The invention of leisure in early modern Europe

Past & Present, Feb, 1995 by Peter Burke

In 1964 the seventh Past and Present conference was concerned with work and leisure.(1) After thirty years or so it may be opportune to return to the theme and to look at what has been happening in the interval. As might have been expected at the time, the 1964 conference devoted most of its attention to the subject of work.(2) In 1994, on the other hand, the Twenty-Sixth Week of Studies on Economic History organized by the Datini Institute at Prato chose "leisure" or "free time" as its theme, thus exemplifying the recent turn towards consumption on the part of economic historians, a turn which has led them to extend their frontiers in the direction of social and cultural history.

In the last twenty years or so, social historians of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been carrying out a good deal of research on leisure and sport, concentrating on the period since 1850.(3) Their colleagues in sociology have moved in the same direction. The sociology of leisure was an expanding sub-discipline as long ago as the 1950s, while the late Norbert Elias devoted a book to the sociology of sport.(4) As usual in the history of academic learning, an extension of scholarly territory has been marked by the establishment of new journals - inter-disciplinary journals such as Leisure Studies and the Journal of Leisure Research, historical journals such as Sozialgeschichte des Sports and the International Journal for the History of Sport.

Implicitly or explicitly, most recent work has been based on one central hypothesis, that of a fundamental discontinuity or great divide between pre-industrial and industrial society.(5) According to this view, in medieval and early modern Europe, as in other pre-industrial societies, the modern idea of leisure was lacking.(6) The modern distinction between the ideas of work and leisure, like the regular alternation of work and leisure, was a product of industrial capitalism. Pre-industrial societies had festivals (together with informal and irregular breaks from work), while industrial societies have leisure, weekends and vacations. The emergence of leisure is therefore part of the process of modernization.(7) In other words, the history of leisure is discontinuous. If this theory is correct, there is what Michel Foucault liked to call a conceptual break or "rupture" between the two periods,(8) and so the very idea of a history of leisure before the industrial revolution is an anachronism.

It is indeed difficult to accept the idea of a continuous history of leisure, going back to the Middle Ages or indeed to the classical world of games and circuses.(9) This is not of course to deny that late medieval and early modern Europeans engaged in many pursuits which we would describe as leisure or even as sporting activities - jousting, hunting, tennis, card-playing, travel, joking and so on. It is not to deny that Europe in this period was dominated by what Thorstein Veblen was to call a "leisure class",(10) or that workers often chose to exercise what economists now describe as a "leisure preference". The point is simply that these concepts were not available in the period under study, and more generally that hunting, gambling and the like were not regarded at the time as part of a larger category or package called "leisure".

This point is not trivial, since it affects the meaning of the individual and collective actions we are concerned to study. Take the example of football, for instance. If we could visit seventeenth-century Florence on Shrove Tuesday and make our way to Piazza Santa Croce, we might find a game of football in progress. However, the game formed part of a set of rituals rather different from those of the twentieth century. "The two factions of the Calcio, the Red and the Green", an English visitor reported, "choose each of them a Prince. The two princes resolve on a battle at Calcio". The contest could only take place after ambassadors had been sent and "war" proclaimed.(11) This form of calcio seems to have had more in common with the ritualized ball-games played by fourteenth-century Japanese courtiers or by the pre-Colombian Maya than with the contemporary world of Pele, Gazza or Maradona.

Or take the case of fencing, a subject on which a number of treatises were written in the sixteenth century. For us it may be a "sport", but for the gentlemen of the Renaissance it was a serious art or science.(12) Conversely, activities which we may think serious, notably warfare, were not infrequently described as forms of passetemps, for example by such sixteenth-century French writers - and warriors - as Monluc and Brantome.(13)

The greatest danger facing historians of our topic is surely to assume continuity and to work with the modern concepts of leisure and sport, projecting them back on to the past without asking about the meanings which contemporaries gave to their activities. However, the discontinuity thesis is not satisfactory either. Historians holding this view attempt to avoid anachronism by means of a simple dichotomy, cutting European history into two slices, pre-industrial and industrial. Unfortunately, the binary opposition between what one might call a "festival culture" and a "leisure culture", like many dichotomies and polarities, is as misleading as it is convenient.