Recreation in the Renaissance

80 Recreation in the Renaissance
clear, and are often spelled out in the early modern literature: by playing
with chance and future, the gambler crossed a dangerous threshold,
which was charged with all the heavy weight of divine predestination
and precognition of events versus human ignorance and limited
freedom of action. From this perspective, gambling was related to other
human activities which promised gain in case of a particular future
course of events, such as insurance (itself a form of gambling on the
outcome of trade, rather than dice or card-playing).
Economic issues are once more the core preoccupations in On
Commutative Justice, the work of João Sobrinho (d. 1486), head of the
Portuguese Province of the Carmelite friars. Within a treatise concerned
with such financial problems as currency exchanges, the theologian
devotes a section to gambling (de ludo alearum). He distinguishes
between lawful and unlawful games under two criteria. If a game is
solely or partly determined by chance, by this mere reason it is unlawful,
since it does not rely on human resources, and – experience says –
brings many troubles to society. Also, any playing which involves a
transfer of property (even if the game is of skill) is by definition illegal:
play has to be primarily chosen for fun and for skilful exercise – beyond
these ends it is not acceptable. Sobrinho therefore only approves of such
games as military exercises with lances, on one side, skilful intellectual
play, on the other (as long as they do not fall in either of the two exclusions
– chance or gain). 14
The Iberian peninsula, where the topic of juego was attracting special
attention in a perspective in which law and moral theology blended
together (see also above, Chapter 4), saw further developments during
the seventeenth century. Pedro Pantoja de Aiala, a jurist from Toledo,
is the author of an extensive commentary on the title ‘De aleatoribus’
(On gamblers) of Digest 11.5, written in 1621 and subsequently printed
within a collection of writings of Roman law. 15
In 1651 a legal divertissement (Schediasma) On Gamblers was held in
Jena by the professor in civil and canon law Johannes Thomas. Following
what was by then a standard arrangement (see below, Chapter
6), the author divided games into three categories: games of skill, of
chance, and mixed. He classified as lawful those games that were already
listed in Justinian’s Code, and added to the list such common social practices
as tournaments or chess and draughts. He was aware that tournaments
had been so severely condemned by medieval canon law, that
even a knight who was killed in a contest, and not only the one responsible
for his death, could be regarded as punishable; however, Thomas
distanced himself from such harsh criticism against the respectable