Recreation in the Renaissance

The Moral Discourse 71
Battista Alberti’s Libri della famiglia, in which time is referred to as a
human being’s most precious possession, more their own than the
body itself. 54 It is therefore quite clear that the interest in saving
time and the concern for its waste had a long tradition. Nonetheless,
my impression remains that it would prove simplistic to use this historical
precedent to destitute post-Reformation developments of any
peculiarity and originality. Max Weber’s thesis of a Protestant birth of
modernity – as disputable as it still remains – should at least work as a
warning against a too mechanical representation of the opposition
between religious and secular attitudes towards time. When Weber
wanted to show a seventeenth-century perception of time that he found
in tune with modern economic concerns, he quoted no other author
than Richard Baxter. 55
This is not to say that religious concern over the appropriate use
of time ordinarily brought people to reject the most common forms
of recreation – an assumption which would contrast with evidence
we have encountered throughout this book. Rather, the point was to
remind us how much the very notion of recreation and amusement
troubled some radical Renaissance and early modern divines, who may
not represent a median view, but offer us nevertheless privileged access
to a mode of thought that was characteristic of their time. The issue
brings us back to Petrarch’s contempt of joy. That the time inappropriate
for rejoicing was the time of all our lives, that the world was a vale
of tears, Christ had never laughed and his example should be followed,
is a litany that had wide currency in a world troubled by instability and
tragedies, natural and man-made alike. In counterpoint with the learned
condescension with human behaviour, which is exemplified by the
Aristotelian discourse on urbanity, one should never forget that a quite
different tune was always sung in medieval and early modern times:
that of pastoral literature (as I said earlier, a world of binary oppositions)
that demonized the flesh and the world.
From this perspective, a tradition that went back to Pope Gregory the
Great (590–604) listed ‘inane rejoicing’ (inepta laetitia) among the vices
connected with gluttony (its ‘daughters’, filiae gulae). It was seen as
the result of excessive eating and drinking, and included dancing
among its manifestations. The topos enjoyed a literary fortune, and
could be found virtually unchanged one thousand years after its first
formulation. 56
In contrast to this negative view, Renaissance philosophy brought
during the fifteenth century, with such works as Lorenzo Valla’s De
voluptate (1431), a comparative re-appreciation of pleasure. However,