Dante in Relation to the Sports and Pastimes of His Age
1906; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 1; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3713606
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Martial Arts: Techniques, Psychology, and Education
ResumoFROM the outset it must be confessed that Dante is an inadequate exponent of the sports and pastimes of his age.His references are so scanty that they may be considered barely worth collecting.Yet this very scarcity has an interest, because it sets his reader thinking how it was that Dante, who sings and writes of so many sides of Italian life, should almost pass by in silence those amusements which for the majority of his countrymen made life worth living.It is true that contemporary poets provide even less illustrative material than does Dante, but then Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, Cino and the like, in their sonnets, ballads and canzoni bearing mainly upon love, would drawr upon sport for the merest commonplace of metaphor, the stock-in-trade of love poets throughout all ages.Fazio Uberti in his Dittamondo had better opportunities, especially as in Italy sport like everything else had its peculiar local colouring; but he is too severely geographical to be instructive, though he does supply one of the very few references to quintain.A more promising source.might seem to be Francesco da Barberino's Del Regginmento e de' Costurmi delle Donne.He was an exact contemporary of Dante, and his subject is eminently social.But he is unfortunately too prudish and domestic for our purpose.He even warns his lady pupil that a love for balls is a sign of vanity, of the desire for the praise of strangers, and though he allows her to ride abroad during the Quinquagesima, with or without her husband, slhe must allow no strange gentlemen to annex themselves to her cavalcade.Above all, she is warned, if a nun, to shun peeping from the windows VOLUME I
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