Games and Sloth: Working for the Common Good in Late Medieval Flanders

Games, sloth and the common good are familiar subjects to scholars of late medieval Europe, yet the connections contemporaries made between them have never been properly explored. How these rhetorical ideas were aligned, how they were used and by whom, across a wide social spectrum, are the central questions in this article; and examining them reveals how malleable (and gendered) they were. Discourses on games, developed by schoolmen and other churchmen in relation to recreation, and integrated with ideas of sloth and the common good, were harnessed to serve the authority of rulers in late med... Mehr ...