Recreation in the Renaissance

56 Recreation in the Renaissance
the number of the damned. The devilish institution has its clergy (the
organizers of gambling), its service and Book of Common Prayer
(the players’ jargon). The logic of opposition and inversion was deeply
rooted in the early modern period, and had a well-known manifestation
in the interpretation of witchcraft as an anti-Christian ritual
system. In a typical style which served mnemonic functions, most
of Bernardino’s text is arranged in the form of lengthy lists (of the
evils of play and human types who take part in it). The sermon must
have enjoyed some popularity over the following few generations of
preachers, if we consider that in the early 1520s it was the object of
French and English adaptations. They appeared together with other
pastoral material as anonymous independent pamphlets, and exploit in
the title the parallel between the two churches. In the frontispiece of
the French booklet, La petite dyablerie, a woodcut represented a soul
who is shown a player/gambler being dragged by devils into the mouth
of hell (Figure 4.1). The English print, The Chirche of the Evyll, still
appeared within the gigantic list of references given in William Prynne’s
Histrio-Mastix (1633). 23
Games of chance also attracted the attention of jurists, since the legal
statute of the payments and debts contracted in playing was far from
clear (see below, Chapter 5). From the moral point of view, they could
receive little justification. As well as being useless from the standpoint
of the traditional justification for recreation (of body and mind) and
dangerous for the manner and the environment in which they were
played and for their financial consequences (disastrous losses – easy
winnings), they implied a play with fortune which defied the divine
government over the future and people’s destiny.
A significant amount of sources, both Catholic and Protestant, primarily
discuss dice and card playing. Born in the opening year of the
Council of Trent, Angelo Rocca (1545–1620), an Augustinian friar, was
also a bishop and the founder of the (still operating) Angelica Library
in Rome. He is the author of a book referred to in the imprimatur as a
‘Treatise on forbidden games of chance’ (Tractatus de vetito alearum ludo)
– although the qualifying adjective is dropped in the title-page – and as
written in both Latin and Italian (the two versions were published in
1616 and 1617 respectively). The Italian frontispiece continues: ‘[A treatise
for the salvation of souls and the preservation of goods and money
against card and dice games,] which are forbidden by the very holy
councils, by canon and civil laws not only among Christians, but also
among the gentiles or pagan, for the many sins and really horrendous
cases that originate from such abominable games. Finally, for recreation