Hearty Parlor Games From the Middle Ages : A HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE Revelations of the Medieval World; <i> edited by Georges Duby; translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press</i> /<i> Harvard University Press: $39.95; 637 pp. illustrated) </i>

“We begin around AD 1000 when the documentary record suddenly becomes richer. Another turning point, no less dramatic, occurred some time between 1300 and 1350. After this, everything takes a new coloration. The change was in part accidental (precipitated, most notably, by the Black Plague of 1348-1350), yet within a few decades it (was) profoundly altered by the way people lived throughout the Western world. A related phenomenon is the shift that occurred in the focus of European development, which moved from northern France to Italy primarily but also to Spain and northern Germany. Other changes affect our sources of information, enabling us to see more clearly the realities of what we are calling private life. During the first half of the 14th Century, a large piece of the veil that previously marked those realities was suddenly torn away.”

The correct approach for clarifying what “private” means is the word’s manifold opposition with “public.” Duby’s introduction rightly interprets this opposition as being fundamentally connected with the law (“a different juridical realm,” “a fundamental legal barrier,” “utmost legal importance”). In fact, “before beginning to study the place of private life in what has been called feudal society, we must locate the boundary between two rival powers, one of which was considered ‘public.’ ”

The useful but prosaic work of tracing the factual traces of domestic life by interpreting legal documents is soon abandoned for a more picturesque approach. In Duby’s view, the Middle Ages revisited acquire the looks of a game reserve, where you can observe from up close the behavior of the knight, the count, the countess in their habitat. “A solitary male” is the godlike ruler of the medieval community and of the castle; it is repeatedly indicated that he is akin to the abbot (another type of solitary male) who marshals the monastery. Of course, “There was a considerable difference between the noble household and the monastery.” Why? “The residents of the one did not live in such close proximity to the angels as those of the other.” In turn, the lack of proximity to the angels was the consequence of habit. Boys “were sent out into the world to seize whatever they could, particularly wives.” The outcome had to be that “the household was not asexual.”

The female appears very busy in her territory during daytime. She knew about proximity, so “she also kept an eye on her domestic servants. When one maid became pregnant, the lady of the castle forced the putative father to marry the girl. Imperiously she punished and terrorized all the women in the house and forced them to obey her will.” The irascible female is more tranquil (maybe just outwardly, see below) when she retires for a repast with the solitary male; after which they move from the “hall” to another part of the habitat, the “chamber.” The public is excluded. “Gone was the wine of the feast, offered freely to guests.” In case maidens happened to be in the chamber, they would “tousle and comb his hair and pick out the lice.” Once the maidens were chased away from the chamber, the couple would find only “lustral water” (for religious ablutions, I trust), and--whatever the phrase may mean--”prophylactic lights.” According to the author of the next chapter, Charles de la Ronciere, the attire at that point offered alternatives that can be explained by basic climactic considerations: “People sometimes wore chemises but might just as easily go naked, because it was hot.”

Readers of medieval literature will learn that the concepts, principles and rituals of courtly love were used by the solitary male to quell disorder among the riotous in the household. “What we know about those rituals and their development from the middle of the 12th Century on suggests that the lord used his wife as bait, as a sort of decoy, offering her as the prize in a game whose rules, increasingly sophisticated as time went by, obliged participants--the unmarried knights and clerics of the household--to control their instincts ever more firmly.” Apparently, no “prophylactic lights” were provided for them, no matter how sophisticated the rules of the game became as time went by. It is true that disorder mingled with romance at every corner. The master of the castle of La Haye was “an intruder who married a woman who had inherited the property.” This quick-thinking intruder was ultimately killed by his own soldiers, all right; but normally, “If the lord was found dead in his bed, his body bloated, blame was laid at the door of the woman of the house, the mistress first of all.”

This first essay on Northern feudal France is a 155-page treatise, containing not only the “historization of the ideology of the couple” but also “a distinction between lineage and kindred, the theory of cognatic systems,” and much more. I appreciated the pages on the plan of St. Gall, where I found a single problem: They reminded me very much of the pretiosum opus by Walter Horn and Ernest Born, “The Plan of St. Gall” (3 volumes, Berkeley, 1979), which unfortunately is not cited either in the bibliography or at the reproduction facing Page 38.

The next part of the book consists of 153 pages by Prof. de la Ronciere, plus a few shorter essays by various authors. De la Ronciere takes us to different social and political scenery. In Tuscany (Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Siena) feudalism is superseded by city-states, where a democratically administered power is in the hands of businessmen, merchants, land-owners. In the title, “Tuscan Notables on the Eve of the Renaissance,” the term “notable” refers to the bourgeois upper class, not to the few remaining feudal lords who resisted in the mountains of Casentino or of Lunigiana. Tuscany! At the onset of the chapter the sweet sound of my tongue! It is my tough luck if two out of the six words are mistranslated ( Fagli mestiere in 15th-Century Italian means “He needs” not “Make it your business.”)

“To live in private was above all to live at home, in the midst of the family”; “The family was the heart of private life.” Apparently a lovely informality flowered in what today looks like severe-to-distrustful architecture: “Ladies did not worry about . . . the neighbors who watched through windows kept wide open to let in the cool evening air, as they prepared for bed or rose in the morning.”

We will find a considerable joviality in the Tuscan upper-class way of life in many of its other manners and practices, or rather I should say confirmed idiosyncrasies, sexual peculiarities, ecological qualifications and generally anthropological patterns. Given the interest of the topic, it is regrettable that the handful of Italian sources sparsely quoted in the bibliography are both haphazard and blemished by misprints.

De la Ronciere’s description of living-room accommodations brought vividly to my memory the look of today’s waiting halls in the historical buildings that have been adapted for public use: “Living rooms were generally furnished with a table or two and occasionally benches or stools, although some were left completely empty.” The squalor of the habitat did not prevent the notables from merriment. Of course, “Washing was one good opportunity for seeing other family members”; as expected, “In the privacy of the bedroom husband and wife made themselves at home.” Gesture language of Tuscan notables in the dark is eloquent: “Some husbands fell asleep at once--so much for marital intimacy. Fortunately, this was not the case with all.” Such enlightening symptoms call for an imaginative and yet rarely punctilious conjecture; the historian’s conclusion appears alarmingly credible to this reviewer: “Despite the reticence of the moralists, we divine,” he affirms, “from their writings that couples knew and used positions that grew naturally out of long years of lovemaking.”

Although feudal France and republican Tuscany are so different, the shared methodology of the two essays succeeds in bringing to light similarities that should not go unnoticed. Outside of Tuscany proper, but not so far away, the pursuit of fun led to scenes that parallel (even if they are graced by a hint of tasteful architectural structures) the zoological depiction of the French solitary male and his maidens: “Mutual delousing was so common among the ladies of Ravenna that a 13th-Century regulation forbade anyone from engaging in the activity under public arcades.”

As we traditionally knew, the games appear to be highly revealing private rituals. According to De la Ronciere, the use of the living room for hearty enjoyment is attested by “various objects such as a chessboard, an account book, or a clyster.” The presence of these various objects in the notables’ living rooms is meaningful. Although the wording of the text is guarded about it, assuredly they were not meant to be used in concert with each other. Either you play chess or look at your account book. As for clyster, the definition of this word in the Concise Oxford Dictionary is “ENEMA; (vb) treat with--(L.f. Gk kluster syringe ( kluzo wash).” Webster, unabridged, expands: “(OFr. clistere ; L. klyster a clyster pipe, syringe, from klyzein , to wash.) In medicine, a rectal injection, an enema.” The discovery that playing clyster was a hobbyhorse for some, maybe a true avocation for others in early Renaissance Florence, and that this spare-time activity was taking place in the notables’ living rooms is a breakthrough in our knowledge of Tuscany and of the Eve of the Renaissance in general. For me, it is a true revelation. I shall look at my birthplace’s palaces with different eyes.