| Renaissance scholars have typically described sport as synonymous with holiday revelry, tavern hopping, and other disorderly activities. Bakhtin's influential definition of carnival as a "temporary liberation from the established order" would appear to describe sports like wrestling, which were extremely violent and often resulted in unruliness. I argue that sport also figured centrally in Renaissance conceptions of order, contributing to the physical, mental, and social stability of the English people. I demonstrate how sport mediated extremes of order and disorder, control and excess, in the early modern imagination.; Many of the greatest contemporary prose writers---Elyot, Ascham, and Mulcaster, among others---argued that sport was vital to the health of the nation. In the opening chapter, I demonstrate the influence of Plato, Galen, and other authorities on Renaissance proponents of sport, who claimed that sport was physiologically beneficial to the individual, militarily beneficial to the commonwealth, and necessary to the reigning class system. The emergence of modern science, the transformation of warfare by firearms, the rise of evangelical Protestantism, and greater social mobility, among other developments, gradually weakened such arguments for sport's functionality, transforming it into one of the most controversial phenomena in early modern England.; The subsequent chapters of my dissertation explore how major Renaissance authors---including Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton---employed sporting imagery, metaphor, and allegory to defend or critique the social order that sport was traditionally believed to uphold. Whereas editors usually gloss the myriad references to sport in the literature of the period as mere topical allusions, I demonstrate their vital importance in such works as Henry VI and Samson Agonistes. On the other hand, works that treated sport explicitly, the Book of Sports and the Compleat Angler, for instance, are considered in the context of the political and religious wrangles they attempted to mediate. By revising the common misconception that sports were simply disorderly activities, I highlight the need for a more thorough scholarly excavation of the many Renaissance texts within which sport figures so prominently. |
