ABSTRACT
There is certainly no shortage of topics as far as the study of folklore or general cultural history are concerned, though sport seen and interpreted as a cultural historical phenomenon is, in Germany at least, only now beginning to be intensely investigated and portrayed. Sports studies, the discipline covering this field, has now found its way into numerous universities or has established its own research institutions. Yet, unlike musicology at university level, which undertook to constitute itself as a primarily historical discipline well over 100 years ago, sports studies seems to have preferred to give its allegiance to the scientific field. Thus, as far as the cultural history of tennis is concerned, the standard work in the German language is the study published in 1990 by Heiner Gillmeister, not a scholar of sports studies but a philologist working at the English Department of the University of Bonn. As its title indicates, this monograph sees itself as ‘a cultural history of tennis’.4
