and a development of the traditional view of play as a safety-valve, offering ‘the liberating excitement of a struggle involving physical exertion and skill, while limiting to a minimum the chance that anyone will get seriously hurt’.27 The authors were well aware of the paradox of presenting sport as both a form of self-control and a means of temporary escape from it in the ‘quest for excitement’. Their book was a milestone in making play a respectable topic for academics to study.
In the 2020s, it has become difficult to imagine how late that respectability was in coming. In 1983, for instance, an Italian literary historian could still complain that the theme of comic poetry in the Italian Renaissance was still neglected – though her own book did much to remedy this neglect.28 By this time, the subject of play was moving from the margin of scholarly concerns towards the centre, in sociology and anthropology as well as in history.
An early example of the move was a collective study of games in the Renaissance – first a conference and then a book – organized by Philippe Ariès, a French scholar who made his name with a history of childhood. In the introduction to the book, Ariès noted that topics that historians used to dismiss as ‘frivolous’ had become respectable, following the rise of interest in the history of forms of solidarity and sociability.29 A few years earlier, a team of French scholars had studied literary representations of the beffa.30
Many valuable specialized studies have been published since the 1980s. The subject has ‘exploded’ in the sense not only of expansion but also of fragmentation, linked to the rise and the institutionalization of new fields of study such as the history of sport and the history of the dance, marked by the foundation of societies, committees, book series and journals such as the International Journal for the History of Sport (1984– ) and Studies in Dance History (1988– ). Economic and social historians, in Italy and elsewhere, also discovered the history of leisure, the subject of a major conference in Prato in 1992.31 The Benetton Foundation has been subsidizing studies of games since 1987, supporting prizes, books and the journal Ludica (1995– ).32 Social and cultural historians have joined historians of art and literature in this collective enterprise, organized by Gherardo Ortalli and others.33
So many studies of different forms of play in Renaissance Italy have been published in the last thirty or forty years that there is not space to mention them all here. The suggestions for ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this book are confined to studies available in English, such as Alessandro Arcangeli on dancing, Robert Davis on the ‘fist wars’, Robert Henke on the commedia dell’arte, George McClure on parlour games, and Gherardo Ortalli on games of chance.
Many other important contributions are accessible to readers of Italian, French or German. Wordplay, satire and parody have been analysed by a team of Italian scholars, including Antonio Corsaro, Silvia Longhi and Paolo Procaccioli. In the case of Carnival, the French historian Martine Boiteux has written on Rome, and the Italian anthropologist Domenico Scafoglio on Naples. The German art historian Horst Bredekamp has studied football in Florence, and the Italian historian Alessandra Rizzi has written on Italian games in the late Middle Ages.34
These contributions have more to say than their predecessors about the social and cultural contexts for different forms of play. Given the increasing number of histories of emotions, a promising direction for future research, inspired by Norbert Elias on ‘the quest for excitement’, might be the emotions triggered by play, from joy to anger – the anger of losers at a game of dice, for instance, or the anger of the victims of practical jokes. Mock-fighting often turned into serious fighting, as we shall see. Competition in play offered many occasions of anger, as latent aggression rose to the surface.
What is still lacking is an overview that links different specialisms. Such an overview is all the more necessary because innovations in one branch of play were sometimes inspired by innovations in another. It becomes easier to understand each genre or medium of play when its connections with other genres and media are viewed as part of a bigger picture. This essay offers a sketch for such a picture.
1 1. On Bronzino, Deborah Parker, ‘Toward a Reading of Bronzino’s Burlesque Poetry’, Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997), 1011–44; on Giulio Romano, Paul Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art (Columbia, MO, 1978), 75–100, 132–8; on Arcimboldo, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History and Still-Life Painting (Chicago, IL, 2010); on Michelangelo, Barolsky, Infinite Jest, 51–74, and Antonio Corsaro, ‘Michelangelo, il comico e la malinconia’, in La regola e la licenza: studi sulla poesia satirica e burlesca fra cinque e seicento (Rome, 1999), 115–33.
2 2. Ian Petru Culianu, Iocari serio: scienza e arte nel pensiero del Rinascimento (2003: Italian translation, Turin, 2017); Paula Findlen’s ‘Galileo’s Laughter: Knowledge and Play in the Renaissance’ remains unpublished.
3 3. Weston La Barre, Shadow of Childhood (Norman, OK, 1991), 109; Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue (Cambridge, 1992).
4 4. Jacques Le Goff, ‘Le rire médiéval entre la cour et la place publique’, in Pauvres et riches (Warsaw, 1992), 307–11; Le Goff, ‘Une enquête sur le rire’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52 (1997), 449–55; Paul Hardwick (ed.) The Playful Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2010).
5 5. On the possible contribution of theorists to the study of early modern play, Bret Rothstein, ‘Early Modern Play: Three Perspectives’, Renaissance Quarterly 71 (2018), 1036–46. The perspectives are those of Johan Huizinga, Bernard Suits and Eugen Fink.
6 6. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938: English translation, London, 1970), 26–30.
7 7. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (1958: English translation, London, 1962).
8 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1929: English translation, Manchester, 1984), 106–9, 32–6, 124, 131.
9 9. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 27.
10 10. Jean Toscan, Le carnaval du langage, 5 vols. (Lille, 1981), 1169–80.
11 11. Andrea Nuti, Ludus e iocus: percorsi di ludicità nella lingua Latina (Treviso, 1998); Andreas Hermann Fischer, ‘Ludus/iocus/lusus: Valla, Bruni und humanistische Wortspielen’, in Spielen und Philosophieren zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2016), 75–9.
12 12. Patricia M. Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago, IL, 1995). Scipione Bargagli wrote about Carnival games filling ‘tedious nights’ (quoted in Laura Riccò, Giuoco e teatro nelle veglie di Siena (Rome, 1993), 118.
13 13. Girolamo Cardano, De ludo aleae (c. 1564: English translation, The Book on Games of Chance, New York, 1961); Scipione Bargagli, Dialogo dei Giuochi (1572: ed. Patrizia Ermini, Siena, 1982); Valerio Marchetti, ‘Recherches sur le “Dialogo dei Giuochi”’, in Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds.) Les jeux à la Renaissance (Paris, 1982), 163–83; Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica (Venice, 1573). Cf. Alessandro Arcangeli and Vivian Nutton (eds.) Girolamo Mercuriale (Florence, 2007).
14 14. Niccola Villani, Ragionamento dello Academico Aldeano sopra la poesia giocosa de’ greci, de latini, e da toscani (Venice, 1634).
15 15. Ludovico Muratori, Antiquitates italicae medii aevi (Milan, 1739) dissertation 29; Girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, 2nd edn, vol. VII (Modena, 1791), 140.
16 16. Isaac D’Israeli (1823) ‘Of the ridiculous titles assumed by the Italian academies’, Curiosities of Literature, 2nd series (1823: London, 1866 edn), 355–9.
17 17. John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (London 1875–86), vol. II, The Revival of Learning, 238.
18 18. Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860: English translation, London, 1944), 93–103.
19 19. Benedetto Croce, ‘Poesia giocosa’, in Opere, vol. XXXIX (Bari, 1941), 78–84; Thomas F. Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, CT, 1920), ch. 6.
20 20. William Heywood, Palio