Cultures of Play
About the Book Series
Cultures of Play, 1300-1700 provides a forum for investigating the full scope of medieval and early modern play, from toys and games to dramatic performances, from etiquette manuals and literary texts to bulls and tractates, from jousting to duels, and from education to early scientific investigation. Inspired by the foundational work of Johan Huizinga as well as later contributions by Roger Caillois, Eugen Fink, and Bernard Suits, this series publishes monographs and essay collections that address the ludic aspects of premodern life. The accent of this series falls on cultural practices that have thus far eluded traditional disciplinary models. Our goal is to make legible modes of thought and action that until recently seemed untraceable, thereby shaping the growing scholarly discourses on playfulness both past and present.
Games and Sports in Renaissance Italy: The Art of Play
1st Edition
By Kelli Wood
May 27, 2026
This book offers a cultural, visual, and material history of games in Renaissance Italy. Games in the Renaissance offered an inventive and imaginative understanding of the world for their players, one founded not only on iterative performances, but also through a visual and material culture ...
Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th-17th Centuries
1st Edition
Edited
By Robin O'Bryan
December 01, 2025
This collection of essays examines the vogue for games and game playing as expressed in art and literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Focusing on games as a leitmotif of creative expression, these scholarly inquiries are framed as a response to two main questions: how were games ...
Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England
1st Edition
Edited
By Tom Bishop, Gina Bloom, Erika T. Lin
December 01, 2025
Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars ...
Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift
1st Edition
Edited
By Holly Faith Nelson, James William Daems
December 01, 2025
This pioneering collection of nine original essays carves out a new conceptual path in the field by theorizing the ways in which the language of games and warfare inform and illuminate each other in the early modern cultural imagination. They consider how warfare and games are mapped onto each ...
Women, Entertainment, and Precursors of the French Salon, 1532-1615
1st Edition
By Julie Campbell
December 01, 2025
This study of ludic literary society in sixteenth-century France addresses Italianate practices of philosophical and literary sociability as they took root there. It asserts that entertainment activities of women-led circles illustrate the richly complex precursors of the seventeenth-century salons...