Recreation in the Renaissance

The Medical Discourse 41
exercises, or recreations of the minde within doores, there is none so
generall, so aptly to be applyed to all sorts of men, so fit and proper to
expell Idleness and Melancholy, as that of Study’ – a topic which he finds
particularly congenial and which occupies him for several pages. 48
Towards the end of the chapter it is revealed to the reader that reference
to ‘all sorts of men’ was not generic, and the matter is heavily gendered:
study is only recommended to male subjects, while a woman has
her own occupations ‘for she eats not the bread of idlenesse’ (Proverbs,
31: 27); we will return to them later (Chapter 6).
As the case of Burton should have widely proved, physical exercise
does not exhaust the relevance of play to human health. There are
various forms of play which are marginally, if at all, physical. This does
not mean that they could not be regarded as helpful for physical wellbeing.
After all, emotions were one of the nonnaturals, and their balance
had to be taken into consideration. Thus medical literature also valued
spiritual recreation, as having a positive effect on one’s health. Both the
Italian physician Bartolomeo Traffichetti in the sixteenth century and
the English Everard Maynwaring (1628–99) during the seventeenth,
wrote in similar terms that ‘that which is most delightful, will probably
prove most beneficial’. 49 This, once more, is evident in Burton, where
the mind appears as rectified by mirth, and music as a significant
remedy for it (2.2.6.3–4). 50
A particular case is offered by the medical assessment of gambling.
Playing cards or dice could not be justifiable as a form of exercise; moreover,
the emotional stress that accompanied the betting and the positive
or negative outcome of the game could hardly be seen as beneficial.
While hints of its dangers for human health are found in a variety of
sources, a systematic medical enquiry on the harmful passion for gambling
(ludendi in pecuniam cupiditas) is produced in the mid-sixteenth
century by the Netherlandish physician Paschier Joostens. Having travelled
for many years throughout Spain and Italy, the author found the
Spaniards to be naturally ‘hot’ and particularly inclined to gambling,
contrary to his fellow-countrymen; to the extent that he declares to
have found Spanish villages where no food or drink was available for
sale, while cards were ubiquitous. As a background to such remarks, it
may be worth remembering that, from Antiquity to the Renaissance,
humoral theory combined with a deterministic doctrine that believed
in an environmental influence on people’s complexions and health. A
chief purpose of the volume is to define gambling and identify the
origin of the passion for it. According to the author – who claims that
the topic has been undeservedly neglected until his date – ‘sex and gam-