El Joc popular i tradicional als segles XVI i XVII: revisió des d'una perspectiva taxonòmica

Abstract

This article aims to provide food for thought on popular and traditional games based on a review of different documentary and iconographic collections of the recreational culture of the 16TH and 17TH Centuries. The text addresses the study of play and games from an unusual standpoint, namely plotting the recreational forms of the epoch, examining how authors from different sources addressed their systematisation. The different classifications reflect the degree of theorization attained by games and play one of the most widespread recreational practices during the Renaissance and the Baroque periods in order to achieve the role it was to play in society. Games and play, once regarded as the worst of all vices, associated with immorality and idleness, would go on to be widely reviewed from the moral standpoint. Christian morality, based on Aristotle's eutropely and the Thomist thesis, sought to legitimise it in order to redirect it towards its own arena. It was then that games of childhood and youth became part of its school programmes and regulations, particularly with a view to controlling and regulating recreational manifestations at a time when a distinction was being made between children's and adult's games. The formulation of games and play as a pedagogical resource was still very far off, and would not take place until the 18TH and 19TH Centuries, when the rupture between the recreational manifestations of childhood and the adult world was consolidated.