From the beginning of time, humans have created and passed on to their children sports and games that teach skills, promote leisure, and encourage friendly competition. By studying these sports and games, we learn much about the culture and traditions of our ancestors. Sports and Games of Medieval Cultures focuses on those sports, games, and play rituals from across the globe that were invented and played during the time of the Middle Ages. Teachers, students, and sports enthusiasts will enjoy discovering the early origins of their favorite sports and games, and how they have evolved into the familiar versions of today. They will also learn about many games otherwise lost to history, and find instructions on how to adapt them for modern play. As one of four books in the series Sports and Games Through History, it is divided into seven regions of the world including: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, The Middle East, North America, and Oceania. Each section describes sports, games, and play rituals for that region, and students can compare and contrast similar sports and games from different regions. Descriptions of equipment, with instructions on making or adapting the game pieces, are given for those students who would like to recreate the games for either multicultural assignments or for fun. This unique book belongs in every library's sports history and multicultural collections.

Identifies sports, games, and play from cultures around the world that were invented and played during medieval times.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, games were not an idle pastime, but were in fact important tools for exploring, transmitting, enhancing, subverting, and challenging social practices and their rules. Their study, through both visual and material sources, offers a unique insight into medieval and early modern gaming culture, shedding light not only on why, where, when, with whom and in what conditions and circumstances people played games, but also on the variety of interpretations that they had of games and play. Representations of games, and of artefacts associated with games, also often served to communicate complex ideas on topics that ranged from war to love, and from politics to theology.00This volume offers a particular focus onto the type of games that required little or no physical exertion and that, consequently, all people could enjoy, regardless of age, gender, status, occupation, or religion. The representations and artefacts discussed here by contributors, who come from varied disciplines including history, literary studies, art history, and archaeology, cover a wide geographical and chronological range, from Spain to Scandinavia to the Ottoman Turkey and from the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and beyond. Far from offering the ?last word? on the subject, it is hoped that this volume will encourage further studies.

Based on reports from 19th century explorers, museum artifacts, and other historical documents, the rules, equipment, and diagrams as they are currently understood are provided here for readers, along with suggestions for adapting these sports and games for modern times. Sports enthusiasts and students will find this volume a valuable resource for discovering the earliest beginnings of our modern-day sports. Divided according to seven geopolitical regions of the world, Sports and Games of the Ancients describes the sports, games, and play of our earliest ancestors. Their need for survival in often hostile conditions enable them to develop skills such as long distance running or archery, and these skills were then practiced in friendly competitions that evolved into our modern-day marathons and Olympic events. Covering such games as Africa's mancala and senet, the martial arts of Asia, the log run and Tejo of Latin America, and the boomerang and surfing of Oceania, this volume provides a solid picture of the sports and games of our ancient ancestors.

According to author Patrick Kelly, Catholics have always engaged in play and sports. During the Middle Ages, games and sports were played on feast days and Sundays, and these activities are shown in prayer books, in woodcuts, and on stained-glass windows in churches and cathedrals. Contrary to the view of some sports historians, pre-Reformation Christians did not "loathe the flesh" but instead insisted on the unity of body and soul. Book jacket.

A lively survey encompassing the Orient, the Americas, and the classical world From the Olympic Games of Greece to the gladiatorial contests of Rome, sport in the ancient world was fiercely competitive and included a wider range of physical contests than we moderns might suspect. The early Chinese played forms of polo and golf, while half a world away, Hohokam and Maya Indians enjoyed team ball games. Nigel Crowther, a leading authority on classical Greek sport, here casts his net over the entire ancient world to reveal the variety, and often the intensity, of sport in earlier times, from 3000 b.c.e. to the Middle Ages. Taking in twenty premodern societies on five continents--with particular emphasis on ancient Greece and Rome and the Byzantine Empire--he traces connections to modern sporting attitudes, practices, and institutions as he describes how athletics figured in cultural arenas that extended beyond physical prowess to ritual, social status, military associations, and politics. Crowther takes us back to the birth of sumo wrestling in Japan and describes the sports of the Sumerians and Hittites. He documents bull leaping and boxing as recorded on pottery in Crete, as well as running and archery as practiced by the pharaohs in Egypt. He shows the significance of the early Olympic Games, describes the Romans' use of gladiatorial contests for political ends, and analyzes the influence of Byzantine chariot racing on society. He also notes the changing role of women in ancient sports--from their prominence in Egyptian contests, to the mythological Atalanta, to female Roman gladiators. As informative as it is entertaining, Sport in Ancient Times opens new vistas for general readers, students, and sport historians. It offers a broad look at ancient sport and will enrich readers' appreciation of games they enjoy today.

A Cultural History of Sport in the Medieval Age covers the period 600 to 1450. Lacking any viable ancient models, sport evolved into two distinct forms, divided by class. Male and female aristocrats hunted and knights engaged in jousting and tournaments, transforming increasingly outdated modes of warfare into brilliant spectacle. Meanwhile, simpler sports provided recreational distraction from the dangerously unsettled conditions of everyday life. Running, jumping, wrestling, and many ball games - soccer, cricket, baseball, golf, and tennis – had their often violent beginnings in this period. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion and segregation; minds, bodies and identities; representation. Noel Fallows is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, USA. Volume 2 in the Cultural History of Sport set General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Mark Dyreson, and John McClelland

A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture. Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil, education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy, saints, the senses, death, and money.

How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question. Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

The game of chess was wildly popular in the Middle Ages, so much so that it became an important thought paradigm for thinkers and writers who utilized its vocabulary and imagery for commentaries on war, politics, love, and the social order. In this collection of essays, scholars investigate chess texts from numerous traditions – English, French, German, Latin, Persian, Spanish, Swedish, and Catalan – and argue that knowledge of chess is essential to understanding medieval culture. Such knowledge, however, cannot rely on the modern game, for today’s rules were not developed until the late fifteenth century. Only through familiarity with earlier incarnations of the game can one fully appreciate the full import of chess to medieval society. The careful scholarship contained in this volume provides not only insight into the significance of chess in medieval European culture but also opens up avenues of inquiry for future work in this rich field.