| This dissertation examines the convergent histories of athletics, reading, print, and social discourse in early modern England. I argue that the governing model of early modern sports analysis, with its tendency to read early modern athletics in terms of political disorder and control, has occluded various forms of early modern sports writing, from instructional guides, to manifestos, to mythologies and histories. By recovering and rethinking these discursive modes and the individual early modern sports narratives they produce, my project suggests that, beyond mapping shifts in relations between the athletic and the political, early modern sports yield unexamined stories of the English Renaissance that recalibrate our current understanding of print history, reading practices, social formation, and historiography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.; In chapter one, I demonstrate that the rhetorical and physical logistics of learning sports via textual-material media reconstitute reading as a physical experience while transforming a literary process (reading) into an athletic one (enacting the text). Chapter two turns to the specific print history of swimming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which I trace according to the vexed relations and contingencies it establishes among author, printer, swimmer, book, and natural environment. In chapter three, I consider early modern expressions of sport as an organizing cultural force by way of a case study of cockfighting. I focus in particular on the ways in which the cockfight mediates human sporting activity through alternative practices (such as breeding), spaces (such as the cockpit and den), and agents (namely the fighting cocks themselves). I read early modern defenses of cockfight alongside Geertz's interpretation of the Balinese cockfight in order to reexamine the interpretive paradigm that has figured both sport and early modern culture according to allegorical figurations of power and play. Chapter four continues this focus on sports as a discursive mode through a literary-biographical analysis of the sports career of Roger Ascham. Following the legacy of Ascham's devotions to the sports of archery and cockfighting, I posit an historiographic perspective that frees our critical understanding of early modern sports from the binarized construction of lawful/unlawful recreations. |
