Recreation in the Renaissance

The Medical Discourse 21
tion leisure, despite the fact that very similar gestures may be involved
in the two human activities. This defining delimitation of the meaning
of exercise may help in understanding why the discussion of sports and
pastimes was not only common in medical literature on the preservation
of health, but also often constituted the main subject of its ‘motion
and rest’ section.
Within the context of an integrated health regime which concentrated
on food (most regimens of health essentially consist of an
annotated list of foodstuffs), physicians discussed exercise mainly by
assessing its relation to nutrition. Physical effort should not disturb
digestion: it had therefore to be made before – or considerably after –
mealtimes. Furthermore, moderation was recommended: both excessive
effort and prolonged inactivity were regarded as harmful to the human
body. It was considered more beneficial to exercise in the open air, rather
than in an enclosed environment; and to do so when the weather
was clement (both as an indication of the appropriate time of day and
of the most convenient times of year). Writers of hygiene classified
exercise with respect to medically significant categories, such as the
speed and intensity of movement involved. With regard to speed, a
seventeenth-century treatise published in Germany mentioned dance
and ball games as examples of quickness, walking and fishing for
slowness. 5 In his frequently reprinted Castel of Helthe (c. 1536), the
humanist and diplomat Thomas Elyot also gave the ‘daunsynge of galyardes’
and ‘foteball playe’ as examples of ‘vehement exercise’: in both
cases the properties of force and speed, elsewhere separated, were
united. 6 There were some exercises in which the body achieved activity
under its own momentum, and others in which the body was either
moved or carried. Swinging or travelling by means of transport – as
occurs in a cradle, a coach or a boat – featured as borderline cases,
but were ordinarily judged as moderate, passive exercise (‘agitation’),
befitting women, children and the elderly.
As well as to different genders and age groups, there were some sorts
of exercise that were more appropriate to particular classes of people
according to varying temperaments and other conditions; others were
commended for their benefit to a specific part of the body (for instance,
dancing and running for their benefit to the feet). 7 The observation that
different parts of the body are involved in each sort of exercise formed
the background for an evaluation of specific pastimes. It was not rare
for medical writers to express their personal orientations as to which
type of sports and pastimes were commendable or not; the choice could
include the recommendation of one particular activity as the most