The invention of leisure in early modern Europe

Past & Present, Feb, 1995 by Peter Burke

(2) Treatises on particular types of recreation, usually "how-to-do-it" books, multiplied in numbers in the early modern period. Renaissance Italy was a clear example of the trend. The books on outdoor activities, like Antonio Scaino's treatise on Il giuoco della palla, are relatively well known (though it may be worth noting Scaino's assertion that girls played football in Udine in his time).(44) What deserves to be emphasized here is the prolif-eration of treatises on what we call "parlour games", including Lorenzo Spirto's Libro della ventura (1476), which used dice to select prophecies; Sigismondo Fonti's Triompho di Fortuna (1527), which offered answers to seventy-two questions by a progression through fortune, case, rote, sphere and astrologi; Francesco Marcohni's Le sorti (1540), which used cards to select the answers to questions; and Innocentio Ringhieri's encyclopaedic Cento giochi liberali (1550). The treatises seem to have transformed the traditional Italian veglie, or nights of recreation, whether for women alone or for mixed company, associated with the feast of All Saints in particular.(45) The multiplication of printed treatises also gave a new respectability to this kind of pastime. Historians too were beginning to think recreations worthy of study. By the early seventeenth century, the collective attempt by Renaissance humanists to reconstruct classical culture had produced an international cluster of treatises on the history of gymnastics, Greek games and Roman circuses, while a Spanish humanist, Rodrigo Caro, published a dialogue comparing ancient and modern festivals and activities.(46) By the eighteenth century, histories of post-classical pastimes were beginning to appear, including Henry Bourne's Popular Antiquities (1725) and the essay on the history of public games published by Lodovico Muratori in his Dissertazioni sopra le antichita italiane (1751).(47)

(3) The evidence of paintings, like the multiplication of treatises on recreations, suggests that leisure activities became more visible, or more respectable, or at any rate that they attracted more interest in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: witness the paintings of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Georges La Tour, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh, Adriaen van Ostade, David Teniers, or Jean Antoine Watteau, representing people smoking, drinking, dancing, playing backgammon, playing cards, dice, and so on. Earlier paintings sometimes included figures of this kind, such as the Roman soldiers at the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, but scenes of relaxation now became an independent genre. It is not easy to make use of this pictorial evidence, since the rise of new genres depends as much on trends internal to the history of art as on social change in general. In any case, it is usually difficult to discover where the paintings were originally displayed (in private houses? taverns? brothels?) and for whom they were originally made. Hence we cannot say whether the pastimes they illustrate were associated with "us" or "them", the owner's social group or another (presumably lower) class. Difficult as it is to interpret, however, this evidence is too important to ignore. Simon Schama has exploited it with skill to explore attitudes to childhood and to speculate about the sense of national identity in the Dutch Republic,(48) but it might also be used to reconstruct changing European attitudes to adult leisure.