Following what was by then a standard arrangement (see below, Chapter 6), the author divided games into three categories: games of skill, of chance, and mixed. He classified as lawful those games that were already listed in Justinian’s Code, and added to the list such common social practices as tournaments or chess and draughts. He was aware that tournaments had been so severely condemned by medieval canon law, that even a knight who was killed in a contest, and not only the one responsible for his death, could be regarded as punishable; however, Thomas distanced himself from such harsh criticism against the respectable

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custom of princes and of their entourage, and welcomed the subsequent softening of the Church’s reproof. His position in matter of board games was similar: while precise moralists could condemn them as a complete waste of time, he found that they could be acceptable as long as players were not exaggerating in devoting their time to them. The work ended by setting punishment for both gamblers and those who admit them in their houses (susceptores).16 The treatment of play in Roman law must have been sufficiently known – at least among the learned élites – as to allow Peter Martyr to adopt it as a source and a guide for his perspective in analysing the matter in the context of a theological commentary (see above, Chapter 4).

Panem et circenses However, attention to the legal implications of play should not necessarily bring to mind prohibitions, as if the story of the relationship between human play and power was only one of repression. The development of gambling in late medieval Europe, for instance, saw the emergence of a phenomenon which the Italian medievalist Gherardo Ortalli has proposed to call ‘the gambler state’. From the twelfth– thirteenth century onwards, gambling gradually regained social importance, and a disciplining process took place: on one hand public authorities became more tolerant towards a number of games, established regulations and granted gambling contracts; on the other hand, such creation of legal spaces was accompanied by the multiplication of prohibitions of illegal gambling. It is in the light of such practical developments that the history of legal writing on the subject needs to be viewed. The tradition of juristic attention to the subject of ludus was matched by a particular attention paid by late medieval Italian city states to regulating the world of play, with a wealth of local norms concerning gambling and some connected popular pastimes. This corpus of statutes and bans has been the subject of scholarly enquiry for over a century, and is still undergoing comparative assessment. It appears to show an articulated, rather than monolithic, policy by local authorities, who intervened at different times on different pastimes according to varying agendas: from the defence of public morality to that of the economic integrity of family, from the prosecution of particular patterns of behaviour to that of specific categories of people (typically, the professional gambler, to be punished more severely than the occasional player).17

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As for Britain, James VI and I’s Book of Sports (1618) clearly shows how the legal discourse on amusements did not always produce prohibitions and repression: a whole range of ‘lawfull games’ could be given considerable importance as means to promote social cohesion. The norm introduced a multi-step classification of Sunday pastimes from the point of view of their acceptability. At one end of the spectrum we find those sports which are licit, provided that they ‘be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of divine Service’ (dancing, archery, leaping, vaulting, but also May poles and May games, ales and morris dancing). At the opposite end, one example is given of unconditioned prohibition (bowling). In between, some games are forbidden on Sundays only (bear- and bull-baiting, interludes).18 The royal disposition obtained Robert Burton’s approval: ‘for my part, I will subscribe to the Kings Declaration, and was ever of that mind, those May-games, wakes, and Whitson-ales, etc., if they be not at unseasonable houres, may justly be permitted. Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their poppet playes, hobby-horses, tabers, croudes, bag-pipes, etc. play at ball, and barley-breakes, and what sports and recreations they like best [. . .]; better doe so than worse, as without question otherwise (such is the corruption of mans nature) many of them will doe.’19 As King of Scotland, James VI had already theoretically subscribed, in his Basilicon Doron, to the political conviction that honest pastimes are a good practice for the people, particularly with the purpose of strengthening their reciprocal friendship.20 A well-known Latin phrase – which I have borrowed as the title for this section – summarized all that was needed in order to keep the Roman plebs quiet and satisfied as ‘bread and circuses’, food and popular entertainments.21 The ‘argument for the Roman circus’ can be found in a variety of early modern sources. Cardinal Cajetan, the theologian and prominent Dominican whom we have already encountered for his assessment of play, also warned Catholic confessors that forbidding peasants from their traditional Sunday dancing would abandon them to idleness and political unrest.22 It goes without saying that the relation between play and state covers a wider range of motifs, from the military training of the nobility and the populace to the use of spectacles as means of propaganda, all of which can be traced in Renaissance political theory and practice. The case of the Venetian ‘war of the fists’ shows a ruling élite – and one particularly effective in controlling threats to the public order – only mildly attempting to suppress (with a series of decrees, dating from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, but with limited law-enforcement) a violent popular amuse-

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ment that could be justified as a public display of Venetian male fighting power; but which also found fans and protectors among the élite; and, by being silently permitted, helped to keep the tax-paying populace happy.23 A key element that Cajetan’s advice to confessors and the Book of Sports have in common is the fact that they both concern Sunday pastimes. From the early councils of the Church, Christian theology and canon law had expressed a fairly consistent set of prohibitions, aiming at ‘keeping the Sabbath holy’ by forbidding both work and pastimes on the Lord’s Day. The controversies that accompanied the story of the issues of the Stuart declaration testify to the diffusion of Sabbatarianism in the English reformed Church; in fact, the very conception of the declaration does so, since it was in the first place a response to stricter Protestant rules, from which the king decided to distance himself. Sabbatarianism was not the monopoly of evangelical Protestantism. Carlo Bascapè – a significant figure in the implementation of the Counter-Reformation in Italy in the decades following the Council of Trent – was an active militant of the ‘Sabbatarian International’ at precisely the time when some Elizabethan reformers launched their editorial attack against the abuse of the Lord’s Day. First, as one of the key collaborators of the Archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo, later himself as Bishop of Novara, Bascapè was a campaigner against dancing and theatre on Sundays, an issue on which in 1580 he unsuccessfully tried to obtain papal approval towards a general prohibition.24 Since Sabbatarianism is a doctrine concerning the appropriate use of Sunday (or whatever day is regarded as the right one for ceremonial purposes), it may be objected that it is not relevant to our topic here: it only concerns recreation (or any other social practice) as long as they are performed on that (inappropriate) day, without requiring any objection against those human activities per se. Although this should be valid in theory and is stated not infrequently in the sources, the predominant attitude among Sabbatarians is an overall condemnation of secular pastimes; and the suggestion to move Sunday revels to weekdays usually a mere provocation, which would prove unworkable in practice. The latter argument is not unworthy of consideration: if rest and recreation belong in the work cycle – some divines state – space for them needs to be found within the working week; the Lord’s day is set out for a completely different purpose. If this could theologically make sense, in the real world, which was undergoing a process of secularization, it would have appeared senseless to try to cast leisure time for the labouring

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population out of working days and hours. To put it in the words of the Stuart Book of Sports, ‘when shal the common people have leave to exercise, if not upon the Sundayes and Holydayes, seeing they must apply their labour, and winne their living in all working dayes?’25 After all, local practice, both in terms of social customs and of differing legal systems, had significant weight in determining cultural attitudes. Renaissance writers were aware of this. Let us consider the case of Lambert Daneau, the Calvinist theologian who wrote the Traité des danses, wherewith the official condemnation of dancing by the French Reformed Churches was expressed. As we saw in Chapter 4, he is also responsible for a Tractatus de ludo aleae, which, as the title suggests, concentrates on games of chance. When he promises his reader to indicate what kinds of games are allowed he proceeds by elimination, and produces a list of the reasons for condemning pastimes: those that do not fall in any prohibited category will be permitted. In its own way, this list of criteria represents a form of classification, provided that we remember that one individual game could be simultaneously forbidden for more than one reason. In fact, the by now familiar category of games of chance appears as one of his three criteria. However, what I wanted to highlight is that it is preceded by a different norm, that is the prohibition of all pastimes that are illegal under any specific territorial rule. That is to say: Daneau is aware of cultural and political variation, and allows for every authority to set its own prohibitions.26 This criterion is less obvious than it may seem, and offers an interesting example of the intersection between theology and law. A theological tract could be expected to fix its own rules, rather than acknowledge the existing ones. In its own way, to begin a list of prohibitions by saying that all that which is illegal is unchristian is a way of acknowledging that we are in the territory of res adiaphorae, and everything depends on circumstances, first of all geographical. Daneau was far from being isolated: a generation before him, an already mentioned sermon del giuoco, which was preached in the Duomo of Milan and adopted a scholastic method in its assessment of the value of human behaviour, included the mere fact of being forbidden by law as one of the circumstances in which playing would become evil, even if it was per se good and was performed for good reasons.27 The same logic, and submission to political authority, governs the approval that Alcocer offers of bullfights, a practice which cannot be reproved on the grounds that it is expressly allowed by the Spanish monarchs.28 After all, the more or less direct political meanings of public festivals are an important factor one should never forget, at the heart of the rela-

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tionship between art and power. By examining a variety of festivals ranging from tournaments, triumphs and royal entries, to intermezzi, ballets, masques and other entertainments, Roy Strong has shown how a medieval tradition of pageantry, which was centred on religious symbolism, gave way to a Renaissance one, which during the sixteenth century became increasingly political; and how a Renaissance symbolism, in which an aspiration towards political order was dominating the language of representations, was progressively replaced, during the first half of the seventeenth century, by the expression of the actual fulfilment of that order.29

The regulation of extravagance Particular leisure activities had their own legal traditions due to specific characteristics and circumstances. We have found frequent reference to dancing, the primary target of censorship and regulation by religious and political authorities interested in reforming popular culture; the plethora of decrees on the matter has been the subject of a specific study covering the German-speaking world.30 Attention from juristic literature, however, was scarce, if we exclude the cursory mention by the writers de ludo, or specific concerns as the Sabbatarian projects of Bascapè and his Calvinist counterparts. The only early modern dissertation on dance from the legal point of view I am aware of (De eo quod iustum est circa saltationes, ‘Of that which is just in the matter of dances’) was defended in Wittenberg as late as 1730. Its provenance says it all about its orientation, since (as we mentioned at the end of the previous chapter), in the confessional geography of post-Reformation Europe, the Lutheran Church was the most systematically tolerant on these matters. The text offers repeated evidence that we have turned the page from the anti-dance prejudice of earlier Christian writing: dancing is not prohibited by natural, divine, or civil law; clergymen are allowed to dance, since the old canonic prohibitions are no longer valid for evangelic pastors; the patristic and monastic motif of dance as a devilish invention is rejected as most absurd. The author of the thesis (Johann Daniel Kettner, who thereby acquired his doctorate in both civil and canon law) also approved of sexually promiscuous dance: ‘if men are allowed to talk, banquet, and play with women, why should they not dance?’; and he goes as far as suggesting that the Church Fathers’ zeal against this practice derived from a more general hatred for women. The only human group which the dissertation singles out as unsuited to dance is that of the mentally ill (furiosi, dementes), who

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should ‘avoid both exposing themselves to laughter, and damaging other people’.31 Duelling and hunting are two other customs which we found briefly assessed in Trotti’s De ludo. Duelling could hardly be defined as a sport (or rather, as just a sport), given its role in the culture of the European nobility, where it belonged to a highly codified set of behavioural rules governing status and public recognition. However, the frequency of its practice and its family relationship with fencing may suggest its mention in passing here, particularly if we consider that it was practised outside the aristocrats’ ‘office hours’ (that is, their actual engagement in warfare). In Burton, we have found a passing critique of its excessive diffusion (‘our modern Frenchmen, that had rather lose a pound of blood in a single combat’). The Church traditionally condemned it, in terms that resemble its battle against violent sports and spectacles (like the aforementioned tournaments).32 Status games were possibly even more at play in the legislation about hunting. Obviously, this was not originally an activity reserved to a specific social group; but during the Middle Ages European aristocracy had made sure that rights to specific practices became their own monopoly. This process had its climax during the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and the subsequent monopoly remained substantially unchallenged until the French Revolution. Generally speaking, princes and nobility became the only social figures allowed to hunt; and, although the crossing of farmland and devastation of crops could be discouraged and regulated by law, at the end of the day it was perceived (by the hunting lobby) as an inevitable side-effect. However, peasants’ protest and poachers’ defiance of privileges and prohibitions are established facts of social history throughout the period: well-known protesters include the peasants of the German revolt of 1524–25 and the compilers of some of the 1789 cahiers de doléances; among the poachers, we find the Blacks studied by Edward Thompson.33 The French case offers a particularly complex situation, since, on one hand, the country was split along a north–south divide, with Germanic law governing on one side, Roman law on the other. According to the latter, game was nobody’s property and what really mattered were rights of property: therefore, although solely in theory, nobody was allowed to trespass property borders during a chase. On the other hand, further complication derived to French jurisdiction from feudal law, under which more than one person could claim rights of hunting over the same land. With the social extension of hunting rights varying from time to time (were landowners of plebeian origin going to be included

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among the hunting lobby?), a royal ordinance of 1669 made it clear that, in the homeland of absolute monarchy, the king’s own hunting rights had a priority over those of his noble subjects: the existing system of fines and punishment protecting the monarch’s wildlife and potential game was extended and made more severe. The situation remained substantially unchanged for over a century, until 1789 came to mark a clear-cut end of the ‘ancien hunting régime’, through the decree which in the night of 4 August abolished all the feudal privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy.34 Hunting brought legislation on a number of specific issues; some of these were recalled in Covarrubias’s section on the subject, given the fact that the dominion of his treatise, as of others, lies at the intersection between moral theology and law. Anyone can hunt bears, wolves, wild boars and deer, both in their own land, or in commons or even in someone else’s; and the prey is theirs by natural law, as reinforced by Roman law. The rule came with some limitations, and the canonist discusses how to proceed in cases of disputation. One of his questions reminds us of a timeless social issue we have just cursorily mentioned: the damage produced by (aristocratic) hunters while crossing fields, vineyards and other fruit orchards in time of harvest, as well as the poultry slaughtered by their hounds. Covarrubias sentenced that the offenders are obliged to repay the offended farmers.35 Furthermore, a number of recreational activities came under fire on the initiative of different authorities, under the set of initiatives collectively known as sumptuary law. A brief consideration of the matter can be appropriate here. It is self-evident that the territory covered by that tradition of legislation deals with topics per se not belonging to the world of recreation, such as social hierarchy and the control of public display, or protectionism and the avoidance of expensive imports. However, it also involved a regulation of popular culture that directly intervened in the field of amusements. And its general role of control of conspicuous consumption is relevant to our discourse too, since many élite leisure activities involved the purchase, collection and public display of expensive goods. At the heart of legislation was a moral anxiety, a critique of the link that connects consumption to pleasure. The methodologically innovative and thought-provoking study by Alan Hunt has managed to make sense of a whole tradition, rather neglected by scholars as an archaic residual of feudalism and made difficult to interpret by the inevitable local variations on the theme. The historical pattern that emerges from this comparative research suggests initial regulations concerned with funerals (both in the ancient city-

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states and in the Renaissance cities), followed by a wider focus on all the rites of passage (births and marriages, as well as deaths). Then came a control of conspicuous consumption, particularly concerned with dress, in the form of both a critique of extravagance and a reinforcement of hierarchic dress codes. Protectionist dress regulation, specifically targeting foreign products, characterized a final stage. By that time a discourse of political economy had become predominant in the field. What is more relevant for us is the logic of the previous phases. They involved, first, ‘the theological discourses surrounding the sin of luxury, as a species of the major sin of pride’. Subsequently, luxury remained the target, though of a secularized, increasingly economic critique. ‘Extravagance was conceived of as the wasting of resources that could be more usefully and gainfully employed: the expenditure of both income and time were the targets of the critique of extravagance.’36 In this context, the combined critique of luxury and idleness was the philosophy behind the law-enforced moral regulation of popular culture that was pursued on the borders of modernity. A series of sixteenthcentury English statutes attempts to ban a list of unlawful games, which predominantly fall within two categories: ball games selected because of their unruliness; and dice and other games significant as opportunities for gambling and drinking. The disciplining project of early Tudor England comprised the attempt to substitute those games with archery, as a compulsory edifying entertainment with obvious benefits for the safety of the kingdom. If the concern with archery began to fade from the middle of the sixteenth century, the same cannot be said for the general governmental concern over the matter. Similar policies were adopted by ruling élites throughout Europe, as is particularly evident in the cities whose legislation was oriented by the Reformation.37

6 Varieties of Pastimes

Who did, or was expected to, take part in what genre of recreation? It goes without saying that, in Renaissance culture and society, such distinctions as those based on social status, gender and age mattered significantly.

Leisure and social hierarchy Differentiation based on status has already emerged in some of the material we have so far examined. In both Gontier and Bicaise (see above, Chapter 3), for instance, we found a clear opposition between the characteristics of élite versus folk music; whereas the Dutch Calvinist Daniel Souter especially recommended music to the literate. During the late medieval and early modern period, horsemanship and hunting were clearly regarded and retained as status symbols for the nobility – a tenet that informs contemporary literature of moral and political advice.1 On a different level there were popular festivals, from which members of the aristocracy were under increasing pressure to withdraw; unless, like Castiglione’s courtier (Cortegiano, II, 11), they joined in wearing a disguise (‘onlesse he were in a maske’). Masking, in the latter case, formally stripped the members of the élite of their hierarchical status (‘bringeth with it a certaine libertie and lycence’), and thus enabled them to mingle with the crowd, without any loss of dignity.2 The tradition of medical writing on the health of the literate offered further advice along the same lines. When Plemp (see above, Chapter 3) listed, among others, the game of bowling a hoop, he commented: ‘You may observe that it is not decent for intellectuals to play this game. That is correct, if they bowl those hoops along in town squares, as our children do. It would not deserve blame, on the other hand, if they do it in their own houses or in the country.’3 89

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It would be hazardous and inappropriate here to generalize and try to estimate the extent to which such cultural prescriptions were actually observed. It is worth mentioning, though, that some forms of recreation were regarded not simply as the monopoly of a privileged group, who could use them for purposes of display, but rather as the very rites of passage via which membership of an élite was secured. In Ancien Régime France, this was the case for hunting, a practice charged with the educational function of offering a young aristocrat the occasion to prove his worth, his right to belong to his social group.4 Jacob Burckhardt regarded the civilization of the Italian Renaissance as a society in which men of different status could have some joint social intercourse, as long as they shared some common ground, such as similar patterns of education. It goes without saying that the rich and powerful and the educated are never exactly overlapping groups, and the learned but comparatively poor (from Roman slaves to medieval clergy, to say nothing of the modern scholar) are never hard to find. Burckhardt’s assertion refers in particular to such social practices as conversation. In his opinion, this ‘equalization of classes’ marked a new development in European history, in contrast to the reality of the Middle Ages, and was documented, among other pieces of evidence, by the emergence of theoretical criticism of noble birth.5 It is difficult to share such a view, and twentieth-century scholarship has, if anything, pointed the attention at historical trends of social differentiation, rather than equalization. Pre-modern Europe constituted, from some respects at least, a ‘one-class society’ in which differences of power, status and wealth were surely not absent, but they did not stop people from sharing a sense of identity as a community, a set of values and some traditional customs, best represented by festivals and the devotion to patron saints. During the sixteenth and seventeenth century a process of gradual withdrawal of the élite from such practices has been identified, originally by Peter Burke in his analysis of popular culture and of the specific case of Venetian Carnival.6 Further research seems to have confirmed the pattern and the heuristic value of the Idealtype of a ‘triumph of Lent’. A form of popular entertainment particularly rooted in the customs of Italian late medieval and early modern cities was that of mock battles (battagliole), fought with fists, sticks or stones mainly by groups of young males. The case of the Venetian ‘war of the fists’ has been the object of the most accurate analysis, Robert Davis’s study of a rich manuscript documentation. It confirms the complexity of a phenomenon, which its scholar interprets as a sign of a strong factionalism, the other side of

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the official image of Venice. Since the participation in the battles as combatants or spectators was tightly linked with neighbourhood identities, and battles could easily escalate and turn into full-scale riots, the custom could only to some extent be classifiable alongside harmless amusements. On the other hand, it was ordinarily intended by its protagonists as a form of recreation – in fact, it was commonly referred to as the most popular among Venetians – and usually held on Sundays; battles were at least to some extent staged, sometimes in agreement with the Republic’s authorities and as a display to a princely visitor; patricians were actively involved in taking sides, supporting their faction and betting on the results. All these elements strongly suggest that these social customs should be regarded, at least from some respects, as a form of popular recreation. The fact that Davis repeatedly refers to the subject of his book as a ‘cult’ could further alert us to the multi-faceted nature of that tradition; but there again, we normally speak in similar terms of modern soccer, without ceasing to consider it, after all, a sport and leisurely entertainment. Everything considered, it could hardly be omitted from our overview. The Venetian ‘war’ reached its climax during the seventeenth century, only to vanish during the following: the last large-scale bridge battle was fought in 1705. Throughout the period, the custom underwent some degree of a ‘civilizing process’, first by moving from the most dangerous pointed sticks to fists, then by progressively isolating the most violent elements and the tendency to lead to armed vendettas.7 As well as prohibitionist legislation, it provoked discussion among moralists, with at least a full-length printed volume devoted in the mid-seventeenth century by a Genoese Dominican to censure the popular tradition of battagliole.8 That the élite were by definition a ‘leisure class’ appears evident from some typical contemporary literature. John Florio (1553?–1625), the son of an Italian Protestant émigré in Elizabethan and Jacobean London and a protagonist of Anglo-Italian linguistic and cultural exchanges of his period, gives us a brilliant example in his Second Fruits. The volume offers the English speaker one hundred pages of Italian conversation, with translation provided on the opposite pages (a collection of six thousand Italian proverbs, in alphabetic order, follows as an appendix). The text is written as a dialogue between a group of gentlemen who spend a whole day together, thus offering the reader the opportunity to encounter a vocabulary that covers useful topics of everyday life, from ‘rising in the morning’ and ‘things belonging to the chamber and to aparell’ to ‘going to bed, and many things thereto belonging’ (a Renais-

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sance equivalent to today’s guides to order ‘un cappuccino, per favore’ or Zimmer reservieren). The topics covered in the conversation between friends and acquaintances start with describing ‘a sett at tenis’, move on to ‘the maner of saluting and visiting the sick, and of riding, with al that belongeth to a horse’. At lunch it is time for ‘many pleasaunt discourses concerning meat and repast’, followed by play, both as a subject of conversation and as actually played by the dialogue’s personae ( primero, tables and chess). For the rest of the day the interlocutors are occupied with a variety of matters, from ‘precepts for a traveiler’ and ‘arms and the art of fencing’, to ‘the court and courtiers of this day’, love, women and ‘the beautiful partes that a woman ought to have to be accounted faire in all perfection’. The text is rich in typical leisure vocabulary (‘pleasaunt entertainments’, ‘many pleasaunt and delightsome jestes’, ‘pleasantly discourse’). As with Robert Burton’s nobility, what is noticeable by its absence from the table of contents – apart from a passing reference to ‘many other things, as buying and selling’ – is any mention of work and other duties.9 Of many recreational activities, it should be clearly stated that they were leisure only for princes and aristocrats, while people of a lesser status may have been involved as a form of obligation and as assistants to their superior, rather than as players. Take the example of hunting. Its practice also required the participation of a fairly large staff employed for the purpose – therefore working, rather than engaging in a pastime. The most distinguished sixteenth-century Italian treatise on hunting, Domenico Boccamazza’s Trattato della caccia, was the work of a professional, a papal chief gamekeeper.10 Contemporaries were well aware of such division of labour. Treatises also showed concern for inserting hunting into a general programme of education of the young aristocrat, where the passion for this sport should not be allowed to become too predominant. Hunting acquired a variety of meanings and purposes, such as those of social display, physical exercise and military training. In Book XIV of Machiavelli’s The Prince – only to mention a classic occurrence – hunting is recommended in time of peace as the best way to prepare for war, chiefly because of the knowledge of territory one acquires through it. But these additional values were not in contrast with the fundamental nature of hunting as a favourite aristocratic source of solace (it was, instead, practically irrelevant as a source of food – or rather: those people who found it valuable for that purpose were officially banned). Dance makes another compulsory example of a pastime whose connotations in terms of social hierarchy were unmistakable. In


Renaissance Nuremberg the social meanings attached to dancing in an economically thriving urban centre are particularly evident. On the one hand, concerns over moral regulation and the reform of popular culture brought the city government, between the fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, to issue a number of ordinances, where ‘immodest and novel dances’ and particular patterns of gesture (‘not take by the neck or embrace one another’) were the target; soon after the Reformation, further legislation was introduced specifically to ban artisans, apprentices and servants from dancing outside the last three days of Carnival. On the other hand, the ruling élite – who admired contemporary Italian dance and were competent enough to be able to copy and import choreographic notes from it – could regard their social dancing habits as meaningful in defining themselves as a social group; a 1521 Tanzstatut restricted eligibility into the City Council only to members of those families who were allowed access to the City Hall (Rathaus) on the occasion of dancing parties.11

Plaisirs des dames Left at the margin of early modern academia, women were nonetheless (if not for that very reason) protagonists in some aspects and developments of the contemporary art of conversation, with particular reference to the experience of the seventeenth-century French salon.12 The series of plaisirs des dames selected in the mid-seventeenth-century for his moral advice by François de Grenaille is a very interesting indicator of gender connotations as they were perceived at his time, and forms a significant counterpart to the contemporary literature on the honnête homme. The work of a French moralist who also paraphrased Petrarch’s Remedies, this book was dedicated to Henrietta Maria of France, Queen of England. It comprises seven separate treatises: ‘Le bouquet’, ‘Le cours’, ‘Le miroir’, ‘La promenade’, ‘La collation’, ‘Le concert’, ‘Le bal’. A High German (hochdeutsch) translation adapts the topic to the culture and expectations of its audience by adding three chapters on dress (Bekleidung), beauty (Schönheit) and nobility (Ehestand).13 Each treatise follows the same pattern. In the fashion of medieval Scholasticism, where demonstration of the opponent’s argument was closely followed by a writer’s counter-demonstration, the texts appear at first to strongly approve of the seven ‘pleasures’. They recur to the rhetoric of gallant society, and discuss such egg-and-chicken questions as ‘si c’est le sein des dames qui orne le bouquet, où si c’est le bouquet qui orne le sein des dames’. At a turning point, however, the reverse is

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stated and proved, and the previous arguments all rejected. Mindful of Petrarch, Grenaille reveals the dark side of beauty and worldly happiness, by showing their vanity and futility. He points at specific morally disputable traits of mundane success, such as the fact that one’s fortune depends on someone else’s misfortune (and vice versa). The section on dance presents a particularly interesting declination of the dichotomy between nature and artifice – a theme that can be found throughout the book. In the first half of the treatise, when Grenaille pretends to write in praise of dance, he observes that solely God is immobile, all animals move, but human beings can do so in a particular manner: ‘Man only can move with art, while the other animals can only move out of necessity, by instinct.’ A few pages later, the reader can already presage the author’s real mood, since the feigned praise goes as far as singling out dance as the demeanour where at most one can see ‘precision of movements’, ‘calculated gait’, ‘more reflection than steps’. Now, in the moral literature of the late medieval and Reformation period this vocabulary signified unmistakably a writer’s or speaker’s contempt for the unnatural, sophisticated aspects of dance movements (‘counting the steps’, and so forth). This is precisely what Grenaille does when he changes his tone (or mask), and turns to an invective against dancing. Here, the comparison with the animal world is turned upside down: ‘Animals go different places; but instinct, rather than whim [caprice], and need, not extravagance, are what take them there.’ If we compare the two parts of this self-contradicting monologue, the attributes of animal movement are left unchanged: they are dominated by instinct and necessity. Their judgement, however, changes dramatically, according to those acquired by the dancing human body: first praised as art, the latter is finally blamed as pure artifice.14 It is not difficult to imagine that the author’s audience – his dames – would have been prepared to listen to or read such moral reprimands, perhaps even theoretically approve of them, and then continue with their lifestyle without putting them into practice. To an extent, this is part of the game: literature of moral advice is a genre with its own rules, it can be appreciated for being elegantly written, one has also the social duty to listen to it periodically, but there is no obligation to implement it literally. Even so, it would be simplistic to downgrade such works as Petrarch’s and Grenaille’s as purely literary exercises: with their choice of topics and style of argumentation, they do vehicle some moral concern that must have been shared within the élite culture of their time.


In general, gender and the forms of recreation which were conceived as specifically appropriate for men or women, or those involving people of either sex participating (separately or together), is, after social hierarchy, another decisive factor to be considered. Traditional gender roles were reinforced by clearly distinguished practices in leisure as well as work, and a wealth of advice books made sure that such cultural identities were observed and transmitted from one generation to the next. Burton’s prescriptions for melancholic women include ‘curious Needleworkes, Cut-workes, spinning, bone-lace, and many pretty devises of their owne making, to adorne their houses, Cushions, Carpets, Chaires, Stooles, confections, conserves, distillations, etc. which they shew to strangers’. Rather than a prescription, it is a descriptive list of what women actually do (the opening clause, in fact, reads ‘Now for women insteed of laborious studies, they have . . .’). Nevertheless, the observation of actual practices serves here the scope of therapeutic advice. The physician’s analysis of women’s occupations continues with a kaleidoscope of details, which add further typical components to the gender cliché, and, bordering on caricature, seem to describe a cultural world totally other than the male observer’s: ‘This they have to busie themselves about, houshold offices, etc. neate gardens full of exotick, versicoloure, diversly varied, sweet smelling flowres, and plants in all kindes, which they are most ambitious to get, curious to preserve and keepe, proud to possesse, and much many times bragge of. Their merry meetings and frequent visitations, mutuall invitations in good townes, I voluntary omit, which are so much in use, gossipping among the meaner sort, etc. old folkes have their beades.’ Burton goes as far as suggesting hints of a religious anthropology: ‘to say so many Paternosters, Avemaries, Creedes’ – though his own religious consciousness requires him to add ‘if it were not prophane and superstitious’.15 We found the same gender differentiation confirmed and reinforced both in medical literature and in the visual imagery of Pirro Ligorio (see above, Chapter 3). Physical strength and military training are among the most obvious components and objectives of male leisure culture, grace and household competence those generally attached to women. When the physician Joseph Duchesne (see once more Chapter 3) discussed hunting, he quoted a saying according to which, while hunting is the most appropriate exercise for men, dance is the equivalent for women. Men would deny themselves any other pleasure (Lat. voluptas, Fr. volupté), but not that which they experience in hunting. The simile is truncated: its implicit completion is that dance, proverbially, is the one pleasure which women would never renounce.16

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The choice is highly representative of dominant gender connotations. This does not mean that during the Renaissance and baroque period dance was the monopoly of women. After all, the meeting of young men and women together was (almost) the whole raison d’être of the ubiquitous dancing parties. Neither was it regarded as inappropriate for a man to be a skilled dancer – in fact, there are many examples of the high esteem in which such competence was held. The suspicion towards a male dancer as an effeminate figure who transgresses his socially expected behaviour is mainly a Victorian development.17 Nevertheless, it was anticipated by such literature as the anti-theatrical pamphlets produced by English Protestantism, where the gender ambiguity of the dancer plays a role as an argumentative weapon, as epitomized in their all-time champion William Prynne. In fact, in his Histrio-Mastix (1633) one can find clear traces of the persistent early modern anxiety about the gender ambiguity of actors, which, as Laura Levine has suggested, may have ultimately derived from the doubt whether each individual really belongs to a given gender by nature, or else male and female are just roles everyone could impersonate and interchange.18 Circumstantial evidence of predominant gender connotations is countless. In medieval preachers’ exempla, the woman who sings and guides the carole (choreatrix, choreas ducens) was the protagonist of many stories of punishment or repentance; when fifteenth-century canonists discussed dance within the literature de ludo, their principal topic could be women’s adornment; and in contemporary Italian courts, dancing parties were often referred to as feste de donne.19 Orchestra, the Elizabethan ‘poem on dancing’ by John Davies, stresses women’s excellence in dancing by various means, including an adaptation of the myth of Tiresias. As we are told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (III, 316–38), the Theban seer experienced both male and female sexual pleasure, and found the latter nine times stronger than the former. In Davies’ text Antinous, the suitor who courts Penelope by recourse to a praise of dance rich in neo-Platonic allegories, recounts that Tiresias danced both parts; and it was the woman’s role that pleased him the most.20 Renaissance dance did not foresee a separate repertoire of gesture for men and women. However, the performing modes of steps were clearly gendered. Anchored in a long tradition of gendered postures and movements, we can find clear instructions as those stated in Thomas Elyot’s Governour (1531): ‘And the meving of the man wolde be more vehement, of the woman more delicate, and with lasse advauncing of the body, signifienge the courage and strength that oughte to be in a man, and the pleasant sobrenesse that shulde be in a woman.’21 Italian dance


writers were explicit in their attention for the role of women, from the mid-fifteenth-century Guglielmo Ebreo who devoted a chapter to them (‘capitulum regulare mulierum’), to the late-sixteenth-century Fabrizio Caroso who, with a total gender transformation of the title of his own book from a first to a second edition, turned Il ballarino into Nobiltà di dame, while paying detailed attention to details of attire, posture and etiquette.22 Furthermore, gender connotations acquired a new prominence in the European social practice of dance for the very fact that it is from the Renaissance that dancing in couples fully replaced circles and chains. The interrelation between the two dancing partners becomes dominant; and a whole vocabulary of gesture is elaborated, by which ritualized courtship is both actually enacted and mimetically represented: the bow, the inspection (turning around each other), the confrontation (battle between sexes), the chase.23 In the end, from the Renaissance onwards, dance becomes so much an integral part of the social training of young women, from posture to general etiquette, that, at the élite level, it would be impossible to think of their gender identity in early modern Europe without that art.24 All this considered, it is frankly odd to read François de Sales’s pages on dance in their seventeenth-century English version, since the translator chose to change the gender of the author’s interlocutor (by turning Philothée into Philotheus), and therefore failed to retain all the specific connotations of a passage wherein a male spiritual director is addressing a female devotee on a heavily gendered issue. Back in Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano, women did not fully participate in the parlour game, although the modern reader should not be too quick in dismissing their position in that context as unimportant. The issue of gender, however, was a central one in the subject matter of the dialogue, in which the entire third book (or evening) was devoted to women. The discussion included explicit reference to the recreational activities which are the most appropriate to each sex. Unsurprisingly, dance and music dominate here too, though with subtle instructions on modes of performance (to be adopted or avoided), rather than mere statement of their obvious suitability. As the persona of Giuliano de’ Medici put it, Sins I may facion this woman after my minde, I will not onelye have her not to practise these manlie exercises so sturdie and boisterous, but also even those that are meete for a woman, I will have her to do them with heedefulnesse and with the soft mildenesse that we have said is comelie for her. And therefore in daunsynge I would not

98


see her use to swift and violent trickes, nor yet in singinge or playinge upon instrumentes those harde and often divisions that declare more counninge then sweetenesse. Likewise the instrumentes of musike which she useth (in mine opinion) ought to be fitt for this pourpose. Imagin with your selfe what an unsightly matter it were to see a woman play upon a tabour or drumm, or blowe in a flute or trompet, or anye like instrumente: and this bicause the boisterousnesse of them doeth both cover and take away that sweete mildenes which setteth so furth everie deede that a woman doeth. Therfore whan she commeth do daunse, or to show any kinde of musike, she ought to be brought to it with suffringe her selfe somewhat to be prayed, and with a certein bashfulnes, that may declare the noble shamefastnes that is contrarye to headinesse,25 a comment that leads the speaker to discuss issues of beauty and apparel. As for hunting (that is, Duchesne’s counterpart of dance), its predominantly male connotations could not be denied. Whether practised alone or in company, the pastime offered – as other leisure activities – the opportunity for the development of specific forms of sociability: a circle of friends, involving the exchange of gifts and enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company. In Ancient Greece, these social customs were charged with homoeroticism, hunting being conceived as part of the educational programme of the young citizen, as well as working as a metaphor for the love chase. By the early modern period, the heterosexual model has taken over: women may be allowed to participate, though usually as mere spectators; men exploit the occasion as an opportunity for sexual display, a strong component of the whole activity which governs both their careful choice of impressive clothing and the self-conscious display of bravery. It has been suggested that women’s actual interest in watching men hunting fell during the period, in significant synchrony with the diffusion of a more distinctive female space and activity as the (just mentioned) salon and the art of conversation; early in the seventeenth century, the King of France Louis XIII was regarded as boring by females who frequented his court because he could not talk of anything else but hunting.26 Iconographic evidence confirms the clear gender connotations of a variety of pastimes. Tapestry constitutes a characteristic medium, or type of material artefact, of the Renaissance period. It has been defined as ‘an art form in which patrons, merchants, artists and craftsmen each played a key role’; according to the same scholar, its iconographic contents reveal the mentalities of the nobility and the high bourgeoisie.27


Figure 6.1 Walking as an aristocratic form of leisure (sixteenth-century tapestry from the southern Netherlands).

From the manufacturing areas of northern France and the southern Netherlands, serial production went on side by side with artistic creation. A series of tapestries held at the Musée National du Moyen-Age, at the Hôtel de Cluny in Paris, offers a good example of the former. The title under which the set is known is La tenture de la vie seigneuriale. It comprises pieces on the promenade, the bath, reading, gallant scenes, embroidery, and the departure for hunting (Figure 6.1). While tapestries were on other occasions employed to record specific, historical events (as with the case of the festivals held in the second half of the sixteenth century at the courts of King Charles IX and Henry III), La tenture de la vie seigneuriale offers an example of representation of generic action. The atmosphere is idyllic and the activities in which the nobility is represented as engaged seem to suggest an unproblematic, leisurely way of life. Gender roles are neatly defined, both in gender-specific activities (hunting, embroidery) and in those into which men and women participate together: it is a woman who takes a bath, apparently undisturbed by the presence of some male servants (among them is the

100 Recreation in the Renaissance

musician in the background); whereas reading is an action represented as performed by a man to a woman, who is spinning (could she read? What else does the picture suggest about their relationship?).28 That this iconographic tradition also evidently represents a socially exclusive milieu is even more evident in a cycle of Months, frescoed at the beginning of the fifteenth century on commission of a prince bishop of Trent in the Castello del Buonconsiglio, where the aristocratic pastimes are performed against a background of peasants’ labours.29 If gender roles were mirrored and, more significantly, reinforced through gendered forms of recreation, this did not entirely stop people from playing the games with which they were not socially expected to engage. Nevertheless, the invasion of each other’s role would not have gone unnoticed, and was likely to become the target of moral critique and/or satire. In Erasmus’ dialogue on ‘Knuckelbones, or the game of tali’ one of the (male) interlocutors, after noticing that the gambling game in question is also practised by women, adds that it is going out of fashion, ‘scorned even by girls today; they take up dice, cards, and other masculine amusements instead’.30

Children’s games As a masterpiece in the literary genre of Latin dialogues, written and widely adopted as a school text, Erasmus’s Colloquies help attracting our attention to a third factor. Age is another obviously relevant variable, with youth playing an important, although not exclusive, part in the world of pastimes, and moralists and physicians alike warning adults and the elderly against activities inappropriate to their status, if not openly counterproductive to their well-being. Children’s games are constantly one of the elements that contribute to the picture; however, they do not constitute a very frequent subject of moral reflection, since the protagonist of ethics is by definition the fully developed and responsible human being. Maturity needs to be socially promoted and achieved: education is therefore a key ground for the transmission of accepted values, including recreational habits. The humanist ideal of education marked a milestone in the perception and practice of play within the European pedagogic tradition. Grounded in the classical model of a balance between mental and physical development, physical exercise was regarded as a necessary formative step, as well as a required recreation needed for relief from prolonged periods of study. In Leon Battista Alberti’s Libri della famiglia (written in the 1430s), Lionardo, the protagonist patriarch, specifies that he does not want children to be ‘always locked up with books’. Their


games, though, have to be appropriate, and not simply in the sense that they need to avoid anything morally reprehensible. Following the model set in Classical Antiquity, young, robust men need to exercise their body and each of their limbs. Sitting-down games like chess are good for elderly people affected by the gout. ‘Let girls sit and grow lazy.’ Horse-riding, archery, fencing, swimming and ball games are appropriate for boys; later in their lives, they would regret not having learned those skills.31 In Mulcaster’s aforementioned Positions (see above, Chapter 3), physical education played a paramount role. As well as discussing general rules concerning exercise, and the exercise of the voice (Of lowd speaking, Of loude singing, Of loude and soft reading, Of much talking and silence, Of laughing and weeping, Of holding the breath), the book devotes a significant series of chapters to specific sports (Of daunsing, Of wrastling, Of fensing, Of the top and scourge, Of walking, Of running, Of leaping, Of swimming, Of riding, Of hunting, Of shooting, Of the ball). The text offers thus a virtually unprecedented panorama of games which were regarded as appropriate for Tudor children, although it appears somehow bookish: the selection does not seem to be particularly targeted at young persons, and the humanist reliance on classical sources and models is still overwhelming.32 The ‘Saletta dei giuochi’ in Ferrara (see above, Chapter 3) offers the visual representation of a similar selection of children’s games, strongly oriented by a humanist programme and a set of allegorical meanings. It reproduces the range of activities that were typical of an ancient school (gymnasium, or ludus), with its characteristic pursuit of a harmonic balance between body and mind. It has been noticed that some of the scenes that would appear more problematic for an educational purpose, such as the gladiatorial contest, do not in fact depict a real fight, but rather a mock one performed as a form of exercise, or a dance miming the contest (the musicians playing in a corner being common in treatises of education as a specific requirement for that form of training). The presence in the panels of the figure of the tutor supervising the exercise also confirms that we are looking at scenes from a school. Other children’s games represented in the same room – spinning-top and skittles – had a philosophical, neo-Platonic tradition of allegorical meaning.33 There is a whole distinctive Flemish and Dutch tradition of representing children’s games systematically in paintings and prints, either in a series of separate images or in an anthology of different games displayed as simultaneous, the latter fashion represented at its best by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s well-known Children’s Games (1560) (Figure 6.2). As with Ferrara, as the case of Bruegel clearly shows, the visual


Figure 6.2 Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games, the Renaissance pictorial encyclopedia of play, and a source of imitations.



repertory of games (or that of Netherlandish proverbs) was not merely the result of a passion for collecting and cataloguing. Images are often moralizing, and art (and culture) historians have devoted great attention to suggest interpretations of hidden messages. Simon Schama has effectively pointed out the ambiguity of these representations, where the child’s playfulness may either symbolize innocence versus corruption, or else silliness versus gravity (if not both at the same time).34 The identification of Bruegel’s individual scenes, as well as the overall meaning of their visual catalogue, is itself not uncontroversial: some scholars have seen children urinating and playing with faeces, where others have managed not to; also, in line with one of Schama’s points, it has been suggested that the painter here has aimed at showing how children are always innocent and kind, while adults do not care for anything but war and violence.35 It is probably appropriate to see a similar ambiguity in the set of Les jeux et plaisirs de l’enfance (1667), designed by Jacques Stella, ‘premier peintre du roi’ who was resident at the Louvre under the young Louis XIV, and engraved by his niece Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella, in spite of the attraction betrayed by some of its subjects. With collections like this – whose iconographic models are inherited from the tradition of the depiction of putti – the artists’ renewed attention for the world of children at play brought forth the publication of specific illustrated volumes. Stella’s plates have been described as having children also as their intended public, although the statement would benefit from some supporting evidence (Figure 6.3).36 The literature of moral advice specifically addressed the question whether or not children and adults should play together. Typical in its orientation is the suggestion, by the Apulian Rao, that this should be avoided among strangers, while it is acceptable within the family circle.37 Recent historiography of childhood has been dominated by the suggestion, effectively made by French historian Philippe Ariès (1914–84), that recognition of the child as a type of human being with specific identity and needs and even parental love were significantly recent developments. Virtually no historian would nowadays share this view. Ariès’s remarks in the matter of the history of games and toys, perhaps, were less controversial, and have survived the eclipse of his main thesis. They included the indication that, by 1600, the production and use of toys for the under-fives had become fairly specialized (but not strongly gendered, if a child king could play with a doll). Children beyond that age limit joined in the recreational activities of the adults,


Figure 6.3 ‘Three of a kind’, from Stella’s Les jeux et plaisirs de l’enfance. While the child on the right plays at bowling a hoop, a game very common throughout Europe and particularly favoured by Netherlandish writers, the group on the left is engaged in a card game. Mocking the adults’ concern for the winnings, the poetic comment states that they joined the game in the hope of gaining, but will end up losing.

while retaining some group-specific identity and customs such as youth confraternities and festivals. Furthermore, a process of gradual adult detachment from some games tended to leave them as a residual monopoly of children, at the same time at which the élite abandoned similar pastimes in the hands of the folk.38 For other researchers too, the perspective of the history of toys seems to point to the seventeenth century as a new age: the idea of a formative role of children’s play moved a step forward with the theories on education of Comenius and Locke.39 Towards the end of the period here under consideration, J.H. Plumb suggested a specific role of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) as a turning-point, after which the education of children became increasingly social rather


than religious. Eighteenth-century England would have witnessed a new parental attention to children, which has counterparts both in the growth of educational facilities and in the first appearance of toy shops.40 A reflection of the peculiarity of the English case could already be perceived from the fact that Locke’s French translator was not aware of his author’s distinction between commercial toys and the broader family of play-things, or at least had no way of retaining it in his own language.41 These social and cultural developments did not, however, eliminate the moral concern over the world of children’s play. While literature on play and games rarely has this human group as its primary subject, we find a relative exception in a lengthy book published in 1685, Frain du Tremblay’s Conversations morales sur les jeux et les divertissemens, which we encountered in Chapter 2 for its claim that the need to play derives from sin. It is written in the form of a dialogue between two male interlocutors (Théophile, Eugène); both because of the length of the text and in observance of a literary topos, the conversations are imagined as taking place over nine different, subsequent days. At Eugène’s request, Théophile instructs him in matters of precise moral theology, in the rigorous style which, within seventeenth-century French Catholicism, was particularly, though not exclusively, typical of the Jansenist movement. The conversations are imagined as the follow-up of previous discussion on the education of children. This is the reason why (or rather the rhetorical device by which), although a general assessment of the subject of play is regarded as necessary, the specific context of discourse is children’s games, the explicit subject of the last conversation. The position of the main speaker is particularly radical, sometimes provoking his interlocutor’s surprise. Ideally he would not allow any recreation whatsoever for either adults or children, and he exploits prohibitions by both civil and ecclesiastical law for his own purposes. A dominant preoccupation of the author’s porte-parole is work or duty, and the obligation not to distract oneself from it.42

As for the range of pastimes which were practised and acknowledged in the culture and society we have surveyed, the exempla of John the Evangelist’s attention for a pet, or of Anthony’s conversation with fellow monks, show how little structure or equipment one needs for obtaining some solace. A wide range of human activities could be considered as appropriate for the scope, and descriptive books have


attempted to compile comprehensive lists of them.43 From the whole series one should not forget to mention sex, although, strictly speaking, people were not normally considered to have sex mainly for recreational purpose, outside the carnivalesque world of the land of Cockaigne and similar marginal (imaginary or real) experiences. Cockaigne’s main feature, that is, the never-ending provision of food and drink, should also remind us of the importance of the recreational value that could be attached to eating and drinking, particularly in such central places of European sociability as banquets and alehouses.44 The above references to Castiglione and Burckhardt may remind us of a very characteristic experience in the sociability of the nobility and urban middle classes of the Italian Renaissance: the parlour game, one of the most specific values of the word ‘gi(u)oco’, core activity of literary academies. It was the very game which the personae in The Book of the Courtier played, and the subject of a series of specific sixteenthcentury publications, from those which exposed a list of society games (Ringhieri, Bargagli) to those which concentrated on the art of conversation itself (Castiglione, Guazzo). The last two categories of texts clearly influenced each other and overlapped: for instance, the personae in both Castiglione’s and Guazzo’s dialogues, as well as being engaged in recreational conversations, also devote significant attention to games as a subject matter. The model was directly imitated in seventeenthcentury France; and a historiographic tradition that is at least a hundred years old has identified this experience as formative for Italian and European modern culture and identity.45 This literature could aim at particular social groups, whose specific forms of sociability it was meant to represent: Ringhieri is explicit about the dominant role of women in parlour games; while one of the French adaptations, Charles Sorel’s La maison des jeux (1642), defines the jeux de conversation as a gamepreserve of the social élite, as opposed to jeux d’exercice and jeux de hasard, in which everyone can participate.46 The fact that most of the second book of the Courtier (the part that the modern reader usually skips) is dedicated to practical jokes should remind us the social importance of the skill of playing with words, which was at the heart of both the Aristotelian notion of playfulness and of the European vocabulary of recreation. An entire publication, the exceptional recording of a specific game as it was played during the carnival of 1566 in the salotto of Beatrice Gambara in Brescia – the Giuoco piacevole of Ascanio de’ Mori – describes a parlour game based on the search of a series of connecting-words starting with a given initial letter.47


Rather than piling up individual social practices, though, in the remaining part of this chapter we will look at the way in which they were interpreted and arranged. During the Renaissance period, there was never such a thing as a universally shared paradigm, a single intellectual or ideological scheme against which pastimes were conceived, organized and valued. The next section will introduce a series of different sets of categories, each with its own chronology and disciplinary roots, but all simultaneously present, overlapping and partly competing in shaping people’s ideas on the matter.

Medieval and Renaissance taxonomies In 1580 Samuel Bird, a pastor at Ipswich, published A friendlie communication or Dialogue betweene Paule and Demas, wherein is disputed how we are to use the pleasures of this life – a tract representative of Elizabethan Puritanism. It shows obvious relation to contemporary literature against theatre and the breaking of the observation of the Sabbath (which could fill a bibliography on its own), but deals more specifically than other pamphlets with topics with which I am concerned in this book. The opening passage offers the author’s own classification of the world of pleasures. ‘The pleasures of this life maie verie well bee divided into such as are common to all men, as meate, drinke, and such like; or else into such as are used but of some men, of this kind are games, for all men you knowe, are not gamesters.’ The former category – which is discussed in the first chapter of the dialogue – is fairly unproblematic, since it mainly consists in the right use of nature, God’s gift to mankind. The latter is defined as the sort of exercise which is taken to delight (as opposed to continuous exercise for profit, that is, a man’s calling, ‘labour of the minde’ or ‘travell of the bodie’). Games are further distinguished ‘into such, the chiefe sport whereof consisteth in looking on, of which kinde, are hunting, hawking, stage plaies, and such like. And into such wherein men are the chiefe dooers, of which kinde are daunsing, dicing, tenesing, and such like.’48 While the distinction is reminiscent of the role of such a category as theatrics (see above, Chapter 4), some of its nuances are not obvious and are worth registering (significantly, hunting appears to have been redefined as a spectator sport). Renaissance writers were well aware of the problems concerning the nature of leisure activities and their classification. Some of the categories that feature in Caillois’s modern taxonomy can be easily traced in sixteenth-century texts. Torquato Tasso’s Il Gonzaga secondo overo del

Varieties of Pastimes 109 Table 6.1 Classification of pleasures according to S. Bird (1580)

pleasures

冦

common to all men used but of some men = exercise

冦

games (delight) dailie labour (profite)

冦

looking

冦

labour of the minde

dooing

traveil of the body

giuoco (first published within the first part of his Rime in 1581) offers a good example of the genre. Given the playful atmosphere of this (and many a) Renaissance dialogue, it would be appropriate to consider it as a metalinguistic reflection on leisure. Typically, the scene takes place in Carnival. The party comprises two gentlemen and a lady. The gender composition is respectful of the style of the Renaissance art of courtly conversation, where the encounter between representatives of the two sexes is one of the main points. However, the woman plays the role of a negotiator and arbiter of the contest, rather than that of a proper participant (once more, nothing new under the sun: one just needs to remember Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano, as seen above). From the outset, she introduces the topic as one she would like to hear from a male expert addressing Ferrarese princesses. The gender imbalance is, thus, clear; nevertheless the presence, participation and interest of an aristocratic lady in the matter suggests that both the leisurely conversation and its topic are appropriate for a mixed gathering of people. Tasso’s personae appear themselves aware that the subject is open to debate (presumably, precisely that which makes it attractive). The range of leisure activities that are mentioned is wide, and testifies to the complex spectrum of meaning of the Italian term gi(u)oco. Fashionable reference to Olympics and other classical games also occur. What attracts proper discussion, however, are a few defining elements of play: what it is (‘che cosa è giuoco?’), what sort and element of it pleases most, and why. A key component which forms the core of the first attempt to a definition is contest (contesa, Caillois’s competition); since simple reference to this factor would create confusion between play and war (and our Renaissance courtiers do not share Huizinga’s vision of a play element in war), playful contest is defined as having peaceful purposes. Not all leisure activities fit so easily within such a class, though; the category of imitation (Caillois’s mimesis) is therefore added. The two


male interlocutors have differing views on the relation between the two classes – whether one is a subgroup of the other (and which way round), or how else they overlap. In the end they agree that neither category is sufficient on its own. When dealing with the nature of delight in play, the author shows awareness of a number of psychological factors that play a significant role in different games. Victory is certainly sought in contests. However, what really matters is the way in which it is gained (it makes all the difference to obtain it by skill or mere fortune); and the tension caused by the uncertainty of the result – for both participants and audience – makes the game itself, rather than its outcome, central. While everyone concentrates on these issues time passes, and so the main, entertaining purpose of play is achieved: Tasso’s party have successfully managed to kill their own time in the dispute (while Tasso may hope he has done the same with his reader).49 In their diversity and variation through time, systems of classification may offer revealing insights into the elements which different authors identified as key factors in this range of human activities. To classify under one or another criterion means to regard it, for whatever reason, as significant; and the hierarchical status of different criteria, that is, whether it appears earlier or later in the ramification, will also be relevant.50 The three predominant disciplines of medieval and early modern university curricula – theology, law and to a lesser extent medicine – will provide the core of my examples. Within the medical discourse, classification could be proposed on the basis of the type and amount of effort required, with consideration for the consequently different effects on the human body. For instance, Girolamo Cardano distinguished between types of exercise: heavy vs light, quick vs slow, continuous vs intermittent; to each of these oppositions he applied a scale of three levels: exercitatio magna, parva and mediocris.51 The more straightforward how-to-do literature, which forms another significant group of early modern writing on leisure, could of course include differentiation of games based on practical factors. Antonio Scaino’s treatise, for instance, distinguishes between games with a solid vs an inflated ball, with the open hand vs clenched fist, with the fist holding or not holding an instrument, open or with a cord.52 Theatrica is the category – directly derived from Hugh of St Victor (see above, Chapter 4) – under which ludi are examined in one of the earliest sources I will consider, the encyclopedic work compiled by the Franciscan friar John of Wales, who studied theology at Oxford in the 1250s and subsequently taught in Oxford and Paris. The book is a


compilation of miscellaneous material for the use of preachers. Its main part (de constitutione reipublice) adopts the metaphor of the body politic, and consistently concludes with a section on workers, the commonwealth equivalent of feet (de informatione populi laborantis qui est ad modum pedum). One hundred and fifty years later, John of Wales is the reference source for another theologian whose biographical data are not known, Alexander Carpenter. As one can surmise from his title, Destructorum viciorum, the structure of his book is the list of the seven deadly sins (or, to be more accurate, capital vices). Since his rationale is different, one should not try to make too much sense of the different context in which he sets his analysis of the world of ludus. It is tempting, however, to notice that the material which his predecessor had catalogued under a rather neutral work heading, is now subsumed into a broader moral category, the sin of avaricia – a choice that speaks for itself. What has happened between the two texts is not a breaking up of the family of ludi, for which those that are connected to gambling are put in one pigeon-hole, others in another. Although their internal classification may deserve closer examination, it is immediately noticeable that the same miscellaneous group of human activities is still grouped together; simply, the lure for the potential gain deriving from gambling has now been interpreted as its most characteristic cause and dominating aspect, with the remaining factors relegated to the role of subcategories.53 Introduced by jurists, the chief distinction that classifies games according to the predominant role played by either chance or skill, or else (as a third possible heading) a combination of the two, gained extraordinary popularity among moralists and has remained to this date commonplace. The three groups could be referred to as (ludi) artificiales, fortuiti and mixti.54 Towards the end of the seventeenth century, this was still an organizing criterion of Thiers’s Traité des jeux et des divertissemens (‘il y a de trois sortes de jeux; les premiers de hazard, les secondes d’adresse, et les derniers, de hazard et d’adresse tout ensemble’).55 Chess – a traditionally aristocratic pastime, with its strong links to military training and chivalric values – usually exemplified (and could often exhaust) the list of games of skill. The other two groups were morally more problematic, and were jointly labelled as ‘games of chance’ (alearum ludi). However, while card and dice games were believed to be determined solely by fortune, backgammon and similar board games tended to be classified in the mixed group, since they involve both the throwing of dice and the rational choice of a successful strategy.


The classification of the subject adopted in Trotti’s treatise De ludo (see above, Chapter 5) is more consistently functional than that of other authors; that is, organized according to the purpose for which different categories of pastimes are practised. His partition is threefold: first, for relaxation of the mind (ludi ‘qui inventi sunt ad quietem animi’); second, in order to exercise and strengthen the body (‘qui tendunt ad virtutem exercendam idest corporis fortitudinem’); third, for gain (‘qui proditi sunt ob causam lucri et quorum finis solet esse cupiditas’).56 While keeping a special category for gambling, this taxonomy also incorporates and fully exploits the distinction between intellectual pastimes (rest) and sports and games involving physical exercise. Since the treatise was never published, there is no clear evidence of its reception and further development. However, together with other comparable hybrids, it represents in itself one of the significant attempts by which contemporary theorists tried to make sense of the world of leisure. Jeux de repos and jeux d’exercice are also two of the categories adopted two hundred years later by Charles Sorel, although his other criteria of classifications are less consistent, and include such elements as the age group.57 If we go back to the typology proposed by John of Wales and Alexander Carpenter – which until now I have only commented on for its general disposition within their books, rather than for its internal distinctions – we find a not very dissimilar attempt at categorizing according to the impulses that drive people to play. While the theological discourse dominates the vocabulary and value system, one can see that the authors are familiar with the different sorts of ludi, and only by introducing a series of internal distinctions can one make clear to which human activities they are actually referring (as well as why they may deserve different judgement).

Table 6.2 The typology proposed by John of Wales and Alexander Carpenter 1. 2. 3. 4.

ludus perverse illusionis lascive vanitatis indiscrete actionis socialis honestatis


The ‘perverse illusion’ that constitutes their first headline is that practised by jongleurs and comedians (ioculatores and histriones); but also with dice (taxilli) and other games of chance – presumably, a reference to tricks and cheating common in gambling. Dance and theatre fill the second group, under the sign of lust. ‘Indiscrete action’ is the rationale of the family of athletic contests, from which trouble tends to arise. The fact that the last, more positive group includes, as usual, chess offers Carpenter the opportunity to summarize the Libellus super ludus scachorum by the Dominican Jacopo da Cessole, a text dating from about 1300 and subsequently tremendously popular for centuries, where each piece of the game was given an equivalent in the social hierarchy and an allegorical interpretation. The spiritual vs temporal divide is discussed by a late-fifteenth-century Franciscan preacher, the Milanese Michele Carcano. It overlaps with a threefold distinction that was quite popular during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, that between divine, human and diabolic ludus. The overlapping between the two systems is uneven. While spiritual recreation is always praiseworthy, ‘temporal’ is a more neutral category, which comprises some practices that are commendable, others morally indifferent, others contemptible. The indifferent group would in theory accommodate dances, the main subject of the sermon, although the amount and gravity of the preacher’s warnings tend to obscure the inherited tolerant evaluation. The threefold distinction which I have just mentioned could be found in a variety of religious texts: in three parallel columns below I have reproduced substantially similar expressions that appeared in different sources, all of which were published in the second half of the fifteenth century: a summa of moral theology, that of Antoninus, the already mentioned Dominican Archbishop of Florence; one of the most popular compilations for confessors, that of the Franciscan Angelo da Chivasso; and Carcano’s own sermon.

Table 6.3 The devil–man–god scheme: three examples ANTONINUS

ANGELUS

M. CARCANO

1. ex magna devotione 2. ex humana recreatione 3. ex diabolica suggestione

ludus spiritualis & divinus ludus humanus ludus diabolicus

laudabiles indifferentes vituperabiles


Antoninus’s example of devotion is David dancing before the Ark. His middle ground is occupied by ludi aimed at amusing oneself and one’s neighbours. These include physical exercise and children’s games. His ‘diabolic’ category comprises indecent spectacles and violent sports where the participants’ life is at risk, as well as games of chance. In the sixteenth century, the same classification still structured the contents of one of the most specific publications, Pedro Covarrubias’s Remedio de jugadores (‘juego espiritual, humano y diabolico’ or ‘infernal’). Covarrubias’s ‘spiritual’ headline is not purely metaphoric, since it includes – as many similar sources did – the staging of episodes extracted from sacred history. His ‘human’ group comprises forms of both intellectual and physical recreation. As a variation on the scheme originating from the legal tradition, Covarrubias adds games of chance as a further subdivision within the ‘diabolic’ family of games. Since the context does not allow for the positive category of skill to appear, the first element of this adapted series is made up by the form of play that consists in scorning God or one’s neighbour; the latter is considered acceptable only if done without insult or sign of contempt, only as a pastime, with the object of soliciting laughter.58 To conclude: between the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, the evaluation and classification of pastimes was manifold. A number of criteria were at a writer’s disposal, their disciplinary background ranging from law and theology, to medicine and the internal logic of the activities in question. Some different criteria were operating at the same time, and to choose between them could to a certain extent be a matter of taste and literary style. Most taxonomies were openly moralizing, their different pigeon-holes deciding on the moral value of the practices they contained. The devil-man-God scheme enjoyed a significant but perhaps comparatively short-lived fortune, during the transitional period from medieval to post-Reformation Christianity, after which the power of the devil imagery was considerably reduced. From the point of view of the moral judgement of leisure activities, this scheme used the positive pole as the repository for saintly acts, unattainable by normal human beings, or else for entertainments that could openly and effectively convey a religious message; at the negative end all those activities could be stored, for which no allowance was made in Christian society; the middle ground was the real territory for detailed moral analysis. Here the Aristotelian acceptance of moderate recreation, together with the long-lived apophthegm of the saint and the archer, formed the basis for a general tolerance of a range of loisirs, which however a number of provisos could mitigate to a higher or lower degree.


The distinction between games of chance and games of skill has proved more durable. At a first glance it may look somewhat spurious, in the way it selects a single criterion, not necessarily particularly relevant in defining that which is more characteristic of one pastime or another. On the other hand, it stresses the desire for gain, which undoubtedly plays an important role in causing some people’s addiction to certain games. The root of this taxonomy was in Roman law. It subsequently grew in both the orchards of the moral and the legal discourse. The fact that it satisfies some popular need for a psychology of the drive to play may be one of the reasons for its duration. Among the lasting effects of this scheme one could include the fact that chance is still one of the four categories in Caillois’s classification of play.

7 Conclusion

Frain du Tremblay’s Conversations morales sur les jeux et les divertissemens (see above, Chapters 2 and 6) were printed in December 1684. By the time they circulated, at the beginning of the next year, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a Huguenot émigré in Rotterdam, where he was teaching philosophy and history, had been publishing for ten month his highly influential literary and philosophical review, the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, printed anonymously in Amsterdam. As stated in the first issue, the purpose of the periodical was to widen the public for and the range of books covered by the network of critical reviews already in circulation; thus, it does not come as a surprise to find a notice on Frain du Tremblay’s volume in the Nouvelles for January 1685, in spite of the limited originality or literary value of the work under review. From the beginning of his enterprise, Bayle had planned two principal models of entries: a brief notice, for the reader who has little time to spare and would simply like to be informed of the existence of a new book; a fuller review, for those who are interested to know more. The first mention of the Conversations morales falls in the former category, though the reviewer promised to return to the volume in future. The synthesis does not keep very far from pure caricature (‘La plus grand source de la corruption, est que nous voulons trop nous divertir’). Bayle predicted that preaching on the subject would not have any effect on the public and, punning on such lack of spiritual ‘profit’, wished booksellers to have a more substantial commercial one by selling the book. Later during the same year, he kept his word and, within the August issue, after commenting on another piece of devotional literature (the best-selling literary genre, according to its sarcastic reviewer), he provided a fuller description and made further points on Frain du Tremblay. A formal homage to the thoroughness of the author’s 116

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argumentation is only an excuse to confirm that the disease he would like to eradicate is too deeply rooted, and his efforts vain. The ‘corruption’ from the earlier summary is recalled here to play an ironic role: if readers infected by it will not be able to improve, they will all the same find reading the book très-agréable.1 Two years later, the first 20 pages of the Nouvelles for January 1687 were entirely occupied by a long review of Thiers’s Traité des jeux et divertissemens. The new book surpasses its predecessor, and Bayle exploits it as an interesting source of information and historical anecdotes. This circumstance does not place the reviewer much closer to the spirit of the author. He points to the contradictions within the Catholic view, by wondering how Thiers managed to get published, considering the number of faults he recognizes within the clergy. The tale of the genesis of recreation out of sin (see above, Chapter 2) comes under especially fierce attack: in the reviewer’s opinion, if one wants to explain how humans develop this need, one should rather recur to the mechanistic explanation of nature that has become available after Robert Boyle’s foundation of chemistry.2 Though in his own way Bayle was showing some respect for his adversaries by acknowledging their erudition, his mental distance from them could hardly have been greater. They were not going to be the last oldfashioned moralists, nor was he their first sceptical critic. Nevertheless, these passing interventions on the subject by the porte-parole of the ‘crisis of the European consciousness’ seem a meaningful point for us to stop, and register a change of predominant cultural attitudes of wider momentum.3

Over the past few decades, social historians have dealt with the subject of recreation from a variety of perspectives, a prominent role being played by the reformation of manners and social discipline that could be seen as the effect of increased control exercised by both political and religious institutions over the early modern European population. So far work has been carried forward more frequently at local level (although for significant communities, such as Calvinist Geneva or Amsterdam),4 rather than for large geographic areas. Moreover, in a good number of researches a Freudo-Marxist historiographic category of repression has predominated,5 while a Foucauldian model of discipline, including the introjection of norms and self-regulation, would probably allow a deeper understanding of the historical trend. Thus, for instance, histo-


rians often use the language of ‘resistance’ (of popular culture, to its suppression); but the model runs the risk of taking for granted an image of the people which overestimates their degree of independence, unity and planning. Such conflicts as the English Sabbatarian campaign were not simply opposing neat counterparts in the fields of government (the people versus the rulers, both at local and national level) or religion (Catholic or Arminian versus evangelical Protestant): the request for law and order and the suppression of abuse has been shown to have come specifically from the middling sort, who pressured magistrates to intervene.6 Notwithstanding all these caveats, we cannot leave the subject without an attempt to outline the scenery against which the action told thus far took place; since the comparison underestimates the level of interaction that always exists between ideas and the social practice of recreation, the stage metaphor is not entirely adequate (unless one thinks of a kind of theatre that actively interacts with the audience). It is precisely the relationship between ideas and practice that needs now to be addressed. Without pretending to jump to social history in the final pages of a book which has explored the cultural side of the story, one cannot avoid asking whether perceptions of recreation reflected trends in social customs, or significantly influenced them, or in what other way interacted with them. A general sketch of the social history of pastimes in Renaissance Europe is far from both the expertise of the present writer and the current state of historical knowledge; however, a glance at some recent research will offer a useful starting-point. The twenty-third international colloquium of humanist studies, held in Tours in 1980, was devoted to an analysis of ‘Play and games in the Renaissance’ (Les jeux à la Renaissance). In his conclusions to the rich two-week conference, its editor Jean-Claude Margolin outlined an evolution throughout the period under examination (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), which witnessed a movement from relative spontaneity towards codification, technical and social regulation, increasing professionalization and commercialization of a range of leisure activities – an evolution which had emerged from a variety of contributions, and more explicitly in Peter Burke’s paper on the Venetian Carnival.7 Over the subsequent two decades the field of study made significant progress, some valuable research being the output of further work from the contributors to the Tours conference. Michel Manson has recently published a history of toys over the longue durée; Jean-Pierre Étienvre has developed a distinctive specialization in the field of juego in the Spanish Golden Age, when cards and the world of players acquired a

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specific jargon, a dedicated literature and a rich set of symbolic meanings.8 Jean-Michel Mehl’s Les jeux au royaume de France du XIIIe au début du XVIe siècle (1990) has searched for play references through a variety of sources, with particular attention for the lettres de rémission, the acts by which the kings of France (and hierarchically high feudal lords), at the request of a condemned person or of his or her relatives, could grant them pardon. The potentially interesting part of the documents is their reference to the incident for which people were sentenced in the first place.9 Across the Channel, another book has exploited consistent archival sources of a different kind in an imaginative way, and thus provided us with a wealth of information relevant to our topic. Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994) proposed, as stated in its subtitle, a study of ‘The Ritual Year, 1400–1700’, part of a multi-volume inquiry on related subjects undertaken by the author.10 Although Hutton makes use of a variety of sources, including some court cases, a good deal of his work is based on extensive analysis of churchwarden’s accounts. A particular merit of these sources is that they not only register prohibitions, but also allow us to census ceremonies that were actually performed. It should be clear that the overlapping between Hutton’s subject matter and mine (or that of Mehl’s book) is only partial. While we both consider festive recreations, he also includes in his survey forms of festive ritual that would not be accountable as recreation, while I examine recreations that do not take place on festive days. Nevertheless, the common ground is highly significant, particularly since it was the field of important early modern developments. We have already discussed the issues relating to the Stuart Book of Sports in earlier chapters. The general trend Hutton derives from his detailed analysis is a set of historical variations in local and national ceremonial practices that depended more on religious and political developments than on social and economic ones; the overall picture also shows a gradual eclipse of a number of popular entertainments (although sometimes their disappearance from the record may only mean that they were no longer used for parish fund-raising, rather than that they were no longer held). A further national scene, and once more a different genre of source material and subsequent perspective, is represented by the aforementioned tradition of statutes of Italian cities. As we commented above (Chapter 5), the particular attention paid by late medieval Italian local authorities to regulating the world of play signals a shift in the predominant attitudes towards gambling and some connected popular pastimes, with a wealth of local norms for which this corpus may represent


a unique European case. A historiographical tradition condescending towards popular culture, human vices and their impermeability to any attempt to govern them has repeatedly portrayed reforming projects as bound to fail. However, it has been suggested that the comparative tolerance of play and gambling by local authorities that emerges in the Italian case is less the result of a failure to control popular pastimes, and more an example of intelligent intervention, careful to distinguish between patterns of behaviour that are harmful to the coherence of society and others that are not, practices that can be realistically and helpfully confined or abolished and others that it would be impossible or useless to repress.11 After Tours, subsequent relevant international conferences were held, among other venues, in Chambéry (‘Jeux, sports et divertissements au Moyen Age et à l’age classique’, 1991), Pienza (‘Passare il tempo’, 1991), Prato (‘Il tempo libero: economia e società, secc. XIII–XVIII’, 1994), Bonn (‘Play, Civilization, Social Transitions’, 1994) and Rotterdam (‘Games and Play in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, 1998).12 Part of the preparatory work that allowed such academic gatherings was the result of the efforts of specialized institutions, which started work on the topic and provided both stimuli and appropriate publishing facilities for research in the field. This was particularly the case for the Institut für Spielforschung und Spielpädagogik established in 1991 at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and for the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche of Treviso, two institutions which also publish yearly periodicals entirely dedicated to the history and culture of play and games (Homo Ludens and Ludica, respectively). What can be said on a wider perspective? As we briefly mentioned (Introduction, above), a received opinion, partly based on the Victorian genesis of modern sports, links the historical emergence of that which today we regard as leisure to the fundamental economic changes brought by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The grounds and implications of this thesis are, on the one hand, that a neat distinction between work and non-work is ultimately the outcome of the modern factory system; on the other hand, that it is precisely within the socioeconomic framework of the past 150 years that a modern model of vacations, and a whole range of recreational activities intended to fill them, has properly developed.13 The story of spectator sports, and its triumph in the neo-Olympic movement, fits the pattern particularly well, and fills most of the current literature on the subject. The thesis of a nineteenth-century birth of modern leisure was supported in 1990 by Brian Vickers’s detailed essay on the Classical and

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Renaissance notion of otium. In his opinion, until that time the predominantly negative connotations of leisure made it culturally and socially acceptable only if it was occupied by literary activity or if it represented a short break. The notion that leisure and work could share the same respectability and that the former was worth seeking for its own sake would emerge only after the Industrial Revolution.14 Against this historiographical orthodoxy, Peter Burke, in an article published in 1995, pinpointed precisely the early modern period as the scene of an ‘invention of leisure’. During the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, he registered a progressive shift, for the whole spectrum of leisure activities, towards a more positive consideration. Two years later the same periodical – Past and Present – hosted a response to Burke by another historian, J.-Ll. Marfany, together with Burke’s reply to his critic. On one hand Marfany aimed at denying leisure the status of possible historical enquiry altogether, by showing how some pastimes are timeless; on the other hand (apparently without noticing a contradiction between his two points) he contested Burke’s revised chronology of the evolution in attitudes towards leisure, and supported the mainstream attribution of a decisive role to the birth of industrial capitalism. In a way, the very choice of the subject for this book implies on the part of the present writer a clear choice for one of the two sides in that debate. To discuss the topic or recreation in the Renaissance as a relevant historical issue requires, for a start, that the matter is regarded as historically variable, not purely determined by nature; furthermore, that the chosen period is taken to be the moment of a significant development in the phenomenon under investigation. The source material considered and the analyses contained in the present book seem to have confirmed the heuristic efficacy of this hypothesis, thus substantiating what could otherwise appear simply as a scholarly prejudice, an interpretative option available among others. During the fifteenth century the scholastic notion of ludus acquired new prominence in the related fields of canon law and pastoral literature. A tradition of specific sermons was established, which in the course of the sixteenth century evolved into a genre of dedicated treatises. The increased attention was linked to a degree of revaluation of the relevant field of human activities, together with a strong inclination to classify, distinguish and assess different forms of recreation in different terms. The quality and quantity of this literature allow us to regard it as introducing a type of discourse, a way of looking at human behaviour, that was not available to the medieval mental tool-kit. By the mid-sixteenth century, the new consideration for leisure activities – firmly rooted in a


humanist ideal of education, in which a reappraisal of the value of play had a significant role – had also attracted systematic attention on the part of physicians. The amount of publications that had gone through the printing press by the mid-eighteenth century was sufficient to offer the scope for the compilation of the first subject bibliography, Heinrich Jonathan Clodius’s Bibliotheca lusoria (1761). Its entries and their diachronic distribution of date of publication contribute to make sense of both the chronological limits that have been adopted for the subtitle of this book. On the one hand, the invention of the printing press offers a powerful trampoline for the circulation of writing on a topic that had its own reasons for attracting increasing attention, but is given by the new medium the chance of reaching a much wider public than it would have done otherwise. On the other hand, the fact that a substantial amount of entries are filled by material published over the last fifty years seems to suggest not solely a better memory for most recent items, or a growth in general publishing, but rather a more specific new level of attention for the subject that characterized the early eighteenth century; this produced a variety of different approaches, which would be better understood in the context of the developments of the contemporary commercial society and of the culture of the Enlightenment, rather than as a mere prosecution of the tradition from which they undoubtedly derive.15 Throughout the period, the aforementioned cultural attitudes were matched by a rich and varying vocabulary (see Appendix, below) and by the increased attention that was paid to leisure activities in the visual arts. Here too some chronological milestones can help in identifying significant cultural trends. In a visual tradition such as that of European medieval and Renaissance art, where religious subjects played such a predominant role, the representation of a profane topic like play is not the most common. To the era immediately preceding the one here under investigation belongs a tradition of manuscript books, where marginal drawings, not necessarily related to the written text, could represent a selection of pastimes. One of the best known and more often reproduced is the series drawn at the bottom of the pages of a fourteenth-century English manuscript preserved at the British Library (Royal 10 E. iv), containing the Smithfield Decretals, where whipping the top, ninepins, ball and other throwing games are depicted. Both in the style of the (male) figures and in the choice of games, the set has an archaic look clearly reflecting its age and predating the Renaissance development of European social life and pictorial conventions. The games appear mixed

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with images of archery and other military exercises, thus indicating the particular body culture and functional context within which most medieval physical training would ordinarily be conceived. From the end of the fourteenth century, Western religious painting started setting a playing and gambling scene within representations of the Crucifixion – a visual interpretation of the narrative, included in all four Gospels, of the soldiers deciding who was to have Christ’s tunic by casting lots. At the 1440s – that is to say, in a significant synchronism with developments in the writing of play-related literature – a turningpoint can be traced: a cycle of frescoes in the Villa Borromeo in Milan portrays dancing, ball and card games; the example has been commented on as one of the emergence of an autonomous recreation scene.16 By 1500 these developments had brought both the increasing availability of play objects (as exemplified by sets of cards or snakesand-ladders boards) and of serially produced artefacts displaying leisure as a subject, such as the tapestries at the Hôtel de Cluny (see above, Chapter 6, and Figure 6.1). The new pictorial attention for the subject can be seen as reaching full maturity during the century that starts with Bruegel’s Kinderspiele (1560, Figure 6.2) and the Ferrara frescoes, and spans until the engravings of Jacques Stella (1667, Figure 6.3). The social and cultural context has noticeably changed by the time in which the Florentine artist Giuseppe Zocchi (1711–67), in the early 1750s, paints a series of Giochi (six oil-paintings on canvas, now at the Museum of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, models for inlaid stone works to be carried out for the Habsburg court in Vienna): The Swing, Badminton, The Ball Game, Bow-shooting, Billiards, Real Tennis. The pictures set the scenes in well-defined architectural and landscape surroundings, which include the ruins of classical buildings. All the games are presented as performed by a small group of people in eighteenth-century clothing, while others watch them. It is easy to identify the social background of the characters as aristocratic. From the point of view of gender, the gatherings are characteristically promiscuous. There remain some activities which are performed by young men (ball game, billiards, real tennis) or women (swing) only. Others, including bow-shooting, are, however, mixed. And there is always at least a member of the opposite sex (sometimes in the form of a couple) among the spectators. It looks as if the whole range of activities serves precisely the purpose of offering young men and women the opportunity to meet socially, display themselves and observe one another. It is noticeable how far we have gone from the overwhelmingly male body culture of Duke Alfonso and its cultural meanings.


The evolution also influenced moral and religious attitudes, if we consider that towards the beginning of our period, during the sixteenth century, a process of ‘Christianization’ of play has been recognized as substituting predominant condemnation, with the introduction of games and sporting activities in educational curricula, including those of Jesuit and other Catholic colleges.17 As we have seen throughout this book, for the whole of the period here under consideration, a shared cultural framework oriented people’s interpretation of the world of leisure: it was the notion of recreation, a coin with the head of Aristotle and his tolerance and appreciation of moderate play on one side, the tail of the medical notion of exercise on the other. This common mental structure did not automatically impose a given value system. Although it offered grounds for justification of a whole sphere of human activity, the extent of its application could be subject to individual nuances. The very reasons which theoretically justify amusements could be seen as feeble or missing for particular pastimes, or in specific circumstances. Renaissance writers, thus, shared a language of leisure, but adopted a wide range of positive and negative judgements on the matter. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the increasing commercialization of leisure, together with the professionalization of some activities and the beginning of an emergence of modern sports had created a new scenario. Surely, cultural history is a land that hosts slow developments, and the early eighteenth-century literature of medical assessment or moral reproof of leisure would almost be indistinguishable from its analogues of a generation earlier. Nonetheless, the circulation of old-fashioned texts does not contradict the fact that the most distinctive developments in the social customs of the new century are to be found elsewhere: best-selling novels, literary magazines, coffee houses, pleasure gardens – just to mention a few characteristic genres. The increasing commercialization of leisure activities was one of the characteristic marks of the birth of a consumer society (which preceded the industrial one).18 The implications of these developments are widespread and important. The history of manners and of that which is regarded as the European ‘civilizing process’ has much to acquire from a better understanding of social customs which required the setting of shared rules and a ritualized conduct, and produced forms of control of the competition between individuals and/or communities. In line with sociological grand theories of modernization, historians have spoken of a gradual decline of ritual, or else of a migration of ritual and of its survival in different corners of social life.19 This means that by the time of the

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European Enlightenment, in spite of the persistence of specific habits and fashions, the cultural system of Renaissance gioco had gone. It had not simply vanished, though: its seminal heritage should be traced in different areas of human practice, whose new starts were reminiscent of the social experience of the past centuries. For instance, the new age witnessed an unprecedented style of vacations; however, its connection with the centuries-old discourse on the need of recreation, or with the Renaissance practice of villeggiatura, should not be underestimated.20 To give another example, the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution inaugurated a distinctive role of festivals as a forge of collective identities of nationhood and citizenship; was this development totally unrelated to the tradition of the early modern popular festival, or to the ‘seriousness’ of the Renaissance theory and practice of play? Periodization should never aim at determining precise turning-points that hardly ever took place as such. As Alan Hunt’s study of sumptuary law has suggested, such trends as the reform of popular culture or the ‘civilizing process’ were ever-present projects along the path that brought forth modernity, rather than specific steps of it.21 Also, research in the field certainly needs to go further in order to produce a reliable chronology. Rather than a wholly synchronic event, the birth of modern leisure should be seen as a process that happened at different levels, with variations depending on many historical circumstances, but also specifically pertinent to particular practices. One cannot deny the revolution of sport that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Historians of the book speak, after the dramatic changes introduced by the printing press, of a revolution in reading, which seems to have taken place during the eighteenth century. The same century saw a clear rise in the popularity of spas which, without denying the importance of earlier forms of travelling or of more recent developments in mass holidays, should allow it to be identified as a crucial phase in the genesis of modern tourism. On the other hand, theatre, music and ballet for a paying public had already acquired importance during the course of the seventeenth century. In the background, one should keep the general picture of an increasing phenomenon of conspicuous consumption – increasing both in its quantity and with respect of the wider strata of society involved – which Peter Burke, on the model of the anthropologists’ potlach, has recognized both in Renaissance Italy and, on a wider scale, in significantly parallel developments between Europe, China and Japan.22 On the whole, as differentiated as the picture becomes, it seems difficult to claim that nothing important in the


reorganization of the world of leisure was happening before the Industrial Revolution. In the new developments of Renaissance social customs, what remained different, distant from the leisured life as we conceive it today? The notion and experience of gioco in the Italian Renaissance court and élite circles has been commented on as a noticeable historical phenomenon for the lack of a number of contrapositions, which are now usual but were not applicable at the time: individual versus institutions, public versus private, real versus fantastic, freedom versus constraint, spontaneity versus performance, pleasure versus duty, indeed work versus leisure.23 If this was the case, somewhere during the early modern period all these oppositions must have emerged more clearly, and have transformed the social practice of recreation accordingly. Renaissance writers were aware of the complex status of play, and could alternatively emphasize its distinction from, or its fusion with, everyday life. As an example of the former, the dedicatory letter of Sorel’s Maison des jeux stated that jeu and feinte are one and the same thing. Conversely, while exploring possible definitions of giuoco, one of the personae in Tasso’s dialogue acknowledges that, to some extent, it comprises the whole of human life.24 The latter suggestion acquires a particular flavour in the period from which it is uttered. Indeed, an influential idea expressed by Johan Huizinga implies that ‘the whole mental attitude of the Renaissance was one of play’. However, the Dutch historian – almost sounding as if he was replying in advance to his critics – did not intend, by this statement, to attach the character of Renaissance culture solely to one side of any specific binary opposition, since he also specified that ‘play does not exclude seriousness’.25 Let us try to focus on the social and cultural framework of the spaces in which these practices took place. Renaissance iconography shows a distinctive preference for representing scenes of play (as well as of love, music and dance) in the open – typically in the garden, the ideal setting for delights (locus amoenus). The point was to physically separate aristocratic leisure from common life.26 Throughout the period, the development of the social forms of recreation produced an increasing number of specialized covered and/or enclosed spaces, from courts for ball games to theatres, from libraries to salons and academies for polite conversation and parlour games.27 Naturally some of these places had a history which predated the fifteenth century, but it is difficult to deny their growth and differentiation during the span of time considered here, while open and socially promiscuous gatherings were losing momentum. From the contemporary literature on recreation, the family is an

Conclusion 127

institution ordinarily absent, with the exception of some tracts on manners and education. However, both religious and socio-economic pressures must have given it increasing importance as a context for human sociability. Parallel considerations would deserve the issue of ‘free time’. It was obviously a time highly defined by social constraints, from work obligations to religious duties, and thus differentiated along the varying steps of the social ladder and maps of the European cultural atlas. Surely religion still marked it in a highly significant way, not only because the Church’s time survived beside the merchant’s, but also due to the striking effects that the sixteenth-century renewal of Western Christianity had on the issue. The medieval feast, with its characteristic mixture of sacred and profane, and its social promiscuity, declined and left room for more specialized activities; while the Protestant attack on the Catholic ritual year suddenly transformed a calendar that previous generations had perceived as fixed, and redefined the distribution in time of the Christians’ different callings. And yet this is an age for which it is tempting to retain Huizinga’s generalizing definition, not only because the European nobility would not want to soil their hands with any work and defined their individual and group identity through a series of leisure activities; but also in the sense that the logic or spirit of those pastimes – the rules of the games, the form of human interaction they tended to favour – enjoyed a high cultural esteem and tended to influence people’s behaviour even outside play time and play spaces. This at least is the impression strongly conveyed by the normative literature, such as treatises on manners. To some extent, one could reverse Vickers’ case for leisure as having only recently acquired its dignity. Surely, modern, commercialized leisure is a hugely growing business and has allowed a great number of people to enjoy forms of pleasure they would not have experienced in the past. At the same time, though, the very change of paradigm that regrouped and reinterpreted pastimes in our own way has marked a loss of deeper cultural meanings: all that we do now outside work tends almost for this simple reason to appear additional, optional, residual – not what life is really about.28

Appendix: the European Vocabulary of Recreation While elsewhere in his oeuvre Johan Huizinga showed full awareness of the subjective element in the use of historical categories and of cultural variations in the meaning of words, when writing Homo Ludens he openly adopted a belief in a given essence of things, to the extent that he not only opened the book with a definition of play, but also criticized languages which had not managed to express it all in one word.1 While we owe him a debt for attracting our attention to the vocabulary of play in different languages, we cannot share his essentialism: on the contrary, the cultural variations of words and meanings are not solely the only reality we are confronted with, but also an exciting arena where variations through time and exchanges between languages take place. Historians know very well, and have brilliantly shown on a variety of occasions, how words do not passively or neutrally reproduce the world to which they refer, but rather positively contribute to shape its understanding by human communities.2 For the European culture of the past, a rich vocabulary was available to refer to recreation. Apart from the specific terms and technical jargon of individual games, a number of general words germinated from one another across the different linguistic dominions. Their etymology, range and variations of meaning form an integral part of the cultural history of Renaissance leisure, since words determine people’s experience as much as they are influenced by it.3

Ludus4 was the basic Latin word for play, from Antiquity to medieval and modern usages of Latin. Since the early history of the language, the semantic dominion of the noun and the verb (ludo) was impressively wide, ranging from indicating the public games of the circus (particularly in the plural) to ‘performances’ in general (and, for the verb, ‘representing’, ‘pretending’); from game-playing (including that of children and animals) to dancing; from ‘learning’, ‘exercise’ or ‘school’ to the sexual act. Among the etymologic parallels of the Latin root, researchers have found the Gothic lita (representation, fiction) and the Albanian verbal forms loz- and luani (to play, to dance or jump).5 The Italian scholar Giovanni Semerano, who worked for years on the academic fringe to deconstruct the myth of the Indo-European and demonstrate a Semitic and Mesopotamian origin of European languages, stressed the family relation with the Akkadian ulsu (pleasure, lust), ullusu (to amuse, to cause to rejoice), elesu (to rejoice) – the reduction of s to d being a normal linguistic phenomenon.6 The thick overlapping of levels of meaning in the history of this word played no small role in determining its social and cultural reception and evolution through time. For instance, writing in Latin about play had the tendency of implying, to some extent at least, reference to drama and gambling (two kinds of ludus conceptually fairly easy to distinguish from the wider notion of play): we have found such implications in the treatment of the subject by moral theologians. The eclipse of the key term of classical and medieval Latin, which all 128

Appendix: the European Vocabulary of Recreation 129 Romance languages solely retained in its adjective form, must account as the most remarkable early modern linguistic development in the field. It is surprising how similar ranges of meaning were retained in vernacular terms deriving from at least three totally different roots: gioco/jeux, play, and Spiel (remarkably, the same three roots also share the musical sense of play). Still, the mix of denotations and connotations would never be the same again; when looking at seventeenth-century material, we always need to bear in mind that the linguistic medium contributes to a significant extent to define the topic and the message. An alternative Latin noun for the act of playing was lusus, derived from the same verb ludo.7 It partly shared some of the connotations of ludus (literary game, sexual playing), and partly developed a specific dominion, which varied through time (as in the case of reference to private, rather than public, games). ‘De luso’ (1522), one of Erasmus’s Colloquies, sees boys playing at tennis, shot-putting, sending a ball through an iron ring, and jumping.8 The Latin term from which Romance languages developed their new, comprehensive key word, iocus,9 was often found combined with ludus. Its specific reference (preserved by the English ‘joke’) was to verbal play, thus giving the phrase ‘ludus et iocus’ the comprehensive inclusion of deeds and words. While sharing with ludus a general connection with activities whose aim is amusement, iocus has a much narrower range of applications, and seems to refer to acts whose specific purpose is to provoke laughter (including derisory comments).10 Romance languages developed it, and, by the sixteenth century, the Italian gi(u)oco had reached an impressive range of meanings. It denoted a pleasant exercise, a competition between individuals or teams, a game or match, a hand at cards, a battle, play objects and places, a feast, a joke, something of little importance, or else a sexual act. It could refer to gesture requiring unusual strength and dexterity, as for jugglers before a public; to this meaning is linked the sense of ‘ability test’, but also of ‘trick’. Gioco di mano already indicated a violent, rough act. Particularly in the plural, giochi was commonly used with specific reference to the ancient tradition of public games. Furthermore, Pietro Aretino inaugurated a use of the word for indicating an ‘opportunity, advantage’. The Spanish juego is attested from the mid-twelfth century, together with the verb jugar (jogar with an o both in twelfth-to-fourteenth-century Castilian and in Catalan). Old Provençal joguet (thirteenth century), followed by Spanish juguete (fourteenth century), also derive from this root the term for ‘toy’ (the modern Italian giocattolo being only a later addition to the same group, whereas Tuscan uses balocco). A development of this family of words which played an important role in the medieval forms of entertainment and in the history of their reception is the Latin verb ioculari, ‘to jest’, with its derivatives (jongleur, to juggle). While often connecting this root with laughter, some comparisons with similar occurrences in parallel European languages insist on the verbal element by connecting it with formulaic praying. The religious component is attested in ancient Italian languages, and would have undergone subsequent secularization, shifting from ‘ritual phrase’ to ‘rhyme with comic effects’.11 Semerano has proposed a richer spectrum of meanings. According to his reconstruction, the family of terms, as opposed to ‘being serious’, would have originally referred to ‘be foolish’, a meaning witnessed by the Hebrew jaqa (to be alienated, to remove oneself).

130 Appendix: the European Vocabulary of Recreation It would have been crossed with similar words like the Akkadian hiaqu (to mix wine) and the Hebrew hagag, hoggi (to keep a festival, to dance), and hag (feast), with parallels such as the Lithuanian jukas (pleasantness) and juktis (to laugh).12 Early modern French displays frequent reference to ‘jeux et divertissements’. If this usage finds some explanation in a general fashion for reinforcing repetition and hendiadys (with parallels like ‘le bal et la danse’, though the latter had a close Latin equivalent in ‘choreae et saltationes’), some more specific, semantic reasons for the double naming could be easily found. Jeu had replaced to a significant extent the comprehensiveness of ludus. However, as ludus needed to be twinned with iocus in order to include the field of playing with words, jeu had the tendency to be associated with a substantial but limited range of games; divertissement (see below) could widen its dominion by considering less structured play, and the amusement which can derive from the arts and a variety of other leisure activities. The relationship between the two key English terms has been described as follows: game13 ‘identifies the concept, its development as schema and system, place, and set of rules’; play14 ‘distinguishes action, time, the moment of participation, the identity of the player in the ludic performance’.15 The most striking difference between English and Romance languages is the lack of a comprehensive English parallel of either ludus or jeu/gioco/juego (‘joke’ being no match for their range of meanings). It is well known how this poses serious problems in translation from one linguistic dominion to the other, with the hendiadys ‘play and games’ usually required in order to give a rough equivalent. The difficulty includes the lack of a parallel English adjective, ‘ludic’ being a poor relative to which non-English speakers resort in desperation. Apart from this major discrepancy, the English language follows most of the Romance vocabulary, thus showing that it developed its terminology of recreation in close relation with French and Italian trends. The opposite is true with German, whose vocabulary, although it shows parallel constructions, is based on an almost entirely different set of roots. The etymology of the key term here, Spiel,16 is unclear, but the earlier usage of both the noun and the corresponding verb is significantly presumed to have applied them to ‘dance, lively movement’, and subsequently have expanded to ‘amusement, pastime’. The literal meaning of recreation,17 ‘to create again’, has obvious parallels (see, for instance, re-formatio). It denotes recovering normal operating conditions after tiredness or disease (the latter being the case in one of the direct meanings of the German parallel Erholung). In that sense, its value is close to that of a wider family of terms referring to refreshment, including the specific type that derives from drinking (cf. German Erquickung, Labung). Divertissement/divertimento18 is mainly a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development, by which a variety of pastimes (including society entertainments and children’s games) are referred to with respect to their role as distractions from everyday cares and occupations. The distinctively negative connotations of the ‘diversion’ in question, which is best known from its role in Pascal’s Pensées, can be found in a wider circle of contemporary rigorous moralists, but it should not be taken as a mainstream use of the word.19 The specifically musical sense of a light and easy instrumental piece also appeared towards the end of our period.

Appendix: the European Vocabulary of Recreation 131 As with the preceding case, word formation of disport/sport 20 signals diversion (see ‘deportation’ and related vocabulary). Diporto is attested in thirteenthcentury Italian poetry. Needless to say, since the British invention of modern sport the word has been directly borrowed in every other language – but this phenomenon lies beyond our chronological boundary. The French noun passe-temps is documented from the early fifteenth century, the Spanish pasatiempo towards 1490, the Italian equivalent widely used in the following century.21 The term anchors the range of leisure activities to which it is applicable to the task of killing time, often with the implication of avoiding boredom. The latter purpose has such deep cultural roots and so wide a historical range of occurences, that the claim by a recent scholar that boredom is an eighteenth-century English invention cannot be taken seriously.22 The French entretenement23 is attested in the fifteenth century. Among its meanings, we find prominent that of pleasant conversation. The same is true of sixteenth-century Italian (where a secondary value of courting is also present). Intrattenimento also stays for pastime, amusement, its spectrum of meanings ranging from a theatrical performance to a party. The French reflexive/medium intransitive verb s’amuser is documented from the twelfth century, the noun from the fifteenth.24 It derives from muser, literally ‘to keep one’s muzzle in the air’, consequently ‘to waste one’s own time’. It has since developed to refer to play and a variety of pleasant occupations. While the general meaning of pleasure25 (and of a few more terms) covers a much wider realm than the present research, in its linguistic varieties the noun could also be used for indicating specific occasions or means of causing pleasure. The Latin root from which delight26 derives generated a group of verbs (lacio, lacto, delicio) which denote seduction, allurement, deception. Semerano links it to an Akkadian and semitic verb (lqh) which means ‘to seize, to capture’. Deliciae are amusements full of pleasure, delights; delicatus is he who lives in delights, ‘gracious, delicate’. Vernacular developments retain the double reference to ‘pleasure, delights’ and those activities which produce them (I will return to this dichotomy below), with a wide range of applications, from games and spectacles, to more informal conversations and a carefree life. The pleasant emotion could refer to satisfaction derived from each of the human senses, from the commodities that make life comfortable, or from the relief from toils and worries. It also indicated the joy provoked by true knowledge, in both the senses it acquires in the religious experience (a leitmotiv of ascetic and mystic language) or in the arts and sciences (a usage which occurs in Leonardo da Vinci). Here we encounter again the value of ‘intensive, mutual love relationship’, with the added Christian nuance (with no lesser witness than Dante) of sensual satisfaction perceived as sin, vice and guilt.27 The term solace is related to consolation, one of the meanings it had in sixteenth-century French.28 More specifically than other equivalent terms, it indicates the relieving effect that pleasure can have on the human mind. It could be used both combined with pleasure or joy, or as their equivalent, and also (like pleasure) refer to the act that produced such a state of mind. The activity could also lend the name to a place dedicated to its implementation.29 Spasso/Spaß30 is an occasional carefree, light-hearted occupation, and its pleasant effect on the human psyche. ‘Fun’ is also the main meaning in German (as well as ‘joke, jest, antic’). In late medieval Italian ‘andare a spasso’ had already

132 Appendix: the European Vocabulary of Recreation acquired the meaning that it still retains, that is, idle, recreational walking in pleasant environment (either for its natural or cultural features, or else for the social opportunities it offers of meeting other people). In more than one of its nuances (including the inevitable sexual ones) the term was targeted by sixteenth-century moralists of the type of Carlo Borromeo in their invectives against mundane pleasures. Another Italian noun, svago,31 is one of the terms which express play as a distraction from ordinary occupations. It stresses the non-functional purpose of the leisure activity in question (not for study or work). It refers both to the effect (rest) and to the specific means of obtaining it (various pastimes). As for leisure, the Latin verb licere had a calque in the OF verb loisir (attested from the second half of the tenth century).32 Around 1100 the noun had entered into usage, with the meaning of ‘possibility (of doing something)’. By the midtwelfth century, it could also mean ‘time required to do something (without constraints)’. In Froissart’s chronicles, at the end of the fourteenth century, it had acquired the value of ‘free time allowing one to do whatever one likes’. In 1740 the Académie Française recorded a poetic usage of the plural loisirs, in terms that have subsequently entered ordinary language. It should be noticed that the verbs connected to a significant group of the above nouns (recreation, divertissement, entertainment, amusement, pleasure, delight) can be transitive, that is, refer to the action by which someone recreates, entertains, amuses, pleases, delights someone else. The performer/ audience dichotomy is there present as a clear possibility, although it is not necessarily implied. Other terms do not offer this opportunity, and one can only play, sport etc. by oneself, or in company with others, but not passively. From this respect, a third category could be seen in the terms that principally describe the effect of an activity on its actor or recipient, such as pleasure, delight and solace (although, as we have seen, they were also used with direct reference to the activities which provoked the aforesaid feelings or states of mind). This variety of perspectives (action, passion and pleasure) should be kept in mind when considering the uses of the vocabulary in the contexts of specific discourses, where one or the other perspective may be predominant, or they may all overlap, and the reader of early modern literature may notice the lack of a neat distinction about which particular perspective is being considered.

Notes 1 Introduction 1. See the literature cited by F. G. Naerebout, Attractive Performances. Ancient Greek Dance: Three Preliminary Studies (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1997), pp. 155–7; also, J. P. Toner, Leisure and Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). 2. Toner, Leisure and Ancient Rome, especially pp. 6–10. 3. J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S.G.C. Middlemore, rev. by I. Gordon (New York and Toronto: New American Library, 1960), part V. 4. This does not exclude that, together with the fun element, a more complex mixture of meanings may be involved while performing any given activity. In fact, this was almost always the case with Renaissance culture (I will return to this subject in my Conclusion). An interesting discussion of these issues is available in S. de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962); in spite of being essentially a sociological study of twentieth-century America, it contains valuable historical insights, even if the author’s perspective is openly élitist. 5. The phenomenon is not exclusively Italian, though: go around Britain at weekends and you will meet (in village fairs and on similar occasions) a variety of people ‘from the past’, from neolithic farmers to Viking warriors. 6. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. by F. Hopman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965); Homo Ludens, trans. by R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1949; repr. 1998). 7. Excerpts of Oase des Glücks (1957) are available as E. Fink, ‘The oasis of happiness: Toward an ontology of play’, trans. by U. and T. Saine, Yale French Studies, 41 (1968) 19–30. 8. E. H. Gombrich, ‘Huizinga’s Homo ludens’, in Johan Huizinga, 1872–1972, ed. by W. R. H. Koops, and others (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 133–54 (with reference to essays by Pieter Geyl and Rosalie Colie). 9. R. Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes: le masque et le vertige (Paris: Gallimard, 1958; rev. edn, 1967); Man, Play and Games, trans. by M. Barash (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962). Cf. M. Rogers, ‘Caillois’ classification of games’, Leisure Studies, 1 (1982) 225–31. As well as in this volume and in a number of articles, the French social theorist also expressed his interpretation of play in R. Caillois (ed.), Jeux et sports, ‘Encyclopédie de la Pléiade’ 23 (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). 10. J. Ehrmann, ‘Homo ludens revisited’, trans. by C. and P. Lewis, Yale French Studies, 41 (1968) 31–57. Cf. É. Benveniste, ‘Le jeu comme structure’, Deucalion, 1947, n. 2, pp. 159–67 (for whom the distinction between play and the real is parallel to that between the sacred and the profane); R. Caillois, ‘Jeu et sacré’, in his L’homme et le sacré, enlarged edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), pp. 208–24. Huizinga did recognize increasing instances of play in modern society, but he dismissed them as expressions of vulgar and irrational 133

134 Notes childishness. Contrary to Ehrmann’s position, there are philosophers who are convinced that play and reality should be kept separated for the benefit of humankind: cf. J.-J. Wunenburger, La fête, le jeu et le sacré (Paris: Delarge, 1977). 11. N. Elias and E. Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); cf. E. Dunning and C. Rojek (eds), Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process: Critique and Counter-Critique (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1992). De Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure. 12. H. Eichberg, Der Weg des Sports in die industrielle Zivilisation (Baden-Baden, 1973); ‘Geometrie als barocke Verhaltensnorm’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, IV (1977) 17–50; Leistung, Spannung, Geschwindigkeit. Sport und Tanz im gesellschaftlichen Wandel des 18./19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1978); ‘Sport, Play and Body Culture in Trialectical Perspective’, Ludica, 3 (1997) 179–85; Body Cultures: Essays on Sport, Space and Identity, ed. by J. Bale and C. Philo (London: Routledge, 1998). Cf. S. Brownell, ‘Thinking dangerously: the person and his ideas’, in Eichberg, Body Cultures, pp. 22–44; A. Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); R. D. Mandell, Sport: A Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); R. Zur Lippe, Naturbeherrschung am Menschen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); A. Nitschke, Bewegungen in Mittelalter und Renaissance: Kämpfe, Spiele, Tänze, Zeremoniell und Umgangsformen (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1987) and Körper in Bewegung: Gesten, Tänze und Räume im Wandel der Geschichte (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1989); K. Schreiner and N. Schnitzler (eds), Gepeingt, begehrt vergessen: Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Körpes im späten Mittelalter und im den frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 1992).

2 The Need for Recreation 1. R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 211. 2. J. B. Thiers, Traité des jeux et des divertissemens (Paris: Dezallier, 1686), preface: ‘L’homme n’auroit point eu besoin de jeux ni de divertissemens, s’il se fut conservé dans le bien heureux état d’innocence où Dieu l’avait crée. Car quoiqu’il eût été de son devoir de travailler dans le Paradis terrestre, selon que l’Écriture Sainte le remarque [Gen. 2, 15], son travail lui eût été agréable, bien loin de luy être pénible; il s’en fut fait un plaisir, dans la pensée de saint Augustin, bien loin de s’en trouver fatigué: ‘Non enim erat laboris afflictio, sed exhilaratio voluntatis’; et par consequent il n’auroit point été obligé de donner du relâche à son esprit ni à son corps. Ainsi, à vrai dire, les jeux et les divertissemens nous sont devenus necessaires par le peché’. On this source see below, Chapter 4. 3. H. Franco Jr, Cocanha: a história de un país imaginário (São Paulo: Companhia de Letras, 1998). 4. P. Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy, and Other Studies, trans. by C.H. Kerr (Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co., 1907). 5. H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956).

Notes 135 6. J. Frain du Tremblay, Conversations morales sur les jeux et les divertissemens (Paris: André Pralard, 1685), p. 17: ‘Je croy qu’il ne se seroit point diverti, parce qu’il ne se seroit jamais fatigué, et que sa vie auroit été une suite continuelle de plaisirs. Il auroit toûjours fait son plaisirs de son devoir.’ Though the frontispiece is anonymous, the author signs the epistle to Henry Arnauld, Bishop of Angers. 7. Frain du Tremblay, Conversations morales, pp. 18–19: ‘L’homme dans cet état auroit donc travaillé, comme on voit certaines personnes travailler dans leurs jardins, sans sentir aucune fatigue, parce qu’ils travaillent avec beaucoup de plaisir, et que n’étant pas obliger de travailler comme des mercenaires pour le soûtien de leur vie, ils quittent toûjours le travail avant la fatigue.’ 8. Frain du Tremblay, Conversations morales, p. 265: ‘Je ne doute point même que qu’Adam ne se soit diverti, quelque rigoureuse qu’ait été sa penitence; puis qu’étant devenu sujet aux infirmitez aussitôt qu’il devint pecheur, il tomba aussi dans la necessité de se relâcher l’esprit et le corps, afin de prendre de nouvelles forces pour retourner au travail.’ 9. C. Rao, ‘Invettiva contra i giuocatori’, in his Invettive, orationi et discorsi (Venice: D. Zenaro, 1587), fols 21v-97 (91v). I owe this and other valuable references to the bibliographic research conducted by G. Zannoni, ‘Libri di giochi e passatempi nel Cinquecento’, unpublished thesis (University of Bologna, 1988/89). Zannoni’s organization of the material is inspired by the treatment of play in the late sixteenth-century encyclopedic compilations of Tommaso Garzoni (1549–89). 10. On the tale and its medieval tradition, see G. Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 91–3. 11. Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, ed. by G. P. Maggioni (Florence: SISMELEdizioni del Galluzzo, 1998), p. 94; Giordano da Pisa, ‘Esempi’, in G. Varanini and G. Baldassarri (eds), Racconti esemplari di predicatori del Due e Trecento, 3 vols (Rome: Salerno, 1993), II, pp. 227–8. 12. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin text and English trans., vol. 44, ed. by T. Gilby (London: Blackfriars, 1972), pp. 216–17; Francis [of] Sales, An Introduction to a Devoute Life, trans. by I. Y. (J. Heigham, 1613; repr. London, 1961), I, pp. 428–9. Further archery metaphors can be found in Dante: cf. Olson, Literature as Recreation, pp. 90–1. For the bent bow as a metaphor applied to the efforts of learning: M. M. Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow Is Bent in Study . . .’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998). 13. J.-M. André, L’otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origines à l’époque augustéenne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1966); B. Vickers, ‘Leisure and idleness in the Renaissance: the ambivalence of otium’, Renaissance Studies, 4 (1990) 1–37, 107–54; J. Sánchez Herrero, ‘El ocio durante la baja edad media hispana a través de los libros de confesión’, in Espai i temps d’oci a la història (Palma, 1993), pp. 497–509. Vickers’s idea of a nineteenthcentury shift in the evaluation of leisure will be discussed in my Conclusion. Cf. also B. Vickers (ed.), Arbeit, Musse, Meditation: Studies in the Vita activa and Vita contemplativa (1985; 2nd rev. edn, Zurich: Verlag der Fachvereine; Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991). 14. G. P. Cardello, ‘Predica fatta nel Duomo di Milano [. . .] l’anno 1563. Ove si parla del giuoco, et si narra la sua institutione, et s’è lecito a’ Christiani’,

136 Notes

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

in T. Porcacchi (ed.), Prima parte delle prediche di diversi illustri theologi et catholici predicatori della parola di Dio (Venice: G. de’ Cavalli, 1566), pp. 479–507 (507). M.W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952; repr. Michigan State University Press, 1967), passim, including numerous references to animals culturally associated with the vice; S. Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali. Storia dei peccati nel Medioevo (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), pp. 78–95. Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, pp. 87, 90, 93. F. de Luque Faxardo, Fiel desengaño contra la ociosidad, y los juegos (1603), ed. by M. de Riquer, 2 vols (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1955). R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by T. C. Faulkner and others, with commentary by J.B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989–2000), I (1989), pp. 238–45 (240); cf. R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964). Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, I (1989), pp. 288–93.

3 The Medical Discourse 1. A. Arcangeli, ‘Play and health in medical literature’, De zeventiende eeuw, 15 (1999) 3–11, and ‘Dance and health: the Renaissance physicians’ view’, Dance Research, 18.1 (2000) 3–30, are anticipations of the content of this chapter. 2. R. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 95, 107. 3. G. Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 39–89; R. Palmer, ‘Health, hygiene and longevity in medieval and Renaissance Europe’, in Y. Kawakita, and others (eds), History of Hygiene (Tokyo: Ishiyaku Euro America, 1991), pp. 75–98; A. Wear, ‘The history of personal hygiene’, in W. F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (London: Routledge, 1993), II, pp. 1283–308; P. Gil Sotres, ‘The regimens of health’, in M. D. Grmek (ed.), Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, trans. by A. Shugaar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 291–318; H. Mikkeli, Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 1999); A. Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 154–209. 4. On the German physician Petrus Lauremberg, see Mikkeli, Hygiene, pp. 101–8. 5. J. Matthaeus, Speculum sanitatis (Herborn, 1620), pp. 138–9. 6. T. Elyot, Castell of Helthe (London: T. Bertheletus, 1539), fol. 50v. 7. H. Montuus, De activa medicinae scientia commentarii duo (Lyons: J. Tornaesius, 1557), p. 130; Matthaeus, Speculum sanitatis, p. 143. 8. A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene (De sanitate tuenda), by R.M. Green (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1951); Galen, ‘The exercise with the small ball’, in

Notes 137

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

his Selected Works, trans. by P.N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 299–304. C. Mendez, Libro del exercicio corporal ([Seville], 1553), fols F8–G5; Book of Bodily Exercise (Baltimore, MD, 1960), pp. 111–13. T. Cogan, The Haven of Health (London: H. Middleton for W. Norton, 1584), p. 3 (another frequently reprinted work). R. a Fonseca, De tuenda valetudine et producenda vita liber (Florence, 1602), p. 15; Del conservare la sanità, trans. by P. Mancini (Florence, 1603), p. 17. The vernacular play terminology occurs already in the original Latin text. H. Rantzovius, De conservanda valetudine liber, ed. by D. S. Holsatus (Frankfurt, 1604), pp. 37–9. E. Hollyngus, De salubri studiosorum victu (Ingolstadt: A. Angermarius, 1602), pp. 85–6. I cited sources and literature in my ‘Dance and health’, note 11. The book had a wide circulation in both the East and the West, where it had been translated into Latin by the second half of the thirteenth century. H. Mercurialis, De arte gymnastica libri sex, 4th edn (Venice, 1601; repr. with It. trans. by I. Galante, [Turin], 1960), p. 239; J. Ulmann, De la gymnastique aux sports moderns (Paris, 1965), pp. 97–109; P. C. McIntosh, ‘Hieronymus Mercurialis’ De arte gymnastica: classification and dogma in physical education in the sixteenth century’, The British Journal of Sports History, 1 (1984) 73–84; V. Nutton, ‘Les exercices de la santé: Hieronymus Mercurialis et la gymnastique médicale’, in J. Céard, M.-M. Fontaine and J.-C. Margolin (eds), Le corps à la Renaissance (Paris, 1990), pp. 295–308. G. Vagenheim, ‘Le dessin de L’essercitio gladiatorio de Pirro Logorio et le De arte gymnastica de Girolamo Mercuriale. De la recherche antiquarie à la propagande de la Contre-Réforme: l’exemple du corps au combat’, Ludica, 3 (1997) 91–100. R. Quazza, ‘Alfonso II d’Este, duca di Ferrara’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 2 (Rome, 1960), pp. 337–41. L. Caporossi, ‘Il programma iconografico di Ligorio nel Castello Estense di Ferrara: gioco e tempo nell’ “Appartamento dello Specchio” ’, forthcoming in Ludica, 8 (2002); M. de Gandillac, ‘Symbolismes ludiques chez Nicolas de Cues (De la toupie et du jeu de la sagesse)’, in P. Ariès and J.-C. Margolin (eds), Les jeux à la Renaissance. Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 345–65. Plutarch, The Education of Children (De liberis educandis), in Plutarch’s Moralia in Sixteen Volumes, I, with an English translation by F. C. Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 37–41; E.B. English, ‘Physical Education Principles of Selected Italian Humanists of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento: Exposition and Comparison with Modern Principles’, unpublished diss. (Buffalo: State University of New York, 1978). R. Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training up of Children (1581), ed. by W. Barker (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994); cf. Nutton, ‘Les exercices de la santé’, pp. 307–8. H. de Monteux, Conservation de santé et prolongation de vie, 2nd French translation (Paris: S. Calvarin, 1572), fols 122, 125–6 (I quote from fols 122 and 126). In the advertising jargon that was typical of frontispieces, the volume

138 Notes

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

is described in a colourful way as also targeting a non-specialist public (‘livre fort utile et necessaire non seulement aux medecins, mais aussi à toute personne qui veult avoir la santé corporelle, sans laquelle ceste vie est sans fruit’). I. Quercetanus, Diaeteticon polyhistoricon (Paris: C. Morellus, 1606), fols 144–9v; J. Du Chesne, Le pourtraict de la santé (Paris: C. Morellus, 1606), pp. 290–334. The latter part of the longer quotation develops a point first made by Plato, Laws, 653c–4b; cf. K. Ioannides, Le philosophe et le musicien dans l’oeuvre de Platon (Nicosia: Centre de Recherche de Kykkos, 1990), pp. 145–60. A. Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria, Elogio & Lettere, ed. by M. Mitani (Venice: Corbo & Fiore, 1983). On the humanistic topos of long life: H. E. Sigerist, Landmarks in the History of Hygiene (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 36–46; Mikkeli, Hygiene, pp. 86–92. On the volta and the cultural history of the waltz, see R. Hess, La valse: révolution du couple en Europe (Paris: Métailié, 1989). P. Gontier, Exercitationes hygiasticae, sive de sanitate tuenda, et vita producenda, libri XVIII (Lyons: A. Jullieron, 1668), pp. 471–96. Xénophon, Banquet. Apologie de Socrate, ed. by F. Ollier (Paris, 1961), p. 45 (hence also in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers). Both the options for dance and ball games as the best exercise were quoted by M. Cagnatus, De sanitate tuenda libri duo (Padua: F. Bolzetta, 1605), fol. 138. Bicais, La manière de regler la santé par ce qui nous environne, par ce que nous recevons, et par les exercices, ou par la gymnastique moderne (Aix: Charles David, 1669), p. 283. The most obvious reference is to Marsilio Ficino, whose path was followed by subsequent generations of philosophers and physicians. Groundbreaking work on Ficino’s philosophy of music and on its medical/anthropological implications is collected in D. P. Walker, Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, ed. by P. Gouk (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985). Bicais, La manière de regler la santé, pp. 284–5. Ibid., pp. 286, 305–6. Ibid., p. 323. V. P. Plempius, De togatorum valetudine tuenda commentatio (Brussels, 1670), p. 297. V. H. Voglerus, Diaeteticorum commentariorum liber unus (Helmstedt, 1667), p. 227. Gontier, Exercitationes hygiasticae; Voglerus, Diaeteticorum commentariorum. J. H. Overfield, ‘Sports and Physical Exercise in Diderot’s Encyclopédie’, North American Society for Sport History. Proceedings (1996) 7–11. M. Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. by C. V. Kaske and J. R. Clarke (Binghamton, NY, 1989). On the genre see W. F. Kümmel, ‘Der Homo litteratus und die Kunst, gesund zu leben’, in R. Schmitz and G. Keil (eds), Humanismus und Medizin (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1984), pp. 67–85; on health advice literature for specific professions and social groups until 1700: A. Arcangeli, ‘Mestieri e professioni nella letteratura medica (secoli XV–XVII)’, in M. Meriggi and A. Pastore (eds), Le regole dei mestieri e delle professioni, secoli XV–XIX (Milan: Angeli, 2000), pp. 256–67. E. Hollyngus, De salubri studiosorum victu (Ingolstadt: A. Angermarius, 1602). A similar list of exercises recommended for the literate, which once again

Notes 139

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

included dance, had been proposed by the Flemish physician Jakob van den Bossche: I. Sylvius, De studiosorum, et eorum qui corporis exercitationibus addicti non sunt, tuenda valetudine, libri duo (Douai, 1574), fols 25v–26. H. Cardanus, Opus novum cunctis de sanitate tuenda, ac vita producenda (Rome: F. Zanettus, 1580), pp. 54–70. On the topic see M. Zerbini, ‘Alle fonti del doping’, unpublished thesis (Rome: Università ‘La Sapienza’, 1995–96). R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by T. C. Faulkner and others, with commentary by J. B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989–2000), II, pp. 67–96 (quotations from p. 67). Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., pp. 76–7. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., pp. 81–2. Ibid., p. 84. E. Maynwaringe, Vita sana et longa: the Preservation of Health, and Prolongation of Life (London, 1669), p. 86; see B. Traffichetti, L’arte di conservare la sanità (Pesaro, 1565), fol. 110, where a technical explanation is given: ‘one has chiefly to care, that the sort of exercise he practises pleases him and makes him happy, if he really wants that motion to be an exercise for himself, not an unpleasant effort; because happiness opens up one’s spirits, and expands heat to all the parts [of the body]’ (perché l’alegrezza è dilattatione dei spirti, ed espansione del calore a tutte le parti). Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, II, pp. 112–24. P. Justus, Alea sive de curanda ludendi in pecuniam cupiditate libri duo (Basel: Ioannes Oporinus, 1561), quot. from p. 17; cf. p. 30: ‘Est igitur alea, effrenata quaedam ludendi in pecuniam cupiditas, animosa credulaque spe lucri flagrans’. In the introductory pages of his treatise (p. 29), Joostens claims to have written it at the request of some friends, who wanted to recover from their addiction to gambling – undoubtedly a paratextual convention, though no less indicative of contemporary cultural orientations and moral hesitations on the matter. Justus’s book was repeatedly cited in Thiers’s already mentioned Traité des jeux et divertissemens (1686). I. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), trans. as Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. by M. Gregor, with an introduction by C. M. Korsgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Justus, Alea (repr. Neustadt an der Weinstrasse: H. Starckius for J. C. Unckelius, 1617). Cf. Johann von Münster, Ein gottselicher Tractat von dem ungottselichen Tantz [A godly treatise on the ungodly dance] (Hanaw: W. Antonius, 1602); A. Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè? Il dibattito europeo sulla danza nella prima età moderna (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche; Rome: Viella, 2000), pp. 57–58, 172–4. Justus, De alea libri duo (repr. Amsterdam: L. Elzevirium, 1642). J. B. Thiers, Traité des jeux et divertissemens, qui peuvent être permis, ou qui doivent être défendus aux chrêtiens selon les règles de l’Église et le sentiment des Pères (Paris: Antoine Dezallier, 1686), p. 353.

140 Notes

4 The Moral Discourse 1. Francis [of] Sales, An Introduction to a Devoute Life, trans. by I. Y. (J. Heigham, 1613; repr. London, 1961), I, pp. 428–37. 2. Innocentius III, De contemptu mundi, in J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina (221 vols, Paris, 1844–64), vol. 217, cols 701–46; R. Bultot, La doctrine du mépris du monde, en Occident, de S. Ambroise à Innocent III, vol. 4 (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1963–64); J. Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. by E. Nicholson (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990). 3. Petrarch, Physicke against fortune, trans. by T. Twyne (London, 1579; facsimile repr., Delmar, NY, 1980), fols 27–45. The Latin text (De remediis utriusque fortunae) is still wanting a critical edition (an undertaking at which Nicholas Mann has been announced to be working). 4. Cf. P. Galloni, Storia e cultura della caccia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2000), p. 160; K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London: Penguin, 1983), Chapter 4. 5. P. Covarrubias, Remedio de jugadores (Burgos: Alonso de Melgar, 1519), fols XXXv–XXXVI; cf. Rimedio de’ giuocatori, Italian trans. by A. Ulloa (Venice: V. Valgrisi, 1561), pp. 62–74. Cf. N. Elias and E. Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 6. P. Salvadori, La chasse sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1996), p. 134. 7. See C. Rojek, ‘Veblen, leisure and human need’, Leisure Studies, 14 (1995) 73–86. 8. J. L. Stocks, ‘Schole’, Classical Quarterly, XXX (1936) 177–87; E. Mikkola, ‘Schole bei Aristoteles’, Arctos, n.s. 2 (1958) 68–87; S. de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962), pp. 9–19. Hannah Arendt’s comments on scholé as ‘ “abstention from” all activities connected with mere being alive’ – The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958; repr. 1998), p. 131 – find their raison d’être within the logic of her book and do not contradict the general consensus about the primary nature of the Greek concept. 9. Francisco de Alcocer, Tratado del juego (Salamanca: Andrea de Portonariis, 1559, colophon 1558), p. 3. 10. H. Rahner, Man at Play (New York, 1972), pp. 91–105. 11. In addition to general commentaries on the Ethics, early modern specific publications include: R. Goclenius (praeses) and G. Dreudius (respondens), Postremae disputationis e quarto libro Ethicorum Aristotelis, theses aphoristicae, de urbanitate et verecundia (Marburg: P. Egenolphus, 1589); H. ab Otten, ‘Disputationum practicarum vigesima-octava, De Urbanitate’ (1647), in A. Heereboord (author & praeses), Collegium Ethicum, in quo tota philosophia moralis aliquot disputationibus . . . explicatur (Leiden: B. and E. Elsevir, 1648), pp. 209–18; S. Constant (respondens), ‘Disputatio undecima, De Comitate et Urbanitate’, in D. Constant, Systema ethico theologicum viginti quinque disputationibus (Lausanne, 1695). 12. G. Milin, [Noël du Fail.] Les baliverneries d’Eutrapel. Edition critique (doctoral diss., Université de Rennes, 1969, published 1970), pp. LXXVII–LXXVIII (also on classical precedents). I owe the reference to Du Fail to the kindness of Peter Burke.

Notes 141 13. Albericus de Roxiate, Alfabetum iuris civilis primum. Et alfabetum iuris canonici secundum (Bologna, 1481), sig. A7; Ioannes Tabiensis, Summae Tabienae, quae Summa summarum merito appellatur, pars prima [-secunda] (Venice, 1572); cf. P. Michaud-Quantin, Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1962), p. 104. For the occurrence of eutrapelia within seventeenth-century French moral debates on drama, see H. Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 167–70. 14. [P. Fomperosa y Quintana], Eutrapelia. Medio, que deben tener los juegos, divertimientos, y comedias, para que no aya en ellas pecado, y puedan exercitarse licita, y honestamente (Valencia: B. Macè, 1683). 15. P. Corazzari, L’empietà condannata negli abusi de’ spettacoli, e giuochi publici (Bologna: G. B. Ferroni, 1661), p. 18. 16. Expositio Gualteri Burlei super decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis (Venice: A. Torresani, 1500), fols 73v–74v. 17. For detailed references to the material that follows, see A. Arcangeli, Davide o Salomé? Il dibattito europea sulla danza nella prima età moderna (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton; Rome: Viella, 2000) pp. 81–8, 224–7. Cf. also C. Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100–1300 (London: Dent, 1989), pp. 129–33. 18. Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS lat. 795, fol. 64v; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conventi soppressi da ordinare, MS Vallombrosa 27, striscia 316, fols 50v–51. On Rolando: M. M. Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow Is Bent in Study . . .’: Dominican Education before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998), pp. 60–7. 19. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin text and English trans., vol. 44, ed. by T. Gilby (London: Blackfriars, 1972), pp. 210–27. On Aristotle and Aquinas, see also G. Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 94–9. 20. Reference is still made to Arcangeli, Davide o Salomé?, pp. 86–7, and Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, p. 132. 21. For a more detailed analysis of this material, see A. Arcangeli, ‘The confessor and the theatre’, in F. Massip (ed.), Formes teatrals de la tradició medieval. Actes del VII Colloqui de la ‘Societé Internationale pour l’Étude du Théatre Médiéval’ (Barcelona: Institut del Teatre, 1996), pp. 19–25. 22. J. B. Thiers, Traité des jeux et divertissemens, qui peuvent être permis, ou qui doivent être défendus aux chrêtiens selon les règles de l’Église et le sentiment des Pères (Paris: A. Dezallier, 1686); R. Sauzet, ‘Aux origines du refus des jeux et divertissements dans la pastorale catholique moderne’, in P. Ariès and J.-C. Margolin (eds), Les jeux à la Renaissance. Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 649–58; C. Biquard, ‘La lutte de l’Église contre les fêtes paiennes, les jeux et les divertissements aux XVI et XVII siècles’, unpublished diss. (Paris: EHESS, 1986). Cf. J. B. Thiers, Traité des superstitions selon l’Écriture sainte, les décrets de conciles et les sentiments des saints Pères et des théologiens (Paris: A. Dezallier, 1679); J.-M. Goulemot, ‘Démons, merveilles et philosophie à l’Âge classique’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 35 (1980) 1223–50; W. Monter, Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), pp. 121–4. For a discussion of the same three conditions set by Aquinas by a contemporary

142 Notes

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

apologist of drama, Thomas Caffaro, see Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics, pp. 159–61 (followed by the reactions from his opponents, pp. 161–7). Bernardino da Siena, sermon 42, ‘De alearum ludo’, from his De Christiana religione (1427), ed. in his Opera omnia, II (Florence, 1950), pp. 20–34; La petite dyablerie dont Lucifer est le chef et les membres sont tous les ioueurs iniques et pecheurs reprouves, intitule Leglise des mauvais (Paris: the widow of J. Trepperel and J. Jeannot, 1520); The chirche of the evyll men and women, whereof Lulyfer is the heed, and the membres is all the players dissolute and sinners reproved, trans. by H. Watson (London: W. de Worde, 1522). Cf. W. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The players scourge, or, Actors tragedie (London: for M. Sparke, 1633; repr. New York and London, 1974). On Bernardino’s moralizing campaigns: A. Rizzi, Ludus/ludere. Giocare in Italia alla fine del medio evo (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton; Rome: Viella, 1995). On the logic of opposition and inversion typical of the belief system of early modern witchcraft, S. Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). A copy of a print of La petite dyablerie held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – MS Rothschild-6 (3 bis, 39) – has a different woodcut, reproducing Moses and the devil Belial (I wish to thank Elizabeth McGrath for her kind help in the identification of the subject). A. Rocca, Commentarius contra ludum alearum (Rome, 1616); Trattato per la salute dell’anime e per la conservatione della robba e del denaro contra i giuochi delle carte e dadi (Rome: Guglielmo Facciotto, 1617): ‘prohibiti da’ sacrosanti concilii, dalle legi canoniche e civili non solamente da’ christiani, ma anco da’ gentili o pagani, per li molti peccati e casi horrendissimi che nascono da’ detti abominevoli giuochi. Finalmente per la ricreatione dell’animo, e per fuggir l’otio, si propone un giuoco ingegnoso et onesto e lecito a qual si voglia persona’. Cf. F. Taviani, La commedia dell’arte e la società barocca: la fascinazione del teatro (Rome: Bulzoni, 1969; repr. 1991), with extracts from sources. G. D. Ottonelli, Parenesi prima a’ giucatori di carte o di dadi (Florence: Landi, 1659): ‘Il giuoco fa dare alle volte in eccessi di pazzia’ (p. 22); next quotation from conclusion 22 (p. 91). L. Danaeus, Tractatus de ludo aleae, in his Tractatus duo: primus De amicitia Christiana; secundus De ludo aleae (Geneva: E. Vignon, 1579), pp. 39–65; A treatise touching dyceplay and prophane gaming. Wherein, as godly recreations and moderate disportes bee Christianly allowed and learnedly defended: so all vaine, ydle, unlawfull, offensive and prophane exercises bee sharply reproved and flatly condemned, trans. by T. Newton, published again together with his True and Christian Friendshippe (London: A. Veale, 1586). Cf. O. Fatio, Nihil pulchrius ordine. Contribution à l’étude de l’établissement de la discipline ecclésiastique aux Pays-Bas ou Lambert Daneau aux Pays-Bas, 1581–1583 (Leiden: Brill, 1971); J. Taffin, The amendment of life (London, 1595), pp. 228–55. Within a few years, Taffin’s treatise also appeared in French and German. A French version of Daneau’s treatise was published first, on the same year as the Latin text, within a revised edition of his work on witchcraft – Deux traitez nouveaux, très-utiles pour ce temps: le premier touchant les sorciers [. . .] le second contient une breve remonstrance sur les jeux de cartes et de dez ([Gien]: Jacques Baumet, 1579) – subsequently in at least one separate print ([s.l.]: P. Prunier, 1591).

Notes 143 28. D. Souter, Palamedes sive De tabula lusoria, alea et variis ludis libri tres (Leiden: Elzevir, 1622 and 1625; preceded by Ioannes Meursius, Graecia ludibunda sive De ludis Graecorum liber singularis). Cf. Ioannes Meursius, Orchestra sive De saltationibus veterum (Leiden, 1618). In his preface to the reader of Graecia ludibunda (unfol.), the author mentions his dance book and refers to his two volumes as a joint project, which aims at a comprehensive exploration of Greek pastimes (oblectamenta). 29. On Lenaert Leys (Leonardus Lessius): T. van Houdt, ‘Spelen om geld’, De zeventiende eeuw, 15.1 (1999) 61–73. On English and Dutch Protestant theologians (Voetius, Taffin, Gataker, Perkins and Ames): L. F. Groenendijk, ‘Kansspelen in het ethische discours van gereformeerde theologen in de Noordelijke Nederlanden’, De zeventiende eeuw, 15.1 (1999) 74–85. 30. Peter Martyr, The Common Places, trans. by A. Marten (London, 1583), pp. 503–5 (‘Of danses’), 524–8 (‘Of plaies or pastimes’); A briefe treatise, concerning the use and abuse of dauncing, trans. by I. K. (London: J. Jugge, [1580?]). While the origin of both of these texts was a Latin commentary on the Book of Judges (first published in Zurich in 1561), the editor of the collection of Peter Martyr’s commonplaces gave them systematic arrangement, and by so doing oriented the reader’s approach to them. Dance was put under the seventh commandment, as related to sexual promiscuity and transgression; play under the eighth, thus equating it with gambling and theft. 31. Augustine, De vera religione, 38; Bede, Expositio in Primam Epistolam S. Joannis. 32. S. D’Agata D’Ottavi, ‘The quaestiones disputatae: an aspect of medieval theatre?’, European Medieval Drama, I (1997) 101–8. 33. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 44, pp. 200–9. 34. St Antoninus, Summa theologica, ed. by P. Ballerini (Verona, 1740; repr. Graz, 1959), vol. 2, cols 491–4. Cf. Arcangeli, ‘The confessor and the theatre’. 35. Caietanus, Summula (Venice: D. Nicolinus, 1584), s.v. ‘histrionum peccata’, ‘ludere’, ‘spectacula’; his commentary is included in St Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, Leonina edn, vol. X (Rome, 1899), pp. 345–8. Cf. Arcangeli, ‘The confessor and the theatre’, pp. 24–5. 36. Otten, ‘De Urbanitate’. 37. Olson, Literature as Recreation, p. 64. Cf. W. Tatarkiewicz, ‘Theatrica, the science of entertainment from the XIIth to the XVIIth century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXVI (1965) 263–72; P. Vallin, ‘Mechanica et Philosophia selon Hugues de Saint-Victor’, Revue d’Histoire de la Spiritualité, 49 (1973) 257–88; C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, ‘Clercs et jongleurs dans la société médiévale (XIIe et XIIIe siècles)’, Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 34 (1979) 913–28. 38. Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics. 39. J.A. Gonzalez Alcantud, Tractatus ludorum: una antropológica del juego (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993). 40. P. de Covarrubias, Remedio de jugadores (Burgos: A. de Melgar, 1519); Rimedio de’ giuocatori, Italian trans. by A. Ulloa (Venice: V. Valgrisi, 1561). Cf. Gonzalez Alcantud, Tractatus ludorum, pp. 115–20. On bullfighting, see A. Molinié-Bertrand, J.-P. Duviols and A. Guillaume-Alonso (eds), Des taureaux et des hommes. Tauromachie et société dans le monde ibérique et ibéro-américain. Actes du colloque international (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999); for an anthropological enquiry on the ritual, with comparisons with

144 Notes

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

other Mediterranean cultures, Á. Álvarez de Miranda, Ritos y juegos del toro (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1998). Alcocer, Tratado del juego; the text runs for 350 pages. Cf. Gonzalez Alcantud, Tractatus ludorum, pp. 120–3. ‘La tercera manera de juegos es, de aquellos que se hazen para tomar un poco de plazer y passatiempo, y a las vezes juntamente para exercitar las fuerças. Y estos son los que los vulgares llaman propriamente juegos, y se dividen segun los dotores en tres maneras de juegos’ (Alcocer, Tratado del juego, p. 27). ‘Que de derecho natural y divino ningun juego ay prohibido ni malo; y de los motivos y causas que algunos pueden tener para condenar los juegos’ (Alcocer, Tratado del juego, pp. 28–36). Juan de Mariana, Tratado contra los juegos públicos (1609; edn Madrid, 1950). Cf. A. Garcia Barrio, Intolerancia de poder y protesta popular en el Siglo de Oro. Los debates sobre la licitud moral del teatro (Malaga: Universidad de Málaga, 1978), pp. 34–7; Gonzalez Alcantud, Tractatus ludorum, pp. 106–9. Alcocer, Tratado del juego, especially p. 17. A first draft of this section was given in A. Arcangeli, ‘Tempo dissipato e tempo redento’, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 17 (1991) 121–34. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, pp. 254–6 (quotation from p. 255). Ibid., pp. 302–10. Ibid., pp. 501–8. R. Baxter, A Christian Directory: or, A Summ of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience (London: R. White and N. Simmons, 1673), pp. 274–93 (quotation from p. 274). Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., pp. 460–5. See also J. K. Rühl, ‘Religion and amusements in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England: “Time might be better bestowed, and besides wee see sin acted” ’, British Journal of Sports History, 1.2 (1984) 125–65. J. Le Goff, ‘Merchant’s time and the Church’s time in the Middle Ages’, in his Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. by A. Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 29–42; Medieval Civiization, 400–1500, trans. by J. Barrow (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). For Alberti: L. B. Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. by R. N. Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969). An interesting test of Le Goff’s point on the opposition between the merchant and the Church is offered by A. Murray, ‘Time and money’, in M. Rubin (ed.), The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 1–25. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by T. Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1930, repr. 1958). A. Arcangeli, ‘Dance under trial: the moral debate 1200–1600’, Dance Research, 12.2 (1994) 127–55 (129); Davide o Salomé?, esp. pp. 220–2. Arcangeli, Davide o Salomé? (on Bucer and Peter Martyr, pp. 136–7; on Lutheranism, pp. 175–87). For Constant, see: Constant, ‘De Comitate et Urbanitate’; H. Vuilleumier, Histoire de l’Église réformée du Pays de Vaud sous le régime bernois, vol. II (Lausanne, 1929). For Meisner: B. Meisnerus,

Notes 145 Philosophia sobria, vol. I (Giessen, 1615), pp. 375–82; developed by his student Matthias Butschky in a thesis, which belonged in a series of anti-Calvinist controversy: Disputatio duodecima de choreis et comoediis (Wittenberg: I. Gormannus, 1620).

5 Games and Law 1. J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, trans. by R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1949; repr. 1998), pp. 76–88. 2. For updated introductions see: R.C. van Caenegem, An Historical Introduction to Private Law, trans. by D.E.L. Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); M. Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000–1800, trans. by L. G. Cochrane (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1995); A. M. Hespanha, Panorama histórico da cultura jurídica europeia, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América, 1999). 3. Digest 11.5.1–4, in Corpus iuris civilis, I: Institutiones. Digesta, ed. by P. Krüger and T. Mommsen, 21st edn (Frankfurt a. M., 1970), pp. 185–6; Code 3.43.1–2, in Corpus iuris civilis, II: Codex Iustinianus, ed. and rev. by P. Krüger, 15th edn (Frankfurt a. M., 1970), pp. 147–8; see also the paragraph Novels 123.10.1, in Corpus iuris civilis, III: Novellae, ed. by R. Schöll and G. Kroll, 9th edn (Frankfurt a. M., 1968), pp. 602–3. Cf. L. Zdekauer, Il gioco d’azzardo nel medoevo italiano (Florence: Salimbeni, 1993 – a reprint of collected articles first published in the 1880s and 1890s); U. Gualazzini, Premesse storiche al diritto sportivo (Milan: Giuffrè, 1965); R. Ferroglio, ‘Ricerche sul gioco e sulla scommessa fino al secolo XIII’, Rivista di storia del diritto italiano, LXXI (1998) 273–387; G. Ceccarelli, ‘Gioco tra economia e teologia’, Ludica, 7 (2001) 46–60; M. Vallerani, ‘Ludus e giustizia: rapporti e interferenze tra sistemi di valori e reazioni giudiziarie’, Ludica, 7 (2001) 61–75. 4. C. Casagrande and S. Vecchio, ‘Clercs et jongleurs dans la société médiévale (XIIe et XIIIe siècles)’, Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 34 (1979) 913–28. 5. Tractatus de multiplici ludo editus per clarissimum utriusque iuris doc. do. Ugonem Trottum; Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, MS I.185, fols 1–27 (quotations from fols 1v, 2, 2v). Cf. Rome, Vatican Library, MS Chis. J.IV.100 (a copy dated 1466); Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Lat. 194; Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, fondo parmense, MS misc. XV.85, fols 80v–118v. 6. Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, MS I.185 (quotation from fol. 9v). 7. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS HB.VI.2, fols 54–73. A much shorter text is contained in Leiden, Bibliothek der Universiteit, MS d’Ablaing 28, fols 54–55v. 8. Tractatus universi iuris, IV (Lyons, 1549); Tractatus universi iuris, VII (Venice: F. Zilettus, 1584). 9. S. Costa, De ludo (Pavia: F. de Sancto Petro, 1478; repr. 1489); also repr. as ‘De ludo et ioco’, in Tractatus universi iuris, Lyons edn, IV, fols 189–196v. Cf. Gualazzini, Premesse storiche al diritto sportivo, pp. 268–81. 10. M. Socinus, Nova et utilissima commentaria super secunda parte libri quinti Decretalium (Parma, 1574), fols 73v–79v. Cf. H. Boich, In quinque Decretalium

146 Notes

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

libros commentaria, 2 vols (Venice: apud haeredem Hieronymi Scoti, 1576), I, 375 (which contains a commentary on Gregory IX’s decretals on the moral conduct of clerics). Bohic was also one of Costa’s main sources. I. B. Cacialup[us], ‘De ludo et aleae lusu’, in Tractatus universi iuris, Lyons edn, IV, fols 201v–207, cf. Gualazzini, Premesse storiche, pp. 266–8. Paris de Putheo, Tractatus aureus in materia ludi editus (Tolouse: I. Fabri, 1520); repr. as Paris a Puteo, ‘De ludo et aleatoribus’, in Tractatus universi iuris, Lyons edn, IV, fols 197–201. T. Malvetius, ‘De sortibus’, in Tractatus universi iuris, Lyons edn, IV, fols 207v–211v. I. Consobrinus, De iustitia commutativa (Paris, 1483 and subsequent edns); repr., with a translation by R. Machado, in M. A. Amzalak, Frei João Sobrinho e as doutrinas económicas da Idade-Média (Lisbon, 1945). P. Pantoja de Aiala, ‘Commentaria in tit[ulos] D[ecreti] et C[odicis] de aleatoribus’, in Thesaurus Juris Romani, ed. by E. Otto (Leiden and Utrecht, 1725–35), IV, cols 907–1152. J. Thomas, Schediasma iuridicum de aleatoribus – Von Würffel-Spielern, in Acad. Jen. MDCLI habitum, 2nd edn (1723). Zdekauer, Il gioco d’azzardo; G. Ortalli (ed.), Gioco e giustizia nell’Italia di Comune (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton; Rome: Viella, 1993); A. Rizzi, Ludus/ludere. Giocare in Italia alla fine del medio evo (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton; Rome: Viella, 1995); I. Taddei, ‘Gioco d’azzardo, ribaldi e baratteria nelle città della Toscana tardo-medievale’, Quaderni storici, 92 (1996) 335–62; Vallerani, ‘Ludus e giustizia’. Forthcoming through the same publishers (Benetton and Viella) is the edition of a substantial collection of laws concerning play and games issued by late medieval Italian communes: A. Rizzi (ed.), Statuta et banna de ludo. Repertorio di leggi sul gioco nell’Italia di Comune (secoli XIII–XVI). Cf. also G. Ortalli, ‘Tempo libero e medio evo: tra pulsioni ludiche e schemi culturali’, in S. Cavaciocchi (ed.), Il tempo libero. Economia e società (Loisirs, leisure, tiempo libre, Freizeit). Secc. XIII–XVIII (Prato: Istituto internazionale di storia economica ‘F. Datini’, 1995), pp. 31–54; ‘The origins of the gambler-state. Licences and excises for gaming activities in the XIII and XIV centuries (and the case of Vicenza)’, Ludica, 3 (1997) 108–31; ‘Lo stato e il giocatore: lunga storia di un rapporto difficile’, in G. Imbucci (ed.), Il gioco pubblico in Italia: storia, cultura e mercato (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), pp. 33–43. Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I, ed. by J. Craigie and A. Law (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1982), pp. 101–9, 217–41; on the controversy cf. R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 196–8, with bibliographical references. R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by T. C. Faulkner and others, with commentary by J. B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989–2000), II, p. 82. The Basilicon Doron of King James VI, ed. by J. Craigie, vol. I (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Text Society, 1944), pp. 93–4. A brief discussion of the issue in J. P. Toner, Leisure and Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 125–6. In a variant which the Spanish royal favourite Valenzuela adopted in 1674, the Latin motto comprised ‘bread,

Notes 147

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

bulls and work’ (pan, toros y trabajo); cf. P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; revised repr. Aldershot: Scolar, 1994), p. 200. Caietanus, Summula (Venice: apud Dominicum Nicolinum, 1584), pp. 44–5. R. C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). A. Arcangeli, ‘L’opuscolo contro la danza attribuito a Carlo Borromeo’, Quadrivium, n.s. 1.1 (1990) 35–76. Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I, p. 105. L. Danaeus, Tractatus de ludo aleae, in his Tractatus duo (Geneva: E. Vignon, 1579), pp. 39–65; A treatise touching dyceplay and prophane gaming, trans. by T. Newton (London: A. Veale, 1586). G. P. Cardello, ‘Predica fatta nel Duomo di Milano [. . .] l’anno 1563. Ove si parla del giuoco, et si narra la sua institutione, et s’è lecito a’ Christiani’, in T. Porcacchi (ed.), Prima parte delle prediche di diversi illustri theologi et catholici predicatori della parola di Dio (Venice: G. de’ Cavalli, 1566), p. 496. F. de Alcocer, Tratado del juego (Salamanca: Andrea de Portonariis, 1558–59), pp. 294–301. R. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). See also Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe/Histoire du spectacle en Europe (1580– 1750), ed. by P. Béhar and H. Watanabe O’Kelly (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), and the connected ongoing international research project ‘Europa triumphans’. M. Panzer, Tanz und Recht (Frankfurt a. M., 1938). G. K. Bastineller (praeses), I. D. Kettnerus (autor et respondens), De eo quod iustum est circa saltationes (Wittenberg, 1730), quotations from pp. 41, 10. Cf. A. Arcangeli, Davide o Salomé? Il dibattito europea sulla danza nella prima età moderna (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton; Rome: Viella, 2000), pp. 185–7; ‘Dance and law’, in B. Ravelhofer (ed.), Terpsichore 1450–1900: International Dance Conference, Ghent, Belgium, 11–18 April 2000. Proceedings (Ghent: Institute for Historical Dance Practice, 2000), pp. 51–64. V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For national perspectives: F. R. Bryson, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Duel: A Study in Renaissance Social History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938); F. Erspamer, La biblioteca di don Ferrante: duello e onore nella cultura del Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1982); F. Billacois, Le duel dans la société française des XVIe–XVIIe siècles: essai de psychosociologie historique (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1986); C. Chauchadis, La loi du duel: le code du point d’honneur dans l’Espagne des XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1997); M. Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness, and Honour (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The Radical Reformation, ed. and trans. by M. G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 116–17 (anonymous To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry, May 1525) and 235 (The Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants, February–March 1525); P. Salvadori, La chasse sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1996), doléances at pp. 382–3; P. Galloni, Storia e cultura della caccia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2000); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975).

148 Notes 34. Salvadori, La chasse, pp. 15–36. 35. P. Covarrubias, Remedio de jugadores (Burgos: Alonso de Melgar, 1519), fols XXXv–XXXV; Rimedio de’ giuocatori, Italian trans. by A. Ulloa (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1561), pp. 69–71. 36. A. Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); quotations from p. 393. 37. Ibid., pp. 273–85.

6 Varieties of Pastimes 1. See for instance the works by Platina (1470) and Giuniano Maio (1492) in J. Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol. II: Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 102–3, 112. 2. B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. by T. Hoby, ed. by V. Cox (London: Dent, 1994), pp. 112–13; cf. W. A. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivities in Castiglione’s Book of Courtier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978). 3. V. P. Plempius, De togatorum valetudine tuenda commentatio (Brussels, 1670), p. 297. 4. P. Salvadori, La chasse sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 5. J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S.G.C. Middlemore, rev. by I. Gordon (New York and Toronto: New American Library, 1960), part V. 6. P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; revised reprint, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994); ‘Le carnaval de Venise: Esquisse pour une histoire de longue durée’, in P. Ariès and J.-C. Margolin (eds), Les jeux à la Renaissance. Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 55–63. 7. W. Heywood, Palio and Ponte (1904; repr. New York: Hacker, 1969); R. C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); A. A. Settia, ‘La “battaglia”: un gioco violento fra permissività e interdizione’, in G. Ortalli (ed.), Gioco e giustizia nell’Italia di Comune (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton; Rome: Viella, 1993), pp. 121–32. 8. P. Corazzari, L’empietà condannata negli abusi de’ spettacoli, e giuochi publici (Bologna: G. B. Ferroni, 1661). 9. Florio’s Second Frutes. To Which is Annexed his Garden of Recreation (London: for T. Woodcock, 1591; repr. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969); F. A. Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). 10. D. Boccamazza, Trattato della caccia, in G. Innamorati (ed.), Arte della caccia. Testi di falconeria, uccellagione e altre cacce (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1965), I, pp. 291–512. 11. For the legislation banning folk dancing, cf. K. R. Greenfield, Sumptuary Law in Nürnberg: A Study in Paternal Government (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1918), pp. 93–4; A. Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of

Notes 149

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 283–4. For the familiarity of Nürnberg patricians with Italian court dance, see the example of Johannes Cochläus in I. Wetzel, ‘ “Hie innen sindt geschrieben die wellschen tenntz”: le otto danze italiane nel manoscritto di Norimberga’, in M. Padovan (ed.), Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro e la danza nelle corti italiane del XV secolo (Pisa: Pacini, 1990), pp. 321–43. On the 1521 Tanzstatut, G. Hirschmann, Das Nürnberger Patriziat, in H. Rössler (ed.), Deutsches Patriziat (Darmstadt: C. A. Starke, 1965), pp. 257–66 (265–6). P. Burke, The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 1993); B. Craveri, La civiltà della conversazione (Milan: Adelphi, 2001). F. de Grenaille, Les plaisirs des dames (Paris, 1641 and 1643); Frauenzimmer Belustigung (Nuremberg: M. Endter, 1657). Cf. F. Petrarque, Le sage resolu contre la bonne et mauvaise fortune, trans. by F. de Grenaille (Bruxelles: F. Foppens, 1660). Grenaille, Les plaisirs des dames, pp. 308, 310, 322. Cf. A. Arcangeli, ‘Dance under trial: the moral debate 1200–1600’, Dance Research, XII.2 (1994) 127–55; Davide o Salomé? (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton; Rome: Viella, 2000), pp. 240–6. R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by T. C. Faulkner and others, with commentary by J. B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989–2000), II, p. 95. I. Quercetanus, Diaeteticon polyhistoricon (Paris: C. Morellus, 1606), fol. 155; cf. J. Du Chesne, Le portraict de la santé (Paris: C. Morellus, 1606), p. 321. Cf. F. Rust, Dance in Society (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969). L. Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); cf. W. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The players scourge, or, Actors tragedie (London, 1633; repr. New York and London, 1974), especially pp. 167–73, 168–216, 237–9, 273–90. See respectively: A. Arcangeli, ‘Dance and punishment’, Dance Research, X.2 (1992) 30–42; Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS HB.VI.2, fols 65v–67; A. Pontremoli and P. La Rocca, Il ballare lombardo (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1987), p. 176. J. Davies, Complete Poems, ed. by A. B. Grosart (London, 1876), I, p. 193. On the text, E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 123–9; S. Thesiger, ‘The Orchestra of Sir John Davies and the image of the dance’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXVI (1973) 277–304; S. Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 87–104. On the myth, L. Brisson, Le mythe de Tirésias (Leiden: Brill, 1976). A Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour, ed. by D. W. Rude (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 93. On dance in Elyot, cf. J. M. Major, ‘The moralization of the dance in Elyot’s Governour’, Studies in the Renaissance, V (1958) 27–36; Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing, pp. 29–35. Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro, De Pratica seu Arte Tripudii. On the Practice or Art of Dancing, ed. by B. Sparti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); F. Caroso, Il ballarino (Venice, 1581; repr. New York: Broude, 1967); Nobiltà di dame, libro altra volta chiamato Il ballarino (Venice, 1600; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1970);

150 Notes

23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the Nobiltà di Dame (1600), ed. by J. Sutton, 2nd edn (New York: Dover, 1995). J. R. Nevile, ‘The courtly dance manuscripts from fifteenth-century Italy’, unpublished diss. (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1992), pp. 181–9. On the subject, see also M. Nordera, ‘La donna in ballo. Danza e genere nella prima età moderna’, unpublished diss. (Florence: European University Institute, 2001). Burton listed ‘to see Ladies dance’ among the leisure occupations of the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good (Anatomy of Melancholy, II, p. 83). Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, p. 218. At the request of Elizabeth Brooks, the Marquise of Northampton, Hoby first specifically translated the third book (1551). Cf. V. Cox, ‘Seen but not heard: the role of women speakers in Cinquecento literary dialogue’, in L. Panizza (ed.), Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), pp. 385–400. P. Salvadori, La chasse sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1996); P. Galloni, Storia e cultura della caccia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2000). F. Joubert, La tapisserie (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), pp. 7, 56. Joubert, La tapisserie, pp. 52–3. Cf. F. Yates, The Valois Tapestries (London: Warburg Institute, 1959). Cf. C. Barletta, ‘Iconografia del gioco nel Quattrocento’, in Passare il tempo: la letteratura del gioco e dell’intrattenimento dal XII al XVI secolo (Rome: Salerno, 1993), pp. 239–50. Erasmus, Colloquies, ed. by C. R. Thompson, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 894. L. B. Alberti, Libri della famiglia, book I; cf. The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. by R. N. Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), quot. from p. 83. R. Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training up of Children (1581), ed. by W. Barker (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994). L. Caporossi, ‘Il programma iconografico di Ligorio nel Castello Estense di Ferrara: gioco e tempo nell’ “Appartamento dello Specchio” ’, forthcoming in Ludica, 8. S. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (London: Collins, 1987), pp. 497– 516. See also P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. by R. Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 60–97; M. F. Durantini, The Child in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Painting (Epping: Bowker, 1983). J. Hills, Das Kinderspielbild von Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. (1560): eine volkskundliche Untersuchung (Vienna, 1957; 2nd edn: Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde, 1998); J.-P. Vanden Branden, ‘Les jeux d’enfants de Pierre Bruegel’, in P. Ariès and J.-C. Margolin (eds), Les jeux à la Renaissance. Actes du XXIIIe Colloque International d’Études Humanistes, Tours, juillet 1980 (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 499–524 (p. 515 both on innocence and le pipi, in polemic with Hills). J. Stella, Les jeux et plaisirs de l’enfance, engraved by C. Bouzonnet-Stella (Paris: Stella, 1667; repr. Geneva and Paris: Slatkine, 1981); cf. M. Manson, Jouets de toujours: de l’Antiquité à la Révolution (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 166. C. Rao, ‘Invettiva contra i giuocatori’, in his Invettive, orationi et discorsi (Venice: D. Zenaro, 1587), fol. 94v – where noble examples from the Medici family are brought to illustrate the point.

Notes 151 38. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. For an example of critique of his main thesis: S. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). On the history of toys, see now Manson, Jouets de toujours. 39. Manson, Jouets de toujours, pp. 137–54. 40. J. H. Plumb, ‘The new world of children in eighteenth-century England’, in N. McKendrick and others (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Europa, 1982), pp. 286–315. 41. Manson, Jouets de toujours, p. 142. 42. J. Frain du Tremblay, Conversations morales sur les jeux et les divertissemens (Paris: André Pralard, 1685). The same author’s subsequent Nouveaux Essais de morale (Paris: D. Hortemels, 1691) contained uncompromising condemnation of contemporary drama; cf. H. Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), passim. 43. J. Verdon, Les loisirs en France au Moyen Âge (Paris: Tallandier, 1980); J. M. Carter, Medieval Games: Sports and Recreations in Feudal Society (New York: Greenwood, 1992). 44. On the latter: P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1983). 45. T. F. Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century, and Their Influence on the Literatures of Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920). The sources cited above are: I. Ringhieri, Cento giuochi liberali, et d’ingegno (Bologna: A. Giaccarelli, 1551); G. Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare, ed. by P. D’Incalci Ermini (Siena: Accademia senese degli intronati, 1982); Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier; S. Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. by A. Quondam, 2 vols (Modena: Panini, 1993). Cf. the contributions by V. Marchetti, F. Lecercle and R. Bruscagli in Ariès and Margolin, Les jeux à la Renaissance, pp. 163–212; those by L. Riccò and R. Lencioni Novelli (among the many relevant) in Passare il tempo, pp. 373–98, 691–706. 46. C. Sorel, La maison des jeux, rev. edn (1657); repr. ed. by D.-A. Gajda (Geneva: Slatkine, 1977). 47. A. de’ Mori, Giuoco piacevole, ed. by M. G. Sanjust (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988); M. G. Sanjust, ‘Il “gioco giocato” di Ascanio de’ Mori da Ceno’, in Passare il tempo, pp. 769–76. The book was originally published in 1575, and underwent revised reprints in 1580 and 1590. 48. S. Byrd, A friendlie communication or Dialogue betweene Paule and Demas, wherein is disputed how we are to use the pleasures of this life (London: T. Heast for J. Harrison the younger, 1580); quotations from initial unfol., 19v. 49. T. Tasso, Il Gonzaga secondo overo del giuoco, in his Dialoghi, ed. by E. Raimondi (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 449–97. Tasso provides the definition and starting point for the assessment of play in T. Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le profesioni del mondo, ed. by P. Cherchi and B. Collina (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), Discorso LXIX, pp. 903–10. 50. On the importance of this issue, see P. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), pp. 81–115. 51. H. Cardanus, Opus novum cunctis de sanitate tuenda, ac vita producenda (Rome: F. Zanettus, 1580), pp. 54–70. 52. A. Scaino, Trattato del giuoco della palla (Venice, 1555). 53. Ioannes Gallensis, Communiloqium sive Summa collationum (Strasbourg: Jordanns de Quedlinburg, 1489; repr. Wakefield: S. R., 1964); A. Anglus (Carpentarius), Destructorum viciorum (1480 seqq.).

152 Notes 54. H. I. Clodius, Primae lineae bibliothecae lusoriae: sive, Notitia scriptorum de ludis, praecipue domesticis ac privatis, ordine alphabetico digesta (Leipzig: I. C. Langenhemius, 1761; repr. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1971), p. 18. 55. J. B. Thiers, Traité des jeux et des divertissemens (Paris: A. Dezallier, 1686). 56. Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, MS I.185, fol. 1v. 57. Sorel, La maison des jeux. On the latter point, the author distinguished between jeux d’enfans, of lesser value, and jeux meslez, not inappropriate to young people and adults (pp. 204–). 58. P. Covarrubias, Remedio de jugadores (Burgos: Alonso de Melgar, 1519), especially Part I, Chap. 2 and Part II, Chap. 1.

7 Conclusion 1. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 1685, pp. 110–11, 930–1 (repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1966, vol. I, pp. 317, 523). 2. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 1687, pp. 1–20 (repr. vol. II, pp. 380–5); p. 1 (380): ‘Il n’est pas besoin de prouver une verité si evidente, et qui est apparemment fondée sur le mechanisme que M. Boyle a substitué si heureusement au mot vague de Nature. Si l’on vouloit prouver quelque chose touchant la necessité de se divertir, ce seroit à l’explication de ce mechanisme qu’il vaudroit mieux apliquer ses soins.’ 3. P. Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1689–1715 (Paris: Boivin, 1935), I, pp. 131–54. 4. On the latter, see H. Roodenburg, Onder censuur (Hilversum: Verloren, 1990), with dancing and playing music for the dance among the forms of behaviour repeatedly censored by the local consistory between 1578 and 1700. 5. See, for examples: R. Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750, trans. by L. Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); C. Biquard, ‘La lutte de l’Église contre les fêtes paiennes, les jeux et les divertissements aux XVI et XVII siècles’, unpublished diss. (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1986). Also, J. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), whose second chapter is entitled ‘The Repression and Reform of Popular Sporting Forms’ (pp. 16–37). 6. S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 188–201. 7. P. Ariès and J.-C. Margolin (eds), Les jeux à la Renaissance. Actes du XXIIIe Colloque international d’études humanistes (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 661–90 for Margolin’s ‘Rapport de Synthèse’. 8. M. Manson, Jouets de toujours: de l’Antiquité à la Révolution (Paris: Fayard, 2001). J.-P. Étienvre, Figures du jeu: études lexico-sémantiques sur le jeu de cartes en Espagne, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1987); Márgenes literarios del juego: una poética del naipe, siglos XVI–XVIII (London: Tamesis, 1990). 9. J.-M. Mehl, Les jeux au royaume de France du XIIIe au début du XVIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990).

Notes 153 10. R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); followed by The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), a general history of calendar customs. 11. M. Vallerani, ‘Ludus e giustizia: rapporti e interferenze tra sistemi di valori e reazioni giudiziarie’, Ludica, 7 (2001) 61–75. 12. Jeux, sports et divertissements au Moyen Age et à l’age classique. Actes di 116e congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1993); Passare il tempo: la letteratura del gioco e dell’intrattenimento dal XII al XVI secolo (Rome: Salerno, 1993); S. Cavaciocchi (ed.), Il tempo libero: economia e società (loisirs, leisure, tiempo libre, Freizeit), secc. XIII–XVIII (Prato: Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’; Florence: Le Monnier, 1995); Bonn proceedings in Ludica, 1 (1995) 51–200; a selection of Rotterdam papers in De zeventiende eeuw, 15.1 (1999). 13. For an updated assessment, see A. Corbin (ed.), L’avènement des loisirs, 1850–1960 (Paris: Aubier, 1995; repr. Flammarion, 2001); Italian edn L’invenzione del tempo libero (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1996). 14. B. Vickers, ‘Leisure and idleness in the Renaissance: the ambivalence of otium’, Renaissance Studies, 4 (1990) 153–4. 15. H. I. Clodius, Primae lineae bibliothecae lusoriae: sive, Notitia scriptorum de ludis, praecipue domesticis ac privatis, ordine alphabetico digesta (Leipzig: I. C. Langenhemius, 1761; repr. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1971). An accurate measuring of entries by date of publication is made difficult by the fact that several publication details are missing. 16. C. Barletta, ‘Iconografia del gioco nel Quattrocento’, in Passare il tempo, pp. 239–50; J.-M. Lhôte, Histoire des jeux de société: géométries du désir (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), p. 246. Cf. also S. Francioni, ‘Iconografia del gioco nel Cinquecento’, in Passare il tempo, pp. 251–68. 17. A. Rizzi, ‘Gioco, disciplinamento, predicazione’, Ludica, 7 (2001) 79–96. 18. J. H. Plumb, ‘The commercialization of leisure’, in N. McKendrick and others (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Europa, 1982), pp. 265–85; J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); A. Bermingham and J. Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997); R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 258–75. 19. P. Burke, ‘The repudiation of ritual in early modern Europe’, in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 223–38; E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 20. D. R. Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 21. A. Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 22. P. Burke, ‘Conspicuous consumption in seventeenth-century Italy’, in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, pp. 132–49; Id., ‘Res et verba: con-

154 Notes

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

spicuous consumption in the modern world’, in Brewer and Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods, pp. 148–61. The list and critical comment come from G. Guerzoni, ‘Playing Great Games: The giuoco in Sixteenth-Century Italian Courts’, Italian History and Culture, I (1995) 43–63 (p. 43), which also contains a promising prediction of the results one may expect from the development of this area of historical enquiry: ‘The analysis of the noble and courtly giuoco is crucial for the comprehension of several issues. It allows a very “serious” investigation of courtly society, providing interesting perspectives on alternative definitions and mode of functioning of internal hierarchies, on ways of managing conflict, on mechanisms for expressing and defusing aggression and competition, on the creation of neutral spaces devoted to interaction among different social strata, on the behavioural codes imposed by the ceremony and etiquette of the period. Moreover, this study sheds light on facets of aristocratic customs that are often overlooked, for example, the relationship between money and the use of wealth, too often hastily dismissed as scandalous waste’ (p. 44). C. Sorel, La maison des jeux, rev. edn (Paris: A. de Sommaville, 1657); repr. ed. by D.-A. Gajda (Geneva: Slatkine, 1977), unfol.; T. Tasso, Il Gonzaga secondo overo del giuoco, in his Dialoghi, ed. by E. Raimondi (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), p. 463. Huizinga, J., Homo Ludens, trans. by R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1949; repr. 1998), p. 180. Barletta, ‘Iconografia del gioco’, pp. 244–5. On ball games, see H. Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). At least in the modern, industrial society. It would seem reasonable to argue that the relationships between work and non-work have changed once more in the post-modern, post-industrial society (for instance with the internet and the increasing opportunities to work from home). However, as I mentioned in the Introduction, forty years ago Sebastian de Grazia – Of Time, Work and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962) – warningly argued that, behind the smoke produced by much talk and search for free time, a contemporary society was revealed in which, outside work, everyone is increasingly burdened with the most unfree and unleisurely of tasks.

Appendix 1. E. H. Gombrich, ‘Huizinga’s Homo ludens’, in Johan Huizinga, 1872–1972, ed. by W.R.H. Koops, and others (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 133–54 (148–50). 2. See for instance S. Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially pp. 3–4. 3. What follows is a survey of the most relevant vocabulary. Consistently with the limits I have set in the introduction, I have excluded such families as ‘feast’, ‘(re)jouissance’ or ‘revel’, although they present obvious connections. While ‘exercise’ may refer to exactly the same activities that are covered by part of the recreation vocabulary, its functional connotations indicate that it is primarily performed for reasons other than mere leisure (see above,

Notes 155

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

Chapter 3). In order to simplify the format and limit repetition: i. examples are limited to Latin, Italian, French, (Spanish,) English and German – naturally other languages would enrich the picture; ii. only the nouns for the activities (not nouns for the actors, adjectives, verbs) are given in the endnotes – parallel linguistic forms are given within brackets [ ] for languages in which the relevant noun is not documented; iii. the (subsequently) predominant spelling is given, alternative spellings are ignored. · Ò signals a term etymologically related, though not with the same meaning. Within each group, the list is given as far as possible in chronological order of first appearance; the resulting series does not necessarily imply a derivation of each term from the one immediately preceding it. Among the main reference works I have used are the following: S. Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: UTET, 1961–); E. Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle (Paris: Champion, 1925–); Trésor de la langue française, 16 vols (Paris: CNRS, 1971–94); Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 9th edn (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1986–). L ludus , [I ludico, F ludique], E ·ludicrousÒ. A. Nuti, Ludus e iocus. Percorsi di ludicità nella lingua latina (Treviso: Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche; Rome: Viella, 1998). G. Semerano, Le origini della cultura europea, 2. Dizionari etimologici: basi semitiche delle lingue indoeuropee (Florence: Olschki, 1994), ‘Dizionario latino’. Nuti, Ludus e iocus, pp. 133–55. Erasmus, Colloquies, ed. by C. R. Thompson, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 39 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 74–87. L iocus, I gi(u)oco, F jeu, E joke. Nuti, Ludus e iocus, p. 70. Ibid., pp. 209–12. Semerano, ‘Dizionario latino’. OE gamen (with parallel in Old Saxon, Old High German and Old Norse), game. [OE plegian, exercise], E play. G. Guerzoni, ‘Playing Great Games: The giuoco in Sixteenth-Century Italian Courts’, Italian History and Culture, I (1995) 43–63 (I quote from p. 43). Dutch spel. Cf. P. Grebe (ed.), Der Große Duden, 7: Etymologie (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1963). L recreatio, I ricreazione, F récréation, E recreation. [L divertere, to turn away], F divertissement, I divertimento. H. Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 151–73. ·L dis-portareÒ, OF de(s)port, I diporto, E disport/sport. F passe-temps, I passatempo, E pastime; cf. G Zeitvertreib. P. M. Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). According to the author, only the eighteenthcentury English began to be bored of something specific, rather than in general; her evidence remains unconvincing. ·Rom. *inter-(tenere, hold)Ò, I (in)trattenimento, F entretien, E entertainment; cf. G Unterhaltung. ·Med. L musum, muzzle, OF amuser, stareÒ, F/E amusement. [L placere], I piacere, F plaisir, E pleasure.

156 Notes 26. [L delectare], OF delit (still in use in the sixteenth century), I diletto, E delight. 27. Semerano, ‘Dizionario latino’, s.v. lacio. 28. L solatium, I sollazzo, OF so(u)las, E solace. 29. For examples of its usage in late medieval Latin and Italian to indicate royal game-preserves, cf. H. Bresc, ‘La chasse en Sicile (XIIe–XVe siècles)’, in La chasse au Moyen âge. Actes du Colloque de Nice, 22–24 juin 1979 (Nice: Les Belles Lettres, 1980), pp. 201–17. 30. [Vulgar L expassare] I spasso, G Spaß. 31. [L e(x)vagari] I svago (attested in the XVI c.). 32. [L licere, be allowed] F loisir, E leisure.

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Index The following terms and notions, which are partially interchangeable, appear very often throughout the book, and are therefore not recorded in the index, unless there is specific reference to them as words or they are the object of particular analysis: ‘amusements’, ‘entertainment’, ‘games’, ‘leisure’, ‘pastimes’, ‘play’, ‘recreation’, ‘sports’. Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables; those in bold mark terms as they are discussed in the appendix. Please note that only a representative selection of such terms – not all their variant spellings and forms, or nuances of meaning – have been recorded. Académie Française, 132 academies, 107, 126 accidents of the soul, see passions acedia, 15–16 Adam, 11, 12 adiaphora, 84 adornment, 69–70, 77, 78, 96 Aeneas, 42 Alberico da Rosate, 52, 141 Albert, the Great (Albertus Magnus), Saint, 53, 77 Alberti, Leon Battista, Libri della famiglia, 71, 100–1, 144, 150 Alcocer, Francisco de, Tratado del juego, 66–7, 84, 140, 144, 147 alea, aleatores, 42, 44, 59, 74, 80, 111 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 37 ales, 82 Alexander of Hales, 52–3 Alfonso II of Este, Duke of Ferrara, 25–9, 123 allegory, in Renaissance painting, 28 philosophy, 101 almanacs, 19, 38 Álvarez de Miranda, Ángel, 144 Ambrogio da Vignate, 78 Ames, William, 143 Amsterdam, 117 amusements, 131, 132 André, Jean-Marie, 135 Angelo (Carletti) da Chivasso, 113 animals associated with sloth, 136

birds’ singing, 36 created for the benefit of humankind, 66 movement compared to human, 94 pets, 13, 40, 48, 106 play, 43, 44, 128 posture distinguishes humans from, 35 sports involving cruelty towards, 48, 82; see also bullfighting see also hunting Anthony of Egypt, Saint, 13, 106 antiquarianism, Renaissance, 24, 28, 31, 36, 37, 39, 48, 59, 60, 101 Antoninus (Pierozzi), Saint, Archbishop of Florence, 62, 113–14, 143 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 14, 52, 54, 55, 77 Summa theologica, 53, 61–2, 76, 78, 135, 141, 143 Arcangeli, Alessandro, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 149 archaeological excavations, Renaissance, 28 archer and saint, see exemplum architecture, as leisure interest, 16 Arendt, Hannah, 140 Aretaeus, of Cappadocia, 40 Aretino, Pietro, 129 Ariès, Philippe, 104, 150, 151, 152 Aristotle, 53, 61, 71, 72, 77, 114, 124 Nicomachean Ethics, 50–1, 52, 63, 76, 107, 140, 141 173

174 Index Aristotle – continued Poetics, 7–8, 63 Politics, 50 Arnauld, Henry, Bishop of Angers, 135 Articella, 19 arts, 3, 5, 16 liberal and mechanical, 64 visual representation of leisure topics, 23, 25–9, 43, 56, 98–100, 101–4, 122–3 astrology, 19, 33, 35–6 athletics, 25, 37, 62, 64, 113 assessment by Cardano, 38 running, 29, 30, 46, 74, 101 throwing, 30, 32, 36, 74; shot-putting, 74, 129 see also jumping audience, 61–5, 67, 69, 132 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 10, 11, 61, 134 Confessions, 61 pseudo-, De vera et falsa poenitentia, 52 avarice, 111 Azpilcueta, Martin, 65 ballet, 34, 85, 125 ball games, 22, 23, 25, 31, 36, 46, 82, 88, 101, 110, 122, 123, 126, 129 football, 8, 91 see also jeu de paume; tennis Bargagli, Girolamo, 107, 151 Barletta, Chiara, 150, 153, 154 Bascapè, Carlo, 83, 85 Bastianino (Sebastiano Filippi), 25 Bastineller, Gebhardt Christian, 147 baths, 99 Battaglia, Salvatore, 155 battles as meaning of giochi, 129 ritual (battagliole), 3, 82–3, 90–1 Baxter, Richard, A Christian Directory, 69–70, 71, 144 Bayle, Pierre, 116–17 Baylor, Michael G., 147 beauty, 93, 94, 98 Bede, Saint, 61, 143 Béhar, Pierre, 147 Belial, 142

Bellomo, Manlio, 145 Benetton see Fondazione Benetton Benveniste, Émile, 6, 133 Bermingham, Ann, 153 Bernard, of Clairvaux, Saint, 40 Bernardino da Siena, Saint, 55–6, 57, 66, 142 betting, 60, 74, 75, 79, 91 Bible, 12, 59, 68–9 bibliography of play, 122 Bicaise, Michel, La manière de régler la santé, 32–6, 89, 138 Billacois, François, 147 billiards, 37 Biquard, Claire, 141, 152 Bird, Samuel, A friendlie communication, 108, 109, 151 blasphemy, companion of gambling, 58 Bloomfield, Morton W., 136 board games, 59, 74, 81, 123 backgammon, 31, 111 chess, 40, 46, 59, 66, 77, 78, 80, 92; allegorical interpretation, 113; chief example of games of skill, 111, 113; disapproved of by Thiers and Del Pozzo, 43, 79; only good for the elderly and sick, 101 draughts, 80 tables, 46, 47, 92 Boccamazza, Domenico, 92, 148 body attitudes towards the, 72 historiography of the, 9 politic, metaphor, 111 bodybuilding, 38 Bohic, Henri, 79, 145–6 Book of Sports, early Stuart, 82, 83, 84, 119 books, see printing press; reading boredom, 131 Borromeo, Carlo, 83, 132 Bossche, Jakob van den, 139 Bouzonnet-Stella, Claudine, 104 bowling, 37, 39, 75 prohibited by early Stuarts, 82 Boyle, Robert, 117, 152 Bresc, Henri, 156 Brewer, John, 153

Index 175 Brisson, Luc, 149 Brooks, Elizabeth, 150 Brownell, Susan, 134 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, Kinderspiele (Children’s Games), 101–4, 102–3, 123 Bruscagli, Riccardo, 151 Bryson, Frederick R., 147 Bucer, Martin, 72, 144 bullfighting, 65, 66, 67–8 allowed by Spanish monarchs, 84 papal decrees on, 67 Bultot, Robert, 140 Burckhardt, Jacob, 2, 90, 107, 133, 148 Burke, Peter, viii, 90, 118, 121, 125, 140, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153–4 Burley, Walter, 52, 141 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 16–17, 39–41, 82, 86, 95, 136, 139, 146, 149, 150 Butschky, Matthias, 145 Byzantine empire, 18 Caccialupi, Giovanni Battista, De ludo, 78, 79, 146 Caenegem, Raoul Charles van, 145 Caffaro, Thomas, 142 Cagnati, Marsilio, 138 Cagnazzo, Giovanni, 52, 62, 141 Caillois, Roger, 6, 108, 109, 115, 133 Cajetan, cardinal (Tommaso de Vio), 54, 62–3, 82 Summula de peccatis, 63, 143, 147 Calvinism see religion, Protestant Caporossi, Luisa, 137, 150 Carcano, Michele, 113 Cardano, Girolamo, De sanitate tuenda, 38, 110, 139, 151 Cardello, G. P., 135, 147 card games, 16, 31, 41, 43, 44, 55, 56, 58, 59, 70, 100, 105, 111 history, 55, 118–19, 123 primero, 92 carnival, 3, 90, 93, 107, 109, 118 Caroso, Fabrizio, 97, 149 Carpenter, Alexander (Alexander Anglus), Destructorum viciorum, 111, 112–13, 151

Carter, John Marshall, 151 Casagrande, Carla, 136, 143, 145 Cassian, John, Collationes, 13 Castiglione, Baldassarre, Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), 89, 97–8, 107, 109, 148, 150, 151 catharsis, 7–8 Catholic Church see religion Cavaciocchi, Simonetta, 153 Ceccarelli, Giovanni, 145 chance as element of play, 6, 56, 73, 79–80, 110, 115 see also games of chance charivari, 3 Charles Borromeo, Saint, cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, see Borromeo Charles IX, King of France, 99 Chauchadis, Claude, 147 chess, see board games children, 25, 32, 100–6, 102–3, 105, 114, 128 China, 125 Chirche of the Evyll Men and Women, The (Bernardino da Siena), 56, 142 Christmas celebrations, canonic assessment, 78 chronology, 1, 121–5 Church Fathers, 12, 13, 59, 60, 85 hatred for women, 85 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 51, 76 circus, ancient games of the, 37, 66, 128 ‘bread and’, 82–3 civilizing process, 49, 91, 124, 125 civil war, English (1642–48), 10 Clark, Peter, 151 Clark, Stuart, 142, 154 clergy dressing up as, 54 and recreation, 49–50, 74, 75, 78, 117; allowed to play chess, 77; gamblers cannot be ordained, 79; Lutheran, allowed to dance, 85 when allowed to take arms, 77 Clodius, Heinrich Jonathan, Bibliotheca lusoria, 122, 152, 153

176 Index clothes, 47, 88, 91, 93, 97, 98 relation to health, 32 see also costume Cochläus, Johannes, 149 Cockaigne, land of, 11, 107 coffee houses, 124 Coffin, David R., 153 Cogan, Thomas, 22, 137 comedy, see drama Comenius, Jan Amos, 105 commercialization of leisure, 124 competition, as element of play, 6, 109 complexions, see temperaments confession (penance), 54 manuals, 65, 82, 83, 113 confraternities, youth, 105 consolation, as a meaning of French solace, 131 Constant, David, 72, 140, 144 Constant, S., 140 consumer society, early modern, 122, 124 consumption, conspicuous, 87, 88, 125 contemptus mundi, 48, 71 conversation and eutrapelia, 51 manuals, 91–2, 107 as recreation, 13, 40, 46, 70, 85, 90, 95, 98, 106, 109, 126 in the vocabulary of recreation, 131 Corazzari, Pietro, 141, 148 Corbin, Alain, 153 Cornaro, Alvise, 31, 38, 138 Corpus iuris civilis, 74 Code, 74, 80, 145 Digest, 74, 75, 77, 80, 145 Novellae, 74, 145 Corpus of Canon Law, 75 Decretals, 75, 79 Decretum, 52–3, 74 Costa, Stefano, De ludo, 78–9, 145, 146 costume, dressing up in historical, 4 councils of the Church, Fourth Lateran, 54 Trent, 83

courting, 99 as a meaning of intrattenimento, 131 in Renaissance dance, 97 Covarrubias, Pedro, Remedio de jugadores, 48–50, 65–6, 87, 114, 140, 143, 148, 152 Cox, Virginia, 150 Crane, Thomas Frederick, 151 Craveri, Benedetta, 149 croquet, 22, 32, 37 Crucifixion, in medieval art, 123 crusades, 66 curiosity, 61, 62, 78 Cyprian, Saint, Bishop of Carthage, pseudoDe aleatoribus, 42 De spectaculis, 67 D’Agata D’Ottavi, Stefania, 143 dance, dancing, 13, 16, 28, 42, 45, 46, 47, 53, 54, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 71, 72, 84, 101, 108, 113, 126, 152 ancient Greek, 60 carole, 96 of galliards, 21, 22 gender connotations, 93, 94, 95–8 and law, 74, 77, 78, 82, 85–6 morris, 82 as physical exercise, 23, 24, 29–30, 31, 33–4, 36, 40 pyrrhic, 25 religious, ancient Indian and biblical, 30, 68 rope, 27, 62 social connotations, 92–3 theatrical, 67 and the vocabulary of play, 128, 130 volta, 36 waltz, 31 see also ballet Daneau, Lambert Tractatus de ludo aleae (A Discourse of Gaming), 40, 58–9, 84, 142, 147 Traité des danses, 59, 84 Dante, 131, 135 David, King of Israel, 53, 114

Index 177 Davies, John, Orchestra, 96, 149 Davis, Robert C., 90–1, 147, 148 death as result of dangerous performances and popular gatherings, 62, 79, 80 as retribution of sin, 58 deception cheating, 113 as a meaning of the vocabulary of play, 128, 129, 131 De Grazia, Sebastian, 8, 133, 134, 140, 154 delight, 41, 70, 110, 131, 132 as the distinctive element of sport, 70 see also pleasure Del Pozzo, Paride, 78, 79, 146 Delumeau, Jean, 140 desire, 46 devils, 56, 57 inventors of dance, 85 see also Belial; Lucifer dialogue, Renaissance, 109 dice games, 16, 31, 41, 43, 44, 47, 55, 56, 58, 59, 64, 70, 88, 100, 108, 111 Diderot, Denis, 37 Dido, 42 Diogenes Laertius, 138 discipline social, 81, 88, 117 stoic, 42 disport, 131 divertimento, divertissement, se divertir, 11, 55, 130, 132 drama and theatrical performances, 16, 40, 47, 52, 54, 61–5, 72, 75, 78, 113, 125, 128, 131 ancient Greek and Roman, 7–8, 48 comedy: effect on spectators, 35; women banned from performing, 67 early Stuart, 45, 68 (actors) gender ambiguity, 96 interludes, intermezzi, 82, 85 literature (reading plays), 69 masques and masquerades, 40, 62, 85

as means of propaganda, 82, 84–5 moralizing campaign against, 64, 67, 68–9, 70, 83, 96, 108 pantomimes, 79 puppet-plays, 82 religious, medieval and Renaissance, 62, 64, 65, 66, 78, 114 see also histriones; theatres Dreud, Georg, 140 drinking excessive, 71 games an opportunity for, 88 for pleasure, as recreation, 17, 40, 70, 107, 108 as refreshment, 130 Duchesne, Joseph, 30–1, 33, 95, 98, 138, 149 duels, 39, 62, 77, 78, 86 condemned by the Church, 86 Du Fail, Noël, 51, 140 Dunning, Eric, 7–8, 134, 140 Durantini, Mary Frances, 150 Duviols, Jean-Paul, 143 Eden, Garden of, 10–11 education, see play Edward III, King of England, 52 Edward VI, King of England, 60 Ehrmann, Jacques, 6–7, 133, 134 Eichberg, Henning, 8–9, 134 Elias, Norbert, 7–8, 49, 134, 140 Elyot, Thomas Boke Named the Governour, The, 96, 149 Castel of Helthe, 21, 38, 136 Elzevirs, publishers, 44, 60 embroidery and needlework, 95, 99 emic vs etic dichotomy, 1–2, 3 emotions, see passions Encyclopédie, 37 England, 82, 83, 88, 96, 106, 118, 119 English, Eleanor B., 137 Enlightenment, 122, 125 entertainment, 64, 131, 132 environment, influence on health, 32, 37, 41

178

Index

Erasmus, Desiderius Colloquies, 51, 100, 129, 150, 155 Praise of Folly, 48 Erspamer, Francesco, 147 Este Castle, Ferrara, frescoes, 25–9, 101, 123 Este family, see Alfonso II Étienvre, Jean-Pierre, 118, 152 etiquette, 97 eutrapelia, 50–2 also expressed as: playfulness, 107; pleasantness, 63; urbanity, 71 excitement in leisure, 7–8 exempla, 58, 96 exemplum of saint and archer, 12–14, 46, 106, 114 exercise, physical, 14, 16, 17, 22, 23–41, 53, 59, 63, 75, 77, 92, 100, 108, 110, 112, 114, 124, 154 ‘passive’, 21, 25 sport a species of, 70 family, 100–1, 104, 126–7 Fathers, of the Desert, 13, 15 see also Church Fathers Fatio, Olivier, 142 Ferrara cultural life, 28 incorporation into Papal States, 29 earthquake of 1570, 25 festive life, 77 University, 76 see also Este Castle Ferroglio, Renato, 145 festivals, feasts, 3, 9, 40, 82, 84–5, 90, 96, 99, 105, 119, 125, 127, 129, 130, 154 royal entries and triumphs, 85 Ficino, Marsilio, 37, 138 fighting, 43, 44 see also battles, ritual Fink, Eugen, 5, 133 fishing, 39 morally preferred to hunting, 49 Florio, John, Second Fruits, 91–2, 148 flowers, women’s love for, 93, 95 Fomperosa y Quintana, Pedro, 141 Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, 120

Fonseca, Rodrigo da, 22, 23, 137 food and eating banquets, 47, 58, 70, 75, 85, 107 delight for, 70, 93, 108 excessive, 72 hunting not practised for, 92 as nonnatural, 32 (meals) relation to exercise, 32 fortune, see chance Foucault, Michel, 117 Frain du Tremblay, Jean, Conversations morales, 11–12, 106, 116–17, 135, 151 France, 33, 37, 79, 86–7, 90, 99, 107, 119 Francioni, Stefania, 153 Franco, Hilário Jr, 134 François de Sales, Saint, Bishop of Geneva, Introduction to a Devout Life, 14, 46, 97, 135, 140 Frankfurt School (Frankfurt Institute of Social Research), 11 French Revolution, 86, 125 abolition of feudal privileges, 87 cahiers de doléances, 86 Freud, Sigmund, 117 friendship, Christian, 58 see also sociability Froissart, Jean, Chronicles, 132 fun, in the vocabulary of play, 131 funerals, 87 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 5 Galen, 18, 38 Art of Medicine, 19 Exercise with the Small Ball, 22, 30, 33, 39, 136 On the Preservation of Health, 22, 136 Galenism, see humoral theory Galloni, Paolo, 140, 147 Gambara, Beatrice, 107 gambling, 3, 16–17, 40, 41–3, 44, 47, 48, 55–60, 66, 67, 111, 112, 123, 128 drama compared to, 65 legal assessment and regulation of, 74–81, 88; historical development, 81, 119–20

Index 179 games, 122, 130 of chance vs skill, 33, 55–60, 67, 72, 75, 78, 84, 111, 112, 113, 114; history of the distinction, 74, 115 how-to-do literature, 110 parlour, 97, 107, 126 public, 78, 128; see also circus spiritual, human and demonic, 66, 113–14 see also ball games; board games; play and under individual games Gandillac, Maurice de, 137 Garcia Barrio, Antonio, 144 gardening, 12 a recreation for women, 95 gardens, 16, 126 pleasure, 124 Garzoni, Tommaso, 135, 151 Gataker, Thomas, 143 gender aspects and connotations of leisure, 35 promiscuous recreation, 99–100; conversation, 109; dance, 85, 96 recreation for men: French élite, 37; games and military exercises, 95, 101, 122–3; gymnastics, 25; hunting, 95, 98, 99, 101; study, 41 transgression of conventions, 100 women: 93–4; banned from performing in comedies, 67; dance especially suited or characteristic, 33, 54, 95, 96–8, 99; dominant role in parlour games, 107; leisure is for, 15; running on saint George festival in Ferrara, 77; swinging, 25 ungendered play: toys, 104 Geneva, 117 laws against gambling, 42 Germany, 72, 85 gesture, in Renaissance dance, 97 see also movement; posture gifts, 98 New Year, 78 Gillmeister, Heiner, 154

Gil Sotres, Pedro, 136 gioco, giuoco, 3, 66, 84, 107, 109, 125, 126, 129 Giordano of Pisa, 13–14, 135 gladiators and gladatorial contests, 28, 38, 61, 101 glossators, 74 gluttony (gula), 71, 79 Goclenius, Rodolphus the Elder, 140 Gombrich, Ernst Hans, 133, 154 Gontier, Pierre, 31–2, 36, 89, 138 Gonzalez Alcantud, José Antonio, 143, 144 gossip, 95 Goulemot, Jean-Marie, 141 grace, 95 Gratian, 52–3, 74 gravity, 77, 104 Grazia, Sebastian de, see De Grazia Grebe, Paul, 155 Greenfield, Kent R., 148 Gregory I, the Great, Saint, pope, 71 Gregory IX (Ugolino, Count of Segni), pope, 75, 79, 146 Grenaille, François de, Les plaisirs des dames, 93–4, 149 Groenendijk, Leendert F., 143 Gualazzini, Ugo, 145, 146 Guarino da Verona, 28, 29 Guazzo, Stefano, 107, 151 Guerzoni, Guido, 154, 155 Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, 97, 149 Guillaume-Alonso, Araceli, 143 Guttmann, Allen, 8, 134 gymnastics, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 Habsburgs, 28, 123 Hargreaves, John, 152 Hazard, Paul, 152 health see illness; literate, advice for; medicine Heereboord, Adriaan, 63, 140 hell, mouth of, 56, 57 Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I of England, 93 Henry II, King of France, 25 Henry III, King of France and Poland, 28, 99 Henry IV, King of France, 30

180 Index Hespanha, António Manuel, 145 Hess, Rémi, 138 Heywood, William, 148 Hills, Jeannette, 150 Hindle, Steve, 152 Hippocrates, 35 Hippocratic Corpus, 18 Hirschmann, Gerhard, 149 history conceptions of, 9, 11 social and cultural, 2, 5, 9, 118 histriones, 52, 53, 54, 63, 79, 113 Hoby, Thomas, 150 Holling, Edmond, 22–3, 36, 37, 137, 138 Homer, 59 Homo Ludens (periodical), 120 Horace, 51 horse-riding as exercise, 30, 33, 47, 48 gender connotations, 101 in relation to hunting, 22 social connotations, 89, 92 Hostiensis (Henry of Susa), cardinal, Summa, 75 Houdt, Toon van, 143 housekeeping, 95 Howard, Skiles, 149 Hugh of St Victor, 64 Huguet, Edmond, 155 Huizinga, Johan, 4–6 Homo Ludens, 5–6, 73, 109, 126, 127, 133, 145, 154 Waning of the Middle Ages, The, 4–5, 133 humanism, 13, 18, 19, 23, 29, 42, 100, 122 humoral theory, 15, 18–19, 32, 33, 37, 39, 41 decline of, 37 Hunt, Alan, 87–8, 125, 148, 153 hunting, 16–17, 47, 48–50, 66, 86–7 as allegory of human aggressiveness and servility, 49 attendance as spectators, 108; condemned by Augustine as dangerous, 62 of bears, wolves, wild boars and deer, 87 with birds of prey, 49, 108

by clergymen, 49–50 compared to martial arts, 22, 49 with the crossbow, 22, 50 evolution through time, 49, 86–7 fox, 8, 49 gender connotations, 95, 98 with hounds, 16, 49, 87 as a mechanical art, 64 as a physical exercise, 23, 30, 35, 39, 46, 92, 101 poaching, 50, 86 social connotations, 89, 90, 92 with traps, 50 treatises on, early modern, 50, 92 visual representation, 99 Hutton, Ronald, 119, 134, 146, 153 hygiene, 19–38 Ibn Butlan, 23 ice, pastimes on, 59 iconoclasm, association with gambling, 58 idleness, 14–16, 39, 47, 48, 69, 70, 82, 88 illness, as moral or legal justification for playing and gambling, 60, 75 imagination or fantasy, faculty of the mind, 70 imitation, 34, 109 see also mimesis improvisation vs rule in play, 6, 126 industrialization, 8, 11, 120, 121, 124, 126 innocence, 104 Innocent III (Lotario de’ Conti di Segni), pope, 48, 140 Institut für Spielforschung und Spielpädagogik, 120 insurance, related to gambling, 80 intellectuals, see literate Ioannides, Klitos, 138 iocus, 55, 63, 129–30 Italy, 76–9, 81, 90, 97, 107, 119–20, 125 ius commune, 74 Jacob of Voragine, 13, 135 Jacopo da Cessole, Libellus super ludus scachorum, 113

Index 181 James VI, King of Scotland, and I, of England, 82, 146, 147 Jansenism, 10, 106 Japan, 125 Jaucourt, Louis de, 37 jesters, 47 jeu, 3, 32, 33, 37, 55, 64, 107, 112, 129 jeu de paume, 30, 31, 32 Johann, von Münster, 42, 139 Johannitius (Hunayn ibn Ishaq), 18 Isagoge, 18–19 John, the Evangelist, Saint, 13, 46, 106 John, of Wales (Gallensis, Vallensis), 110–11, 112–13, 151 jokes, 55, 66, 107, 129, 130 jongleurs, 75, 113 Joostens, Paschier, De alea, 41–3, 44, 139 Joubert, Fabienne, 150 joy, 20 as interlocutor in Petrarch’s De remediis, 47–8, 71 in the vocabulary of play, 128, 131 juego, 3, 16, 65–8, 118, 129 juggling, and the vocabulary of play, 129 jumping as exercise, 31, 74, 82, 101 in the vocabulary of play, 128, 129 Justinian, Roman emperor, 74, 80 see also Corpus iuris civilis Justus, Pascasius, see Joostens, Paschier Kant, Immanuel, 42, 139 Kettner, Johann Daniel, 85–6, 147 Kiernan, Victor G., 147 Kilwardby, Robert, 64 Klibansky, Raymond, 136 knowledge and the control of passions, 42 four kinds of human, 64 intellectual and sensory, and curiosity, 61–2 as source of delight, 131 knucklebones, 100 Kraye, Jill, 148 Kümmel, Werner Friedrich, 138

laetitia, inepta, 71 Lafargue, Paul, Le droit à la paresse, 11, 14, 134 languages English, 130 German, 130 Latin, 30, 31, 128–9 Romance (French, Italian, Spanish), 32, 128, 130 teaching of foreign, 91–2 La Rocca, Patrizia, 149 laughter in Ecclesiastes (3: 4), 68 medical assessment, 35, 101 moral assessment, 51, 53, 76, 114 and the vocabulary of play, 129, 130 Lauremberg, Petrus, 136 law, 5, 73–88, 121 canon (ecclesiastical), 52–3, 74, 76, 85; see also Corpus of Canon Law civil (Roman), 59, 60, 76, 81, 86, 87, 115; publications of collected works, 78, 79, 80; see also Corpus iuris civilis divine, 85 feudal, 74, 86, 87 Germanic, in Northern France, 86 literature de ludo, 76–81 natural, 85, 87 sumptuary, 87–8, 125 learning, as exercise for the mind, 40 Lecercle, François, 151 Le Goff, Jacques, 70, 144 Leicester University, 7 Leiden University, 5 leisure, loisirs, 7, 50, 132 and social hierarchy, 12, 17, 31, 35, 39, 50, 86–8, 89–93, 98, 99, 100, 107, 111, 127 see also recreation leisure classes, 3, 16, 50, 91 Lencioni Novelli, Roberta, 151 Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici), pope, 17 Leonardo da Brescia, 25 Leonardo da Vinci, 131 lettres de rémission, 118 Levine, Laura, 96, 149

182 Index Leys (Lessius), Lenaert, 143 Lhôte, Jean-Marie, 153 libraries, 126 life active vs contemplative, 14, 50 amendment of, 59 quest for long, 31, 38 sedentary, 36, 43 solitary, as unhealthy, 39 urban and/or rural, 15, 16, 51 Ligorio, Pirro, 25, 28, 95 literary magazines, 61 literate, advice for the medical, 23, 29, 36, 37, 59 moral and legal, 79, 89 literature as leisure, 14, 121, 124 as source, 3 see also drama; poetry Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 105, 106 locus amoenus, 126 London, 10, 68 Louis XIII, King of France, 98 Louis XIV, King of France, 104 love, 15, 92, 126, 131 hunting a metaphor for, 98 compared to play, 42 parental, 104 see also courting; sex Lucian, 34 Lucifer, inventor of ludus, 55 lucrum, turpe, 75 Ludica (periodical), 120 ludus, ludere, 3, 6, 28, 41, 52, 54, 55, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 74, 76, 78, 79, 81, 85, 86, 96, 101, 110, 111, 112, 121, 128–9 Luque Faxardo, Francisco de, 136 lusus, 74, 129 Luther, Martin, 17 Lutheranism, see religion, Protestant luxury, 88 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, 92 madness consequence of play, 58 mentally ill unsuited to dance, 85–6

maglio, see croquet Maio, Giuniano, 148 Major, John M., 149 Malvezzi, Troilo, De sortibus, 79, 146 Mandell, Richard, 8, 134 Mann, Nicholas, 140 manners, 30, 124 reformation of, 117 Manson, Michel, 118, 150, 151, 152 Marchetti, Valerio, 151 Marcuse, Herbert, 134 Marfany, Joan-Lluís, 121 Margolin, Jean-Claude, 118, 152 Mariana, Juan de, Tratado contra los juegos públicos, 67–8, 144 Martial, 51 martial arts, 33, 35, 37, 63, 75, 79, 80, 82, 92 archery, 59, 82, 101, 123; early Tudor promotion of, 88 chess related to, 111 fencing, 43, 44, 86, 92, 101 jousting, 75 tournaments, 49, 62, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80–1, 86 Marx, Karl, 11, 117 masking, 54, 66, 78 suspension of social identity, 89 Matthaeus, Johannes, 136 May-games, 40, 82 Maynwaring, Everard, 41, 139 McGrath, Elizabeth, 142 McIntosh, Peter C., 137 Medici family, 150 medicine, 14, 15, 18–45, 47, 110, 122 ancient Greek, 20 Arabic, 18 curative (therapeutics), 39–41, 50 learned and popular, 19 preventive (hygiene), 19–38 Mehl, Jean-Michel, Les jeux au royaume de France, 119, 152 Meisner, Balthasar, 72, 144–5 melancholy, 15, 16–17, 20, 39–41 Mendez, Christoval, Libro del exercicio corporal, 22, 137 Mercuriale, Girolamo, De arte gymnastica, 24–5, 26, 27, 137 Mercury (god), 42

Index 183 Meursius (Johannes van Meurs), 60, 143 Michaud-Quantin, Pierre, 141 Mikkeli, Heikki, 136, 138 Mikkola, Eino, 140 Milin, Gaël, 140 military games and exercises, see martial arts mimesis, as element of play, 6, 109 mirrors, 93 mirth, 41, 53 misrule, 3 modernization, 71 modesty, 53, 55, 61, 76 Molinié-Bertrand, Annie, 143 monasticism, 13, 15–16, 85 monetary economy, late medieval, 76 Monter, William, 141 Monteux, Jérôme de, 29–30, 37, 136, 137 Months, 100 moral assessment of recreation, 33, 36, 43–5, 46–72, 73–4, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 100, 104 treatises, 55, 56–60, 65–8, 93–4, 106, 114, 121 Mori, Ascanio de’, Giuoco piacevole, 107, 151 morra, 59 Moses, 142 movement animal and human compared, 94 gender stereotypes, 96 (motion) in medical thought and practice, 19, 20, 43–5 as meaning of Spiel, 130 Muchembled, Robert, 152 Muir, Edward, 153 Mulcaster, Richard, Positions, 29, 101, 137, 150 Mulchahey, M. Michèle, 135, 141 Murray, A., 144 music, 3, 16, 25, 34, 40, 47, 64, 89, 125, 126 concerts, 93 and enthusiasm, 34 instrumental (playing), 31, 35, 46, 82, 152; drums and wind

instruments unsuited to women, 97; (listening) 100 opera, 64 religious, 78 suitable for intellectuals, 59 theatrical, 7, 67 as therapy, 34, 35, 40 and the vocabulary of play, 129, 130 see also singing Naerebout, Frits Gerard, 133 nature vs artifice, 94 negotium, 14 neo-Platonism, 34, 37, 96, 101 Netherlands, 36, 59, 99, 101, 105 Nevile, Jennifer, 150 Nitschke, August, 9, 134 nobility, 93 nonnaturals (res non naturales), 19–20 see also food; movement; passions; rest Nordera, Marina, 150 Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 116–17, 152 Nuremberg customs and regulations concerning dancing, 93 laws against gambling, 42 Nuti, Andrea, 155 Nutton, Vivian, 137 Olson, Glending, 64, 135, 136, 141, 143 Olympic games ancient, 60, 109 modern, 9, 120 Ortalli, Gherardo, 81, 146 Ostia, 17 otium, 14, 15, 50, 121 Otten, Hermannus ab, 140, 143 Ottonelli, Giovanni Domenigo, 58, 142 Overfield, James H., 138 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 96 pagan, prohibitions of games, 56 Page, Christopher, 141 pageants, 40, 85

184 Index paidia, 6 Palamedes, 59 pallacorda, 22 pallamaglio, see croquet Palmer, Richard, 136 Panofsky, Erwin, 136 Pantoja de Aiala, Pedro, 80, 146 Panzer, Marianne, 147 Papal States, 29 Paracelsians, 38 Paris University, 52–4 parlour games, 97, 107, 126 party (social gathering), as a meaning of intrattenimento, 131 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 130 passion plays, 62 passions, and human health, 16, 19, 20, 41–2, 64 see also joy Past and Present, 121 pastimes, 2, 64, 131 paume, see jeu Peasants’ War, German (1524–25), 86 pelota, 22 Peltonen, Markku, 147 Penelope, 96 performance, in the vocabulary of play, 128, 131, 132 performing arts, see audience; dance; drama; music Perkins, William, 39, 143 Peter Lombard, Sentences, 52–3 Peter Martyr (Pietro Martire Vermigli), 60–1, 72, 81, 143, 144 Petite dyablerie dont Lucifer est le chef, La (Bernardino da Siena), 56, 57, 142 Petrarca, Francesco, see Petrarch Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies against Both Kinds of Fortune), 47–8, 49, 71, 93, 94, 140, 149 Invectivae contra medicum (Invectives against a Physician), 47 Philip II, King of Spain and Portugal, 51 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, 150

Philistines, 60 Phillips, Henry, 141, 142, 143, 151, 155 Philothée/Philotheus, 97 physical education, see exercise; gymnastics; play in/and education Platina, 148 Plato, 29, 37, 50, 138 play, 5, 14, 64, 129, 130, 132 historiography of, 118–20 in/and education, 29, 92, 98, 100–1, 105–6, 122, 124, 126 and the sacred, 6, 133–4 philosophical interpretations, 5 pleasure, plaisirs, 8, 10, 11, 12, 66, 67, 72, 87, 93–4, 95, 108, 126, 131, 132 re-appreciation by Valla, 71 see also delight pleasure gardens, 124 Plemp, Vopiscus Fortunatus, 36, 37, 89, 138, 148 Plumb, J.H., 105–6, 151, 153 Plutarch, On the Education of Children, 29, 137 poetry, 5, 25, 34 Pontremoli, Alessandro, 149 popular culture and entertainments, 79, 82–3, 89, 118, 120, 125 reform/regulation of, 85, 87, 88 withrawal of élite from, 89, 90, 105 Porter, Roy, 136, 153 possibility, as original meaning of Old French losir, 132 posture, 35, 96, 97 potlach, 125 praying as a meaning of the vocabulary of play, 129 as an occupation for women, 95 printing press, 122, 125 prostitution, 75 protectionism, 87, 88 Protestantism see religion proverbs, 19, 91, 104 Prynne, William, Histrio-Mastix, 45, 56, 68–9, 96, 142, 144, 149 Puritanism, 10, 39, 108

Index 185 Quazza, Romolo, 137 Quercetanus, see Duchesne, Joseph Rabanus Maurus, 16 Rahner, Hugo, 140 Ranzow, Heinrich, 22, 23, 38, 137 Rao, Cesare, Invective against players, 12, 104, 135, 150 Raymond of Peñafort, Saint, 75 reading as exercise for the voice, 101 as a form of recreation, 3, 7, 70, 99, 100, 125 reason, and the passions, 42, 47–8 Rebhorn, Wayne A., 148 recreation, 11, 12, 130, 132 classifications, 6, 7–8, 63, 66, 108–15 definitions, 1, 4 human need, 10–14, 43, 52, 117, 125 moderate use, 13–14, 39–40, 46, 48, 50–1, 114, 124 motives, 3, 4, 18, 49, 50, 53, 66, 67, 75, 112, 154 spiritual, 41, 113, 114 Reformation see religion refreshment, as a meaning of the vocabulary of recreation, 129 regimen of health, or diet, 19, 21, 31, 32 religion, Christian, and recreation Catholic, 55, 56–8, 65, 66–8, 72, 106 pre-Reformation, 52–4, 55–6, 61–2, 65–6, 112, 114 Protestant, 30, 42, 58–61, 68–70, 72, 84, 85, 88, 93, 96, 117 see also Jansenism; Puritanism; religious orders religious orders Augustinians, 56 Carmelites, 80 Dominicans, 53, 54, 62, 63, 64, 66, 75, 82, 91, 113 Franciscans, 53, 66, 76, 110, 113 Jesuits, 58, 67, 124 see also monasticism

Renaissance, 2–3, 18, 19, 28, 29, 38, 71, 126 representatio, 63 repression, 81, 82, 117 rest, 8, 14, 83, 132 as a nonnatural, 19, 20, 23, 30 as scope of recreation, 12, 43–5, 68, 76, 112 two kinds, according to Petrarch, 48 Riccò, Laura, 151 Richard of Middleton, 76 riddles, 60 ring-a-roses, 25 Ringhieri, Innocenzio, 107, 151 ritual, 3, 8, 88, 119, 124, 127, 129 rites of passage, 90 see also battles, ritual and under other individual practices Rizzi, Alessandra, 142, 146, 153 Rocca, Angelo, 56–8, 142 Rogers, M., 133 Rojek, Chris, 134, 140 Rolando of Cremona, Summa, 53, 141 Rome ancient, 14–15 Testaccio games, 79 Roodenburg, Herman, 152 Rosate see Alberico rough music, 3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 125 Rühl, J. K., 144 Rust, Frances, 149 Sabbatarianism and Sunday observance, 10, 16, 82, 83–4, 85, 108, 118 saint and archer, see exemplum saints, see under individual names saints, devotion to, 90 Salernitan Rule for Health (Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum), 19 salons, 93, 98, 107, 126 saltatoria, 31 Salvadori, Philippe, 140, 147, 148, 150 Samson, 60 Sánchez Herrero, José, 135 Sanjust, Maria Giovanna, 151

186

Index

Sauzet, Robert, 141 Saxl, Fritz, 136 Scaino, Antonio, 110, 151 scandal, 50 Schama, Simon, 104, 150 Schnitzler, Norbert, 134 scholasticism, 53, 55, 62, 76, 93 scholé vs ascholia, 50 school, as a meaning of ludus, 28, 101, 128 schools, English public, 29 Schottus, Franciscus, Itinerary to Italy, 40 Schreiner, Klaus, 134 Scientific Revolution, 18 seduction, and the vocabulary of recreation, 131 Semerano, Giovanni, 128, 155, 156 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus the Younger, 13, 68, 76 senses, the, in the cure of melancholy, 40 sermons, 13–14, 15, 55–6, 84, 96, 113, 121 servants, 70 Settevecchi, Ludovico, 25 Settia, Aldo A., 148 sex as double meaning of terms, 128, 129, 132 as evil, 41–2 as recreation, 17, 107 in theatrical performances, 62, 114 see also love; prostitution Shahar, Shulamith, 151 Silvestro (Mazzolini) da Prierio, Summa Sylvestrina, 54, 62 similes and metaphors concerning recreation, 12–13, 52, 77, 88, 135 simony, 75 singing, as exercise or recreation, 23, 24, 40, 46, 82, 96, 98, 101 sins and vices, 14, 53–4, 56, 58, 62, 63, 67, 77, 78, 111, 131 as root of play, 10, 11 sleep excessive (moral criticism), 69 as recreation, 47

sloth, 15–16, 48, 69 smells, pleasant, 47 Smithfield Decretals, 122 smoking tobacco, relation to health, 32, 40 snowballs, 32 Sobrinho, João, On Commutative Justice, 80, 146 sociability, 7, 40, 51, 70, 82, 92, 95, 98, 107, 124, 127, 132 social theory, 6–9, 11 Socrates, 33, 76 solace, 131, 132 Sorel, Charles, La maison des jeux, 107, 112, 126, 151, 152, 154 Souter, Daniel, Palamedes, 40, 59–60, 89, 143 Sozzini, Mariano the Elder, 78, 79, 145 space, human perception of, 9 Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer, 155 Spain, 15, 65–8, 80, 84, 118–19 passion for gambling, 41 spas, 125 Spaß, spasso, 58, 131–2 speech as exercise, 36, 101 vs acts dichotomy, 63 Spiel, 129, 130 spinning, 95, 100 spirits, in Galenic medicine, 34, 36 sports, 131, 132 boxing, 25, 30, 74 distinguished from exercise in general, 70 emergence of modern, 8–9, 29, 124, 125, 131 historiography, 8, 120 weightlifting, 25 wrestling, 23, 25, 29–30, 48, 74, 77, 101 Stella, Jacques, Les jeux et plaisirs de l’enfance, 104, 105, 123, 150 Stocks, J. L., 140 stoicism, 42, 48 story telling, 16 Strong, Roy, 85, 147 Sunday observance, see Sabbatarianism

Index 187 superstitions, 55, 95 svago, 132 swearing, 58 swimming, 25, 30, 101 Sylvius, Jacobus, 139 symbolism, in Renaissance festivals, 85 Tabiensis, Ioannes, see Cagnazzo Tacuini sanitatis, 23, 24 Taddei, Ilaria, 146 Taffin, Jean the Elder, 59, 142, 143 talking, see conversation; speech Tasso, Torquato, 28 Il Gonzaga secondo, 108–10, 126, 151, 154 Tatarkiewicz, Wladislaw, 143 taverns and alehouses, 40, 107 as the temple of play, 55 Taviani, Ferdinando, 142 temperaments, in humoral medicine, 19, 35, 41 Ten Commandments, transgressed by players, 66 tennis, 22, 37, 46, 92, 108, 123, 129 Tenture de la Vie Seigneuriale, La, 99–100 Tertullian, 67 theatres, 64, 67, 69, 126 theatrica, 64, 108, 110 theology, see religion; moral assessment of recreation Thesiger, Sarah, 149 Thiers, Jean Baptiste, Traité des jeux et divertissemens, 10–11, 12, 43, 54–5, 111, 117, 134, 139, 141, 152 Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, see Aquinas Thomas, Johannes, 80–1, 146 Thomas, Keith, 48, 140 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 86, 147 Tillyard, Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall, 149 time of day, of year, or of human life, as relevant to human activities, 15, 20, 24, 49, 69, 76, 82; see also Sabbatarianism

definitions, conceptions and perceptions of, 28, 69, 70–1, 127 free, spare, see leisure; work killing, 110, 131 in the meaning of Old French losir, 132 waste or misuse, 14, 16, 68–70, 71, 88, 131 tipcat, 75 Tiresias, 96 tobacco smoking, relation to health, 32, 40 Toner, Jerry Peter, Leisure and Ancient Rome, 2, 133, 146 tournaments, see martial arts toys and play-things, 104, 106, 118, 129 catapults, 31, 32 dolls, 104 hobby-horses, 82 hoops, 36, 89, 105 skittles, 25, 37, 101 spinning tops, 25, 32, 101 swings, 25, 26, 123 toy shops, 106 traditions, invention of, 4 Traffichetti, Bartolomeo, 41, 139 tragedy, 7–8 Traité des danses (Daneau), 59, 84 travelling for leisure, 7, 40, 92, 125 Trent Castle, frescoes, 100 tristitia, 15 Trotti, Ugo, De ludo, 28, 76–8, 86, 112, 145 Ulmann, Jacques, 137 universities, 51, 110 see also under individual places USA, 8 utopias, 11 vacations, 120, 125 Vagenheim, Ginette, 137 Valenzuela, 146 Valla, Lorenzo, 71 Vallerani, Massimo, 145, 146, 153 Vallin, Pierre, 143 Vanden Branden, Jean-Pierre, 150

188 Index Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 50 Vecchio, Silvana, 136, 143, 145 Venice carnival, 90, 118 war of the fists, 82–3, 90–1 Verdon, Jean, 151 Vergil, 42 Vermigli, Pietro Martire, see Peter Martyr vertigo, 31 Vickers, Brian, 14, 120–1, 127, 135, 153 Vignate, Ambrogio da, 78 Villa Adriana, Tivoli, 28 Villa Borromeo, Milan, 123 Villalón, Cristóbal de, 51–2 villeggiatura, 17, 125 virtus, 75 violence, 104 association with gambling, 58 in sports and drama, 48, 62, 66, 75, 77, 86, 91, 114 vita activa and vita contemplativa, 14 Vitae Patrum, 13 vocabulary of recreation, European, 107, 122, 128–32 see also languages and under individual terms Voetius (Gijsbert Voet), 143 Vogler, Valentin Heinrich, 36, 138 voluptas, 71, 95 Vuilleumier, Henri, 144

as a meaning of ‘andare a spasso’, 131–2 solitary or in company, 70 war, 5, 77, 92, 104, 109 Watanabe O’Kelly, Helen, 147 wealth (moral and legal implications), 47, 70, 87–8 Wear, Andrew, 136 Weber, Max, theory of modernization, 71, 144 Wenzel, Siegfried, 136 Wetzel, Ingrid, 149 William of Auvergne, 16 wisdom, see reason witchcraft, Christian interpretation, 56, 142 Wittenberg University, 72, 85 women, see gender work and pleasure, 10–12 vs leisure/play/dance dichotomy, 6, 7–8, 11, 15, 16, 68, 83–4, 92, 100, 106, 108, 121, 126, 127, 132 Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques, 134

Yates, Frances Amelia, 148, 150 yin and yang, 15 youth, 105

wakes, 40, 82 Walker, Daniel Pickering, 138 walking, as exercise or recreation, 22, 29, 31, 35–6, 40, 46, 93, 99, 101

Zannoni, Giuliana, 135 Zdekauer, Ludovico, 145, 146 Zerbini, Maurizio, 139 Zocchi, Giuseppe, Giochi, 123 Zur Lippe, Rudolf, 9, 134

Xenophon Banquet, 33, 138 on hunting, 23

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