Recreation in the Renaissance

The Need for Recreation 17
discourse, the critique of the passion for gambling and its obvious financial
consequences can be taken for granted, the author’s insistence on
the exaggerated love for hunting as a common problem of the European
aristocracy is worth recording. Its presentation is enriched by a
series of historical examples; one of the targets of criticism is ‘Leo
decimus, that hunting Pope’ (Giovanni de’ Medici, Pope 1513–21, the
Pope who excommunicated Martin Luther), who would spend months
hawking and hunting in his country villa at Ostia, neglecting all his
duties. Furthermore, ‘some men are consumed by mad fantasticall
buildings, by making Galleries, Cloisters, Terraces, Walkes, Orchards,
Gardens, Pooles, Rillets, Bowers, and such places of pleasure’. Both the
passions for hunting and for leisure architecture are commented on as
appropriate to some great men, unsuitable to others; the fault, in this
case, would seem to derive from the lack of understanding of the occupations
which are befitting an individual and his status. The list of
immoderate pleasures people indulge in is completed by (excessive love
for) ‘Wine and women’. 19 When dealing, in the second partition, with
the cure of melancholy, Burton also surveys ‘exercise rectified of body
and minde’, in terms that we will revisit towards the end of the next
chapter.
The medical discourse on play, however, covered a much wider territory
than the specific case of the melancholic. The next chapter will aim
to introduce this specific cultural perspective, under which the social
practices of recreation were understood by contemporaries; moreover,
that will also provide the grounds for presenting Burton’s therapeutics
in its appropriate context.