Mainardi and the court fool Pietro Gonnella; the practical jokes recounted in the short stories (novelle) of the period; parodies of romances of chivalry; the Renaissance theory of laughter and the satire of ‘the greatest railer of modern times’, Pietro Aretino. I shall return to all these themes and individuals in later chapters.18
For a long time, discussions of the history of play in Italy (and elsewhere) were dominated by specialists in literature (including, of course, the theatre, a field in which there has been a long tradition of studies). Tiraboschi and D’Israeli were followed in the early twentieth century by Arturo Graf, a professor of Italian literature at the University of Turin, whose essays on comic poetry will be cited on various occasions in later chapters. In contrast, the Italian philosopher-critic Benedetto Croce, writing on what he called the ‘late Renaissance’, declared that the phrase ‘comic poetry’ (poesia giocosa) was a contradiction because poetry is ‘always serious and severe’. Croce also denounced mock-epics as signs of ‘the lowering of taste’. Thomas F. Crane, an American professor of literature, took play more seriously and devoted a chapter to what he called ‘Parlor Games’ (translating giochi di sala), in a book on social customs in sixteenth-century Italy.19
Crane’s interest in the topic was closer to that of antiquaries and folklorists than to that of his literary colleagues. Cesare Guasti, an archivist and an admirer of Muratori, published a collection of texts describing the feast of St John the Baptist in Florence. The journalist Alessandro Ademollo wrote a history of Carnival in Rome. Giuseppe Pitrè, a pioneer of Italian folklore studies, wrote on popular customs, festivals and games in Sicily. The German scholar Aby Warburg, whose concern with the Renaissance transgressed frontiers between disciplines, studied festivals at the court of the Medici in Florence. An eccentric Englishman, William Heywood, had been active as a lawyer, a journalist and even a cowboy before he retired to Siena and began writing on what he called ‘the sports of Central Italy’.20
Outside Italy, the story of the growing interest in play is a similar one. In France, scholarly interest in Renaissance festivals was launched at a conference in 1955.21 In 1965, two important books on Carnival were published, one in Madrid and the other in Moscow. One author, Julio Caro Baroja, was well known in Spain as an anthropologist, a historian and a folklorist. His book has a distinguished place in the long series of studies in which the author constructed a historical anthropology of Spanish culture. Caro Baroja drew on anthropological theory, notably that of Sir James Frazer, usually to criticize it for speculation and overemphasis on pagan survivals.22
The second author, Mikhail Bakhtin, also criticized Frazer and the folklorists but from a rather different point of view, accusing them of a lack of ‘theoretical pathos’ – of collecting ‘curiosities’ while failing to see the world of folk humour as a whole. It is difficult to say whether Bakhtin’s concern with play developed out of his interest in a French writer of the Renaissance, François Rabelais, or the other way round. In any case, his study Rabelais and his World (written before 1940 and finally permitted to be published in the USSR in 1965) is a major contribution not only to the interpretation of a masterpiece of French literature but also to the theory of play, alongside that of Huizinga (who might have been shocked by some of the ideas of his Russian colleague, had he been able to read his work).
As noted earlier, Bakhtin emphasized the importance of disorder and the use of laughter for what he calls ‘uncrowning’, the symbolic destruction of an enemy. In the second place, he devoted attention to what he calls ‘the material bodily lower stratum’. In a book on Rabelais, this may not seem so surprising, but in the 1940s it was still unusual for a scholar to pay so much attention to what Freud (whom Bakhtin does not mention) described as anal and genital matters. In the third place, Bakhtin stressed the role of joyous or festive violence in Gargantua and Pantagruel. His emphasis on joy and freedom now appears to be a kind of psychological compensation for life in the USSR at a time when both joy and freedom were in short supply.23
In contrast to these relatively rare contributions, there was a rapid rise of histories of play from the 1980s onwards. Where earlier studies were mainly descriptive, the more recent ones often made use of theorists of play, from Huizinga to Bakhtin and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whose essay on the meaning of the cock-fight in Bali, first published in 1973, rapidly became a classic.24 As early as 1977, a Romanian scholar, Ioan Petru Culianu, was planning a book on the theory of play in the philosophical culture of the Italian Renaissance. Culianu was murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1991 before the book was completed.25
It is in this context of increasing interest that the historical sociologist Norbert Elias (together with his colleague Eric Dunning) put forward a theory of sport as part of the ‘civilizing process’, described and analysed by Elias nearly half a century earlier.26 The theory offers a refinement and a development of the traditional view of play as a safety-valve, offering ‘the liberating excitement of a struggle involving physical exertion and skill, while limiting to a minimum the chance that anyone will get seriously hurt’.27 The authors were well aware of the paradox of presenting sport as both a form of self-control and a means of temporary escape from it in the ‘quest for excitement’. Their book was a milestone in making play a respectable topic for academics to study.
In the 2020s, it has become difficult to imagine how late that respectability was in coming. In 1983, for instance, an Italian literary historian could still complain that the theme of comic poetry in the Italian Renaissance was still neglected – though her own book did much to remedy this neglect.28 By this time, the subject of play was moving from the margin of scholarly concerns towards the centre, in sociology and anthropology as well as in history.
An early example of the move was a collective study of games in the Renaissance – first a conference and then a book – organized by Philippe Ariès, a French scholar who made his name with a history of childhood. In the introduction to the book, Ariès noted that topics that historians used to dismiss as ‘frivolous’ had become respectable, following the rise of interest in the history of forms of solidarity and sociability.29 A few years earlier, a team of French scholars had studied literary representations of the beffa.30
Many valuable specialized studies have been published since the 1980s. The subject has ‘exploded’ in the sense not only of expansion but also of fragmentation, linked to the rise and the institutionalization of new fields of study such as the history of sport and the history of the dance, marked by the foundation of societies, committees, book series and journals such as the International Journal for the History of Sport (1984– ) and Studies in Dance History (1988– ). Economic and social historians, in Italy and elsewhere, also discovered the history of leisure, the subject of a major conference in Prato in 1992.31 The Benetton Foundation has been subsidizing studies of games since 1987, supporting prizes, books and the journal Ludica (1995– ).32 Social and cultural historians have joined historians of art and literature in this collective enterprise, organized by Gherardo Ortalli and others.33
So many studies of different forms of play in Renaissance Italy have been published in the last thirty or forty years that there is not space to mention them all here. The suggestions for ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this book are confined to studies available in English, such as Alessandro Arcangeli on dancing, Robert Davis on the ‘fist wars’, Robert Henke on the commedia dell’arte, George McClure on parlour games, and Gherardo Ortalli on games of chance.
Many other important contributions are accessible to readers of Italian, French or German. Wordplay, satire and parody have been analysed by a team of Italian scholars, including Antonio Corsaro, Silvia Longhi and Paolo Procaccioli. In the case of Carnival, the French historian Martine Boiteux has written on Rome, and the Italian anthropologist Domenico Scafoglio on Naples. The German art historian Horst Bredekamp has studied football in Florence, and the Italian historian Alessandra Rizzi has written on Italian games in the late Middle Ages.34
