The accidental sports tourist: travelling and spectating in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1755182x.2013.828785
ISSN1755-1838
Autores Tópico(s)Martial Arts: Techniques, Psychology, and Education
ResumoAbstractIt is well known that early modern sports events attracted large numbers of spectators, but travel conditions were so bad that these were mostly just people who lived not far from the venue. However, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, general-purpose tourism – the ‘Grand Tour’ – came to be considered a necessary component of a gentleman's education and its offshoot, the travel diary, became a recognized literary genre that enjoyed commercial success. This article looks at six such diaries written between 1580 and 1665 by authors that had no special interest in sport but who reported in various ways on the sports competitions and activities whose occurrence happened to coincide with their itinerary (or who occasionally organized their itinerary to be present at festivities involving sport). By analysing their reaction to these events and the language in which they report them, we can reach conclusions concerning the evolving role of sport within the imaginary of the Anglo-French gentry. This evolution occurred against the backdrop of the scientific revolution, a development that may have influenced how the writers of travel diaries presented their descriptions.Keywords: early modern travellerssports spectatorsFranceItalyMiddle East Notes on contributorJohn McClelland is a Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where he also taught sports history in the Faculty of Physical Education and Health. He is the author of Les Erreurs amoureuses de Pontus de Tyard (1967) and Body and Mind: Sport in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance (2007); and co-author/editor of Die Anfänge des modernen Sports in der Renaissance (1984) and Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe (2009). In addition he has written more than 50 articles on early modern sport, French literature, music and the history of rhetoric.Notes1 Filopono, ‘Untitled Manuscript Latin Letter [c. 1518] to Francesco Onesti’, in Epistulae et orationes (Florence: Biblioteca Riccardiana), 98v°–100r°; Giovanni Bardi, Discorso sopra il giuoco del calcio fiorentino [An Essay on Florentine Rugby] (Florence: Giunti, 1580). Early modern calcio was not soccer/football, as it is now, but a more elaborate game with 27 players to a side; the ball was struck more with the hand than the foot. Filopono (‘workaholic’, the nickname taken by Stefano di Francesco Sterponi) was not a tourist but a professor of rhetoric who took a position at the University of Florence around 1516 and in a letter described calcio to a former colleague in Pisa.2 Allen Guttmann, Sports Spectators (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 35–52, 192–5; Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry, and Pageants in the Middle Ages (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).3 René d'Anjou, Le Livre des Tournois du Roi René [c. 1460] [King Rene's Book of Tournaments] (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, ms. français 2695).4 ‘Cette chose fut si élevée et publiée en Angleterre, que proprement cils qui nul désir ni volonté n'avoient de faire armes certifioient qu'ils seroient pour voir ceux qui armes feroient sur la place, au jour et terme qui mis y étoit' (Jean Froissart, ‘Les Chroniques [c. 1400] [Chronicles]’, in Historiens et chroniqueurs du Moyen-âge [Historians and chroniclers of the middle ages], ed. A. Pauphilet and E. Pognon, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, (Paris: NRF-Gallimard, 1963), 678).5 ‘Sont maintes bonnes villes qui leur offrent les deffraiz a nombre de chevaulx et le bancquet, pour avoir le prouffit des survenans’ (Antoine de La Sale, ‘Traité des anciens et des nouveaux tournois’ [A treatise on former and current tournaments], in Antoine de La Sale. La fabrique de l'oeuvre et de l’écrivain [Antoine de La Sale, the making of the work and of the writer], ed. Sylvie Lefèvre, Publications romanes et françaises (Genève: Droz, 2006), 307).6 Early examples include Petrarch's Lettere familiari [before 1374], ed. V. Rossi, 4 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1934) and the anonymous Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris (1405–1449), ed. A. Tuety (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1975).7 Jacques de Villamont, Les voyages du seigneur de Villamont Gentilhomme du pays de Bretaigne. Divisez en trois livres [The Travels of the Lord of Villamont, a Gentleman of Brittany, in Three Books] (Paris: Claude de Monst'oeil et Jean Richer, 1595), 285r°–288v°; references are to the Bibliothèque nationale de France copy of this edition, available online, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k106196h/f1.image; Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary [1617], 4 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907–1908) II, 84–9.8 The Travels of Leo of Rozmital …, ed. and trans. Malcolm Letts, The Hakluyt Society 108 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). See in particular the account of his stay in Brussels at the court of the duke of Burgundy (36–9). Among other things the Bohemian delegation were the astonished spectators of an ice-skating race.9 Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage … en France et en Italie, Par la Suisse & l'Allemagne en 1580 & 1581, avec des notes de M. de Querlon, 2 vols. (Rome et Paris: Chez Le Jay, 1774); John McClelland, ‘Montaigne and the Sports of Italy’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme XXVII, no. 2 (2003): 41–51.10 ‘… à la clarté d'un nombre infiny de flambeaux .… mais le plaisir estoit bien encore plus de voir resonner & briller le fer des armes, des puissans coups d'espees qu'ils se donnoient les uns aux autres’ (300v°).11 On Dallington's life and career see Karl Josef Höltgen, ‘Sir Robert Dallington (1561–1637): Writer, Traveller, Pioneer of Taste’, Huntington Library Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1984): 147–77.12 Robert Dallington, The View of Fraunce (London: Symon Stafford, 1604; Shakespeare Association Facsimiles no. 13 London: Humphrey Milford, 1936), Tv°–Vv°.13 Jean-Michel Mehl, Les jeux au royaume de France du XIIIeau début du XVIesiècle [Games in the Kingdom of France from the 13th Century to the Beginning of the 16th] (Paris: Fayard, 1990); Georges Vigarello, ‘Jeux populaires: les paris et les prix dans la France classique’ [The Games of the People: Wagers and Prizes in Pre-Revolutionary France], in Sport and Culture in Early Modern Europe/Le sport dans la civilisation de l'Europe pré-moderne, Essays and Studies 20, ed. John McClelland and Brian Merrilees (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009), 319–38.14 Villamont had earlier made almost the identical remark about the Padua students (Voyages, 296r°). On the importance of gentlemanly sports in Italian student life, see Paul Grendler, ‘Fencing, Playing Ball, and Dancing in Italian Renaissance Universities’, in ed. McClelland and Merrilees, 293–318.15 Thomas Coryat, Coryat's Crudities hastily gobbled up … & now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling members of this kingdome [1611], 2 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905).16 Pallone was a sport played widely in Italy in the sixteenth century and later also in the Low Countries. It is described in detail by Antonio Scaino, Trattato del giuoco della palla [A Treatise on Ball Games] (Venice: Giolito de' Ferrari, 1555) who pictures the armlet (bracciale in Italian) that Coryat refers to. It is fundamentally an early variety of volleyball without the net and in some places using the facades of buildings for ricochets (John McClelland, Body and Mind: Sport in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Sport in the Global Society, (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 78). In Charles Sturridge's 1991 film of E. M. Forster's novel Where Angels Fear to Tread the hero is seen playing pallone.17 Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, or a Complete Journey through Italy, 2 vols. (Paris: Du Moutier; London: John Starkey, 1670). The London title page specifies that he had ‘Travelled through Italy Five times.’18 John McClelland, ‘Ball Games, from the Roman Gentleman to the Renaissance Warrior’, in Militarism, Sport, Europe: War without Weapons, ed. J. A. Mangan, European Sports History Review 5 (2003), 46–64.19 On Moryson in Ireland at the time of the first plantations, see R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1988), 3–43.20 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. P. Villey et V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1965), ch. II 12, ‘De l'exercitation.’21 The most generally influential account of this shift is Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).22 From Vittorino da Feltre (1423) to Richard Mulcaster (1581) humanistically inspired programs of education always advocated strenuous exercise and sports; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientifically inspired programs drastically reduce this component and limit it to young boys.
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