Recreation in the Renaissance

Games and Law 85
tionship between art and power. By examining a variety of festivals
ranging from tournaments, triumphs and royal entries, to intermezzi,
ballets, masques and other entertainments, Roy Strong has shown
how a medieval tradition of pageantry, which was centred on religious
symbolism, gave way to a Renaissance one, which during the sixteenth
century became increasingly political; and how a Renaissance symbolism,
in which an aspiration towards political order was dominating the
language of representations, was progressively replaced, during the first
half of the seventeenth century, by the expression of the actual fulfilment
of that order. 29
The regulation of extravagance
Particular leisure activities had their own legal traditions due to specific
characteristics and circumstances. We have found frequent reference to
dancing, the primary target of censorship and regulation by religious
and political authorities interested in reforming popular culture; the
plethora of decrees on the matter has been the subject of a specific study
covering the German-speaking world. 30 Attention from juristic literature,
however, was scarce, if we exclude the cursory mention by the
writers de ludo, or specific concerns as the Sabbatarian projects of
Bascapè and his Calvinist counterparts. The only early modern dissertation
on dance from the legal point of view I am aware of (De eo quod
iustum est circa saltationes, ‘Of that which is just in the matter of dances’)
was defended in Wittenberg as late as 1730. Its provenance says it all
about its orientation, since (as we mentioned at the end of the previous
chapter), in the confessional geography of post-Reformation
Europe, the Lutheran Church was the most systematically tolerant on
these matters. The text offers repeated evidence that we have turned the
page from the anti-dance prejudice of earlier Christian writing: dancing
is not prohibited by natural, divine, or civil law; clergymen are allowed
to dance, since the old canonic prohibitions are no longer valid for
evangelic pastors; the patristic and monastic motif of dance as a
devilish invention is rejected as most absurd. The author of the thesis
(Johann Daniel Kettner, who thereby acquired his doctorate in both
civil and canon law) also approved of sexually promiscuous dance: ‘if
men are allowed to talk, banquet, and play with women, why should
they not dance’; and he goes as far as suggesting that the Church
Fathers’ zeal against this practice derived from a more general hatred
for women. The only human group which the dissertation singles out
as unsuited to dance is that of the mentally ill (furiosi, dementes), who