1st Edition
Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture New Perspectives on the History of Sports and Motion
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Rebekka v. Mallinckrodt and Angela Schattner
I: What Sports? Tracing Early Modern Sports Practices
1 The Invention of Sports: Early Modern Ball Games
Wolfgang Behringer
2 Sport and Recreation in Sixteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Accidental Deaths
Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski
3 Putting Sports in Place: Sports Venues in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England and their Social Significance
Angela Schattner
II: Sport for Money and Glory? Commercialisation and Professionalisation
4 The Capital of Tennis: Jeux de Paume as Urban Sport Facilities in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Paris
Christian Jaser
5 The Bruising Business: Pugilism, Commercial Culture and Celebrity, 1700–1750
Benjamin Litherland
6 An ‘Art and a Science’: Eighteenth-Century Sports Training
David Day
III: Promoting Health or Danger? Physical Exercise under Scrutiny
7 Exercise for Women
Alessandro Arcangeli
8 Healthy, ‘Decorous’ and Pleasant Exercise: Competing Models and Practices of the Italian Nobility (Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)
Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey
9 Exercise, Health and Gender: Normative Discourses and Practices in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century German-Speaking Countries
Martin Dinges
IV: Enhancing or Endangering Status and Identity?
10 Masculine and Political Identity in German Martial Sports
B. Ann Tlusty
11 French Enlightenment Swimming
Rebekka v. Mallinckrodt
12 Swordsmanship and Society in Early Modern Japan
Michael Wert
Index
Biography
Rebekka von Mallinckrodt is Professor for Early Modern History at the University of Bremen. She has worked in the field of religious studies, history of the body as well as postcolonial studies. With regard to sports and physical exercise she has published Bewegtes Leben - Körpertechniken in der Frühen Neuzeit (Body Techniques in the Early Modern Period), exposition catalogue Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel (Harrassowitz 2008) as well as several articles on the cultural history of swimming, diving and running.
Dr Angela Schattner is Max Weber 2016/17 Fellow at the University of Bremen and was Research Fellow in Early Modern History at the German Historical Institute London from 2010-2016. She specialises in the social and cultural history of Early Modern Britain and Germany and the history of the body, disability, sports, exercise and leisure. She is the author of Zwischen Familie, Heiler und Fürsorge. Das Bewältigungsverhalten von Epileptikern in deutschsprachigen Gebieten des 16.-18. Jahrunderts.
"From all points of view, Mallinckrodt's and Schattner's books is an essential set of studies for historians of sport and the body and in addition for social and cultural historians who have neglected the role athletic activities played in the fabric of early modern societies." - John McClelland, Ludica. Annali di storia e civiltà del gioco, 21-22, 2015-2016
