Recreation in the Renaissance

Conclusion 117
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-