Sports & hobbies

Description

Western societies have turned leisure and sport into reference points and models that permeate all spheres of life. These practices are at the crossroads of the major political, economic, social and cultural trends of each era. To study their history is to approach the very essence of each great moment in Western history. How can we understand the advent of gymnastics in the 19th century without taking into account the rise of nation states? How can we assess entertainment at the court of Louis XIV without talking about the foundations of royal absolutism? What can we say about medieval tournaments if we don't take the trouble to relate them to the ideal of the combatant that knights embodied in this society of order? Or how can we analyse the ancient Olympic Games without linking them to the culture of the body, medicine and philosophy that developed in Antiquity? Strictly speaking, it is impossible to detach these practices from the societies that founded and organised them.
Contemporary society invents sports, but without any spontaneous generation. Sport therefore owes a great deal to the vast chronological period that stretches from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, where we find entertainment practices and forms of physical exercise from which contemporary society has drawn. This original work looks back at the ways of being, living and thinking in each era.