Introduction: A Passion for Games

Summary

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides a general background on the European passion for games in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As well as giving a brief overview of some of the most popular games in the period, the discussion addresses the various roles that games played in early modern society. The examination then moves on to elucidate a wide range of ancillary topics related to games and their play, while also looking at the ways in which games and game playing revealed greater truths about the inner workings of European culture. In identifying leitmotifs and metaphors used by authors, dramatists, and artists, the investigation shows that the games and issues discussed in the essays are part of a much larger cultural narrative.

Keywords: chess, playing cards, gambling, tennis, educational games, game metaphors

Writing in his Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), Baldassare Castiglione engages his characters in a dialogue on the role of game play in the making of an ideal courtier. A young man asks if it is “wrong for the courtier to play at cards and dice?,” with his respondent—a courtier himself—assuring him that it is fine as long as he does not neglect things of greater importance nor play to win money and cheat his partner. As for chess, although acknowledging that it is “a refined and ingenious recreation,” the speaker goes on to say that it takes too much time and study to master the game, time and effort that is best spent in more noble pursuits; in short, he concludes that for chess “mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence.” While there were a number of chess advocates who would have certainly disagreed with him, Castiglione seems to be arguing for temperance in game play, recognizing, if not anticipating, the burgeoning taste for such diversions that was to gain traction as the century progressed.

That a discussion on the relative merits of game play should figure in a manual on courtier conduct is indicative of how thoroughly the penchant for games had been embraced by European society. Indeed, commensurate with an increased interest in, and opportunity for leisurely pastimes, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented vogue for playing games. We may get a good idea of this phenomenon by considering the way games are presented in François Rabelais's classic text Gargantua and Pantagruel (1542).