Recreation in the Renaissance

122 Recreation in the Renaissance
humanist ideal of education, in which a reappraisal of the value of play
had a significant role – had also attracted systematic attention on the
part of physicians.
The amount of publications that had gone through the printing press
by the mid-eighteenth century was sufficient to offer the scope for the
compilation of the first subject bibliography, Heinrich Jonathan
Clodius’s Bibliotheca lusoria (1761). Its entries and their diachronic distribution
of date of publication contribute to make sense of both the
chronological limits that have been adopted for the subtitle of this
book. On the one hand, the invention of the printing press offers a powerful
trampoline for the circulation of writing on a topic that had its
own reasons for attracting increasing attention, but is given by the new
medium the chance of reaching a much wider public than it would have
done otherwise. On the other hand, the fact that a substantial amount
of entries are filled by material published over the last fifty years seems
to suggest not solely a better memory for most recent items, or a growth
in general publishing, but rather a more specific new level of attention
for the subject that characterized the early eighteenth century; this produced
a variety of different approaches, which would be better understood
in the context of the developments of the contemporary
commercial society and of the culture of the Enlightenment, rather than
as a mere prosecution of the tradition from which they undoubtedly
derive. 15
Throughout the period, the aforementioned cultural attitudes were
matched by a rich and varying vocabulary (see Appendix, below) and by
the increased attention that was paid to leisure activities in the visual
arts. Here too some chronological milestones can help in identifying significant
cultural trends. In a visual tradition such as that of European
medieval and Renaissance art, where religious subjects played such a predominant
role, the representation of a profane topic like play is not the
most common. To the era immediately preceding the one here under
investigation belongs a tradition of manuscript books, where marginal
drawings, not necessarily related to the written text, could represent a
selection of pastimes. One of the best known and more often reproduced
is the series drawn at the bottom of the pages of a fourteenth-century
English manuscript preserved at the British Library (Royal 10 E. iv), containing
the Smithfield Decretals, where whipping the top, ninepins, ball
and other throwing games are depicted. Both in the style of the (male)
figures and in the choice of games, the set has an archaic look clearly
reflecting its age and predating the Renaissance development of
European social life and pictorial conventions. The games appear mixed