Recreation in the Renaissance

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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.
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