Recreation in the Renaissance

The overall thesis of Arcangeli's book is that during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a distinctive leisure culture emerged in Europe which had obvious connections with earlier and later developments, but was nonetheless distinguishable from both. In his introduction the author offers a survey of the study of the idea of play as a significant factor in human affairs. He starts from the landmark anthropological enquiry into the topic of play, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1933), which discerned a ‘play element’ in fields as diverse as law, war, poetry, and art. He then discusses a number of theorists who have developed Huizinga's work: Robert Callois’ enlargement of Huizinga's notion of play (through the categories of competition, chance, mimesis and vertigo), which offered an ambitious sociological approach to human behaviour; Jacques Hermann's philosophical critique of the relation between play and culture as stated by both Huizinga and Callois as well as by the linguist Émile Benvéniste; and finally the sociological theories of Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (Quest for Excitement), which introduced the important distinction between leisure activities and the broader notion of spare time. Reviewing the scholarship that has appeared subsequent to the important 1980 conference at Tours on the subject (Les Jeux à la Renaissance), Arcangeli concludes with the work of Peter Burke (The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe, 1995). Burke argued against the orthodox historiographical position that the historical emergence of leisure was linked to the fundamental economic changes brought about by industrial capitalism and showed that between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries at least the upper strata of the population placed increasingly higher value on the full spectrum of leisure activities

Fifteenth · Historiography · Legend · Martial Arts: Techniques, Psychology, and Education · Physical education and sports games research · Sociology and Norbert Elias

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  Open Access•Juan Escourido•Araucaria•2021

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