The invention of leisure in early modern Europe

Past & Present, August, 1997 by Joan-Lluis Marfany, Peter Burke

Peter Burke believes that the main problem confronting the history of leisure is the contradictory evidence for a `pre-industrial festival/ industrial leisure' dichotomy, on the one hand, and for unbroken continuity, on the other. As a solution he has hypothesized a process of `invention of leisure', extending over the whole of the early modern period, which he has backed with very interesting suggestions for its further development and eventual testing.(1) His proposals display the breadth and depth of knowledge, and the ability to move in and out of periods, languages and cultures which we have come to associate with his writing. Yet they also raise some fundamental doubts.

Before I begin to expose these doubts, however, I should like to remove two side issues. First, the point surely cannot be that the concepts of `leisure', `leisure class' and `leisure preference' `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"'. Were it `simply' that, then the point, pace Burke, would be very `trivial' indeed. That the concept of `leisure' in its modern sense was lacking is neither here nor there. The objects and actions thus conceptualized may have manifested themselves in a different way, or ways, as `ease', `solace', `pleasure', `play' and `sport', singly or severally. That certain activities which we now classify as `leisure' were not thought of in those terms is not entirely relevant either. If fencing is for us a sport, whereas `for the gentlemen of the Renaissance [it] was a serious art or science', it is not because those gentlemen lacked the concept of `leisure', but because we no longer carry swords as an instrument of self-defence. It is not the nature of the activities which determines the `category or package called "leisure"': anything can be `leisure' as long as it is not work.(2)

The question of the increased visibility of leisure pursuits must also be left out of our discussion. If the sources remain silent on these matters over many centuries, so too are they on many other matters. If, from the sixteenth century onwards, books and treatises on leisure activities began to proliferate, so did books and treatises on all sorts of other things. If `scenes of relaxation' became increasingly the subject of paintings, so did many other aspects of contemporary life intrude into art -- and, one might add, literature. None of this necessarily indicates the emergence of something that had not existed before, or even a new awareness of something which had previously gone unnoticed.(3)

This brings us to the question which needs debating: whether, before the advent of industrial capitalism, people were fully aware of their leisure. This breaks down into two sub-questions: whether there was as clear a distinction as there is nowadays between work and leisure; and whether leisure could only exist mingled with something else, fulfilling some special social functions besides and beyond personal relaxation.(4)

My main reservation about Burke's approach to the first question is that it is biased: most of the time he seems to be concerned solely with the leisure of those who never worked. People might -- indeed, did -- fill their free time in ways which were essentially the same across classes, yet there were huge differences in the possibilities each individual had in that respect. To begin with, of course, some people had very little free time, whereas others had all their time free. It is a difference which turns the study of their respective forms of leisure into two distinct questions.

More precisely, we are faced with two distinct historical questions. Though Burke is quite right in detecting an awakening of interest in leisure at the beginning of the early modern period, what he fails to emphasize, however, is that this is, first, an intellectual interest and, as such, secondly, an interest of the upper classes. All his evidence either relates to aspects of aristocratic life or comes from literature, mostly treatises, written by aristocrats, clerics and, above all, humanists. We are dealing with an interesting historical development, no doubt: a wide range of hitherto typical aristocratic pursuits were being distinguished from those more directly linked to the actual exercise of power (fighting wars, running estates, imparting justice) and gathered together into one single category of sport or recreation. This seems to reflect a new need to give some kind of sense to, and to legitimate, the idle existence of the elite. Such a need had clearly not been experienced, not at least to any significant extent, in earlier medieval times. A theoretical distinction probably existed between war, the essential, defining occupation of the class -- the one that sorted out the bellatores from the oratores and, of course, the laboratores -- and the rest of the things that nobles and knights did.(5) In practice, however, war appears to have been regarded as no different from hunting, dancing, jousting, singing, and all the other pursuits making up the leisured lifestyle which alone befitted the nobleman. For a petty feudal lord like the troubadour Bertran de Born (c.1140-c.1215), no pleasurable activity could compare with fighting. Raimbaut de Vaqueiras's verse epistle to Bonifazio of Montferrat (1205?) shows the same lack of distinction between making war, raiding rival lords' lands, kidnapping maids and married women, hunting, carousing, and composing songs: it is all fun. This attitude seems to persist for as long as the feudal ethos that it reflects remains dominant and unchallenged. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, Pere March (1338?-1413), lord of Beniarjo and Gandia in the kingdom of Valencia (and member of a lineage of court notaries which had only been ennobled in the previous generation), was still including among the things he enjoyed -- women, horses, courtly games -- `riding in a host / through flat, populated country / and seeing fire and smoke / and enemy under siege' (platz me fer cavalcada / en loch pla e hen poblat / e vesser foch e fumada / e-z enamich assetiat).(6) Even as late as the sixteenth century, as Burke himself reminds us, warrior aristocrats such as Monluc (1502?-1577) and Brantome (1540-1614) thought of warfare as a passetemps.(7)