Recreation in the Renaissance

Varieties of Pastimes 111
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.