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Dedication
‘Let’s joke, but seriously’ (scherzare, sì, ma seriamente)
In memory of Umberto Eco, playful scholar
Play in Renaissance Italy
Peter Burke
polity
Copyright © Peter Burke 2021
The right of Peter Burke to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4344-1
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Preface
A Chinese painter, explaining to his pupils how to paint a grove of bamboo, told them to meditate for months on bamboo, to try to become a bamboo, and then produce their painting in a matter of minutes. In similar fashion, this essay in synthesis, although short and written in the course of a few months, has been long in the making. Writing about festivals, and in particular about Carnival, in my Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) made me want to continue in this direction. Conversations with Philippe Ariès a few months later led to an invitation to give a paper at a conference in Tours in 1980 concerned with ‘Les jeux à la Renaissance’. A conference on ‘tempo libero’, held in Prato in 1992, allowed me to explore the history of the idea of leisure. Writing a book about Castiglione’s Courtier, a dialogue that is presented as a game, encouraged thought about playfulness in the culture of the High Renaissance. A conference on the cultural history of humour, organized by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg and held in Amsterdam, was the occasion for a paper on ‘Frontiers of the Comic’, that turned into a chapter in a collective study of the history of humour, published in 1997.1 In short, I feel that I have been preparing for this essay for more than forty years without knowing it. I have occasionally stolen sentences from my past self in order to construct it, but I believe that this book offers new ideas as well as developing thoughts that were originally expressed in print elsewhere in new directions.
Another invitation, this time from John Henderson and Virginia