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A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Enlightenment . Vol. 4 of A Cultural History of Sport

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21558450.50.1.13

2155-8450

Darrin M. McMahon,

Sports and Physical Education Studies

This work, which covers the period between 1650 and 1800, constitutes volume 4 of Bloomsbury's six-volume A Cultural History of Sport. Its focus is on Great Britain and Western Europe, with some attention paid to North America, and it follows the organizational conventions mandated by the Bloomsbury series as a whole, with an introduction and a general chapter on the purposes of sport during the time frame under consideration, followed by seven more chapters dealing with time and space, equipment and technology, rules and order, conflict and accommodation, inclusion and segregation, athletes and identities, and finally, representation. If the mandate is formulaic, it has the advantage of clearly delineating changes and continuities over time. Richly illustrated and with an exacting standard of scholarship throughout, the present volume offers a useful resource for scholars of sport in particular and historians of early-modern culture and society more generally.As Rebekka von Mallinckrodt observes in her lucid introduction to the volume, the period between 1650 and 1800 has tended to be neglected in sport historiography, characterized as a kind of holding place and moment of decline between the general reawakening of interest in exercise of the Renaissance and the advent of modern sports in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mallinckrodt and the other contributors to the volume, however, contest that characterization, treating the period on its own terms as a vital and unique period of experimentation.What, if anything, was “enlightened” about sport in the Age of Enlightenment? None of the authors in the volume puts that question directly, but collectively they provide numerous answers. For one thing, the growing commercialization of sport in the period created the conditions for what Mallinckrodt and Angela Schattner see in their jointly authored chapter on “Sporting Time and Sporting Space” as a fundamental conflict between “church and sports during the period . . . that concerned Catholics and Protestants alike” (54). As both Enlightenment ideas and economic considerations created pressure to reduce the number of feast days and religious holidays in the annual calendar, a premium was placed on leisure time. Religious authorities pressed for Sundays to be devoted exclusively to worship, whereas publicans and others took advantage of the sabbath to organize sporting events as forms of popular entertainment that could bring in clientele. The drinking, gambling, and general mayhem that often accompanied these events drew religious sanction, as did the brutality of certain forms of bloodsports, which also fell afoul of Enlightenment assaults on cruelty and inhumanity. Thus, if there were places of overlap between Enlightenment and religion in sport, as there were in other facets of eighteenth-century social life, there were also tensions.Enlightenment and sports culture also came together in the emergence of the public sphere, as a new culture of sociability and associativity gave rise to sports clubs and voluntary associations devoted to the cultivation of games and competition. This was, above all, the case in Great Britain, which witnessed the emergence of hunting, angling, and archery associations, along with numerous societies organized around the new pastimes of cricket and golf. But the authors here find evidence of similar (if less extensive) developments on the Continent, as well as in North America, where hunting clubs, fishing clubs, and horse-racing associations sprouted up on the English model. These were, for the most part, like the Enlightenment public more broadly, affairs of men of the elite and middling sort. But the authors of the volume do an exemplary job of complementing that focus with a sustained interest in the exclusions and inclusions that sporting life in the long eighteenth century entailed for women and ordinary people.Still another way in which the Enlightenment intersected with sporting culture is through its conceptualization and study. The eighteenth century saw numerous attempts to codify and publish rules, with treatises produced on cockfighting, the laws of cricket (1744), the first rules of golf (1744), and Broughton's rules for pugilism (1744), among others. That meant greater standardization and systemization.In other ways, too, Enlightenment thinkers brought reflection to bear on physical activity. As older humoral theories of medical physiology gave way to vitalist and mechanical understanding of the body, Enlightenment thinkers considered new ways to fine-tune the human machine. John Locke stressed the importance of physical activity for childhood health and development; Rousseau and others counseled the benefits of swimming, running, and exercise; and pedagogues and physicians like the Genevan Théodore Tronchin praised the benefits of strolling, with the new verb tronchiner gaining popularity in the second half of the eighteenth century as a synonym for taking a walk. Indeed, as readers amble through the pages of this volume, they will be reminded that Enlightenment was not only an affair of the mind.