'Lector Ludens'

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, debating the acceptability of games and recreation was serious business. With Lector Ludens, Michael Scham uses Cervantes{u2019}s Don Quijote and Novelas ejemplares as the basis for a wide-ranging exploration of early modern Spanish views on recreations ranging from cards and dice to hunting, attending the theater, and reading fiction. Shifting fluidly between modern theories of play, little-known Spanish treatises on leisure and games, and the evidence in Cervantes{u2019}s own works, Scham illuminates Cervantes{u2019}s intense fascination with games, play, and leisure, as well as the tensions in early modern Spain between the stern moralizing of the Counter-Reformation and the playfulness of Renaissance humanism. -- From publisher's website.