Recreation in the Renaissance

Preface
This work springs from a previous book of mine, which was concerned
with cultural attitudes towards dance in a variety of texts – ethical,
medical and ethnographical – from late medieval and early modern
Europe. When, about ten years ago, I started to look at neighbouring
topics, in order to better understand the cultural framework within
which my sources conceived and interpreted dance, play and leisure
appeared to be the most frequent associates (rather than, say, religion
and ritual, or music and theatre). While I was moving my first steps in
this direction, a thought-provoking contribution by Peter Burke on ‘The
invention of leisure in early modern Europe’ was published both within
the proceedings of an international conference of economic history and
as an article for Past and Present. Consequently, although the origins
of this book are rooted in my own itinerary of research, it can also be
read as a development of the agenda set by Burke (the reader of us
both will notice that I am indebted to many of his hypotheses and
recommendations).
Work on the project became more systematic thanks to a Fellowship
at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance
Studies (Florence, 1998/99), and a Research Fellowship from my faculty
at the University of Verona (1999–2001). With the former I concentrated
on Italian material, with the latter I extended the work via a series
of European comparisons. The title of my Florentine project, ‘Studies in
the historical anthropology of leisure’, should be taken as a caveat for
the reader of the present volume: in a mine of potentially unlimited
sources, I can only hope to have considered an intelligent selection. I
would also like to thank the Harvard University Center at Villa I Tatti
for subsequently awarding me a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Special
Project Grant (2001/02), which helped me in completing my research
and collecting material for this book.
Over the past few years, I presented the general outlook and/or specific
aspects of my work-in-progress in research seminars and conferences
at the Universities of Rotterdam, Verona, Geneva and Cambridge
(Emmanuel College).
During the process of writing and publishing with Palgrave
Macmillan I have incurred many debts, which I wish to thankfully
acknowledge here. The editors of the present series, Rab Houston and
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