Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Toys, Games, and Entertainment

Albrecht Classen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110623703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

Pleasure and Leisure from the Middle Ages to the early Nineteenth Century

The Rediscovery of a Neglected Dimension in Cultural History. Also an Introduction

Albrecht Classen

University of Arizona German Studies 301 LSB, 1512 E 1st St. 85721 Tucson AZ United States of America

“Des wil ich mich ziehen an die Romer. Die haben es selbes getan vnd haben das ire kinder gelernet, das sie liebe in eren haben solten, turnieren, stechen, tanzen, wetlaufen, springen vnd allerlei zuchtige hubscheit treiben solten bei mussiger weile auf die rede, das sie die weile bosheit weren vberhaben” (Johannes von Saaz [Tepl], Der Ackermann, ca. 1401, ch. 23; ed. Günther Jungblut, 1969 https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/15Jh/Tepl/tep_tod.html).

[Let me refer to the Romans as role models. They themselves did it and also taught their children to love honorable behavior and to embrace the idea that they should pursue entertainment through tournaments, jousts, dancing, competitve running, leaping, and all kinds of other acceptable activities during their leisure time so that they would be free from evil thoughts.] (Here I have used my my own translation; but see also http://www.michaelhaldane.com/HusbandmanandDeath)

Global Perspectives on the homo ludens

People throughout time, both old and young, men and women, have always searched for various types of entertainment and games, and despite the allegedly superficial character of ‘playfulness’ and the seemingly simple ‘enjoyment,’ the opportunity to spend one’s time more leisurely and/or filled with excitement has traditionally assumed a high reputation even for the social elites, if not especially among them, because game playing is a form of theoretical reflection on and practice of the countless options and opportunities in life. The elites, above all other social classes, tend to have the necessary resources and free time to pursue pleasures, but this does not mean that the members of other social classes were doing nothing but work or slaving away, neither in the Middle Ages nor in our own time.

Entertainment makes it possible for the player to move away from the hardship and constraints of reality while challenging him/her in an artificial framework without exposing the player to the real implications of the actions.¹ Those, however, are predicated on the concrete conditions in our existence, imitating and refracting them according to changing sets of rules. Life thus proves to be a game, as we might say, and it is our challenge to learn the rules in order to participate in that game as well as possible so that both we ourselves and our playing partners can have a fulfilled and happy time, getting ready for the reality outside of the game where the various options have been played out in a rather random fashion, or determined by extra rules and regulations.

For the purpose of being as inclusive as possible and in order to avoid terminological confusion, subsequently I will not sharply differentiate between entertainment, games, gaming, play (not in the sense of drama, or stage performance), leisure (activities), and even playfulness since all those aspects overlap and mirror a fundamental concern in human existence to experiment playfully with alternative conditions and to operate there on the new playing field, whether a tournament camp, a soccer stadium, a volleyball court, a chessboard, a card game, etc. Playing can take place in physical, intellectual, and spiritual fashion, and both the arts and literature have regularly created the fundamental platform where individuals could experiment and create a playful situation.² We have also realized that game underlies most intra-human interactions, both in politics and in economic relations, although in this context we move to a very global definition of game as part of the universal dimension of entertainment, pleasure, and leisure. Many studies that seemingly address this larger topic in reality are mostly concerned with humor, laughter, jokes, satire, or irony.³ The central question will be what constituted or produced entertainment in the pre-modern world and what significance leisure activities could have had in their wide range of social, political, economic, and religious contexts. Whereas previous scholars in the field of Cultural Studies have only tentatively begun to explore the wide field of games, recent years have witnessed a new and heightened interest in this topic, although we often face the dilemma that the material dimension (toys, board games, dice, dolls, etc.) blinds us to the theoretical reflections truly necessary in order to gain a new and more insightful understanding of the issue at stake, as suggested by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles Sanders Peirce in their semiological concepts, identifying game as another form of representation of social reality.⁴

We are dealing here with leisure and pleasure in their myriad of manifestations because human life is not only determined by work, eating, sleeping, or procreation, but also by free-time activities, playing, or relaxing in a deliberately non-productive fashion, which was, according to Thorstein Veblen, primarily a privilege of the upper class.⁵ Historically speaking, in order to comprehend human culture, we must not ignore what happens when people are not working, not engaged in war, not attending mass, or are not involved in harvesting, for instance, if we think of the peasant population.⁶ Gaming and other forms of entertainment are as old as human culture and have always represented a unique form of social interaction freed from serious consequences. As soon as a society has achieved a level of security and wealth, having enough resources available to carve out free time for its individual members, the components of pleasure and leisure enter the picture.⁷ As Paul Milliman has recently emphasized, addressing medieval culture at large, “games and pastimes permeated medieval society. …” However, he also alerts us to the fundamental problem of how to research this issue: “more often than not, games are marginal …, mentioned in passing, or serve as metaphors in works concerned mainly with other topics. Games and pastimes are everywhere and nowhere, so one must look for them in a wide range of sources.”⁸ Literary documents, as to be expected, offer themselves as important and fertile mirrors of everyday culture in which games and many other forms of entertainment assume a significant role.⁹ But there are also numerous visual depictions, musical compositions, and philosophical reflections that provide insight into this heretofore relatively neglected research field.¹⁰ Moreover, travelogues, pilgrimage accounts, and chronicles also contain valuable information about how free time was filled with a variety of activities in the pre-modern world.

One of the ‘classical’ examples of how members of courtly society sought entertainment is provided by the Middle High German poet Hartmann von Aue in his ‘translation’ of Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain from ca. 1160, Iwein (ca. 1200), where we encounter the company of King Arthur during the festive season of Pentecost. Every member of his court is dedicated to some kind of enjoyment because there is, so to speak, free time and everyone has complete freedom to do whatever it might please him or her. As the narrator lists them, some knights are chatting with ladies (65), some take care of their own well-being and appearance (66), some are dancing and singing (67), some are running and jumping for exercise (68), some are listening to the playing of string instruments (69), some are practicing shooting with bow and arrow (70), some are telling love stories (71), and others relate heroic adventures (72). King Arthur and his wife retire to their tent to take a nap, but less because they need a rest, as the narrator emphasizes, and more for giving each other some company (80 – 84). At the same time, four knights, Dodines and Gawein, Segremors and Iwein, along with the court seneschal Keii, form a group and listen to an extraordinary account told them by Kâlogrenant who a long time ago had experienced a most difficult time in a knightly encounter and then had failed to win a joust (92 – 95). The queen listens and finds this so intriguing that she gets up from bed and joins the company to hear more about this adventure (97 – 104).¹¹

The twelfth-century Cambro-Norman archdeacon of Brecon and historian, Gerald of Wales (ca. 1146–ca. 1323; also known as Giraldus Cambrensis), offers in his Descriptio Cambriae from ca. 1186 to 1188 (with several new editions in the following years) a detailed description of this country in its geophysical appearance, its history, and of the people’s culture. He highlights also that the people of Wales, in contrast to those in England, sing, whenever they meet at social gatherings, “their traditional songs, not in unison, as is done elsewhere, but in parts, in many modes and modulations. When a choir gathers to sing, which happens often in this country, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers, all joining together in the end to produce a single organic harmony and melody in the soft sweetness of B-flat.”¹² As laudatory as this might be, the subsequent sections paint a rather negative picture of the Welsh at large. For our purposes, however, we can interpret this section as a strong confirmation of the fact that communal singing was a central means for people in those parts of the British Isles in the high Middle Ages to pursue pleasure and leisure and thereby to confirm their identity.

According to Gerald, the Welsh pursue their own characteristic style of singing, while the English enjoy communal singing in a different way: “the English who live there produce the same symphonic harmony when they sing. They do this in two parts only, with two modulations of the voice, one group humming the bass and the others singing the treble most sweetly” (242). In other words, singing as a public form of entertainment represented, for Gerald, an indication of a national character involving all the people, so when he remarks on where the English might have learned their style: “I think that these latter must have taken their part-singing, as they did their speech, from the Danes and Norwegians, who so often invaded those parts of the island and held them longer under their dominion” (243). If we widened our perspective, we could easily also include the dances and songs performed on the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic from the fourteenth century until today, often replicating the heroic epic known as the Nibelungenlied and a variety of medieval ballads. The medieval tradition of public entertainment by means of poetic texts, dance, and music thus has continued there, far away from the rest of Europe, and this unabatedly.¹³

As we will see below, late medieval and early Renaissance poets similarly reflected extensively on the accounts of public entertainment and thus set up very comparable scenes where a group of story-tellers gets together and entertains each other with accounts of love, adventures, vice and virtue, etc. (Boccaccio, Chaucer, Kaufringer, Sacchetti, et al.), often combining their narratives with songs as interludes. It might be rather appropriate to identify some of the famous collections of medieval and early modern songs and love poetry, such as the Carmina Burana (ca. 1230/1240), as mirrors of intellectual and artistic entertainment insofar as those compositions reflect intricately how members of learned and/or ecclesiastic groups experimented with a variety of erotic, satirical, political, and religious issues, provoking each other to understand the subtle allusions and literary games, relying on deliberate ambivalence, irony, satire, and parody, and this not only in the poems/songs, but also in the religious plays.¹⁴ The thirteenth-century French chantefable, Aucassin et Nicolette, in its structure as a prosimetrum, adds to this observation quite meaningfully.¹⁵

The literary and artistic representation of pleasure and leisure thus lends itself exceedingly well for a critical examination of the relations between ludic activities, physical and intellectua...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Pleasure and Leisure from the Middle Ages to the early Nineteenth Century The Rediscovery of a Neglected Dimension in Cultural History. Also an Introduction
• Medieval Magicians as Entertainers: Magic as Demonic Illusion or Stagecraft
• Hestaþing (Horse Meeting/s) in Medieval Icelandic Culture
• The Transformation of the World through Pleasure and Performance in the Thousand and One Nights
• Behüde mich vor vngerechtem gude. Were Goods Won in Game “Unjustified”? Medieval Gambling
• Aldhelm’s Enigmata and the Commentaries from the Canterbury School: A Monastic Curriculum in Play
• Understanding Monastic Recreations and Luxury within the Anglo-Saxon Patristic Tradition
• Subjects of the Game: The Pleasures of Subjection in William IX’s “Ben vueill que sapchon li pluzor”
• Peregrine Pleasures: The Sport of Falconry, Lovers, and Self-Identity in Medieval German Literature
• Tourney, Joust, Foreis and Round Table: Tournament Forms in the Frauendienst of Ulrich von Liechtenstein
• Drinking, Partying, and Drunkenness in Late Medieval German Verse Narratives and Jest Narratives
• William Langland’s Attitude Toward Play, Leisure, and Pastime: A Realignment of Priorities in Post-Plague England
• The Ambraser Hofämterspiel: Playing Cards as a Visual Source for Courtly Life during the Late Middle Ages
• Gawain, Giants, and Tennis in the Fifteenth Century
• “J’ai tiré si près / Que je touche au but”: Ludic Roots, Spiritual Play in Marguerite de Navarre’s L’Inquisiteur
• Jeux Interdits: The Rationale and Limits of Clerical and Lay Efforts to Enjoin “Scurrilia Solatia”
• Randomization in Paper: Shuffling as a Material Practice with Moral Implications in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern World
• Calculated Losses: Molière, Regnard, and the Changing Comic Gamblers of Seventeenth-Century France
• “His usuall Retyrement”: Henry Vaughan’s Life and Writing during the English Civil War
• Jokes and the Eighteenth-Century Unconscious: Enlightening the Early-Modern European Id
• Enjoying the Waters: Cross-Class Leisure and Pleasure at the Eighteenth Century British Spa
• Nine Men’s Medievalisms: Conquests of the Longbow, Nine Men’s Morris, and the Impossibilities of a Half-Forgotten Game’s Ludic Past
• Biographical Notes about the Contributors
• Index