Play

Abstract

This chapter opens with a set of medieval wooden statues in Audley End House in Essex that survived in part because they spent a period being used by children as toys. It considers the uneven trajectories through which these objects have passed--existing at different points as holy things, playthings, and art-things--to consider the wider temporal narratives into which play (and especially the playing of children) is often folded. It considers the way in which educative and habituating schemes from Plato to Renaissance figures such as Thomas Elyot and Montaigne involve the interpretation of play as a linear process of habituation, but it argues that these narratives involve a defensive simplification of the way in which play can in fact unfold in and through time, an attempt to limit and tame its meanings.