Recreation in the Renaissance

36 Recreation in the Renaissance
has identified in our body; but also because our spirit is heavenly,
the only way it can move is by rolling, and, being connected
(proportionné) with the element of which the stars are made, it must
imitate their route and do in our limbs as the intelligences do in
the sky. 31
As for where to go, the ideal place should be well equipped with singing
birds, flowing streams, trees and flowers. Although, on the whole,
Bicaise’s book may look almost unique in its focus on exercise and
somehow idiosyncratic in the opinions it expresses, it offers a selection
of topics that is highly representative of the cultural and social orientations
predominant at the time.
Amor et alea
If from France we move north to the southern Low Countries, one year
after Bicaise yet another treatise on the preservation of the health of
the literate (Lat. togati) sees its way through the press. The author of
the 1670 publication was Vopiscus Fortunatus Plemp of Amsterdam
(1601–71), a professor of medicine at Leuven. While obviously everyone
recommended exercise as an antidote to the drawbacks of a sedentary
life, Plemp pays more attention than average to listing and
describing the different types of exercise. They include some professionally
orientated activities, such as practising speech (pronunciatio);
but also walking, ball games (with reference to the Italian game of pallamaglio),
dancing, being transported in various ways, throwing sports,
and end with the game of bowling a hoop (Lat. circilasia; ‘very popular
among us Netherlanders, and it is called reepen, by the Dutch hoepen’). 32
Similar practices were also referred to a couple of years earlier by the
German physician Valentin Heinrich Vogler (1622–77), professor of
medicine at Frankfurt an der Oder, although in a context where antiquarian
references were still predominant. Vogler was sometimes more
explicit in indicating the negative effects produced by playing, as in the
case of games consisting in hitting a ball towards a target (‘lusus metatorius
noster’), in which the parts of the human body are unevenly
engaged, and people tend to tire both their arms and their backs to
excess. 33 As Gontier (and Holling), Vogler also attacked as unhealthy the
volta, the quick Renaissance dance that raised both the bodies of women
and the eyebrows of moralists. 34
The century-and-a-half which we roughly surveyed – from midsixteenth
to late seventeenth – sees the most characteristic develop-