ABSTRACT
The growth of the popularity of ball games among the upper classes almost exactly parallels the gradual demise of early modern Europe’s longest-lived sport, the knightly tournament. In fact the two sports developed along opposite paths. From being an effi gy of war in the Middle Ages, the tournament had turned into pure spectacle, an occasion for young and not-so-young knights to show off for the ladies. Ball games – calcio in particular – had gone the other way. Both Scaino (1555) and Bardi (1580) insist on battle array and tactics as the paradigm for calcio (and, in the case of Scaino, for tennis as well) (McClelland 2003a). As Richard Lassels’ (1670: 212-15) account of the preparations for a match reveals, a calcio match came about when two groups of young men conducted mock negotiations with each other in the manner of autonomous states; when the negotiations broke down, they would ‘resolve on a battle at Calcio’.
