Inventing the Language of Sport, 1170-1750

Evenement organisé conjointement par la Section d'histoire de la Faculté des Lettres, le Centre d'études olympiques & de la globalisation du sport et la Summer School "Doing, Writing, Thinking Sport History" de l'Université de Lausanne.

Abstract:

The sporting culture that emerged in Western Europe beginning in the mid-ninth century CE was completely different from—and largely ignorant of—the institutionalized professional and recreational sports that had been practiced in Greco-Roman Antiquity. To the extent that they were formalized, the new sports were ad hoc sportifications of military practices and might thus be described using the Latin of Vegetius, whose 4th century De re militari was one of the few ancient texts that continued to be preserved through the Dark Ages. But as these sports diversified technologically—new weapons, new forms of protection, new ways of competing—and refined surrogates were invented (e.g., jeu de paume), they also became institutionalized as legitimate leisure and spectator activities. They consequently required a language that would define and regulate them during the period when Latin was losing its generalized status and the modern languages of Western Europe were being codified lexically and grammatically.

This lecture will explore the parallel development of sport and language and their mutual interferences as both evolve from their embryonic, pragmatic state in the twelfth century to their emergence as finished forms in the mid-eighteenth.