Kungarna på racketbanan: Tennis, status och tidigmodern sportifiering

Abstract

The kings of the early modern tennis court: Ball games, status, and early modern sportification in Sweden

In Sweden, the history of sport is a discipline that mainly focuses on the modern era. Sporting life in earlier times has mainly been studied by ethnologists interested in the popular games and competitions of agrarian society. This article focuses instead on real tennis, which was evidently aristocratic in nature and known for its importance in establishing the status of the royals and elites. From an international perspective, tennis under the Vasa dynasty in Sweden (1523–1654) was a peripheral offshoot of an early modern European sports culture. It was introduced at the Swedish royal court in the mid sixteenth century, at a time when Europe’s urban tennis culture had already reached its peak in Central Europe. Tennis’s emergence and development in Sweden in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is described here in terms of an exclusionary process of sportification. It took the form of the institutionalisation of ball games associated with the royal court: the construction of special sports facilities, commercialisation, royal sportswear, and the introduction of sports-related occupations. In other words, it was a process of sportification for the absolute elite of society. Tennis culture in Sweden under the Vasa dynasty was not about the rationalisation of activities or involving as many people as possible to select talent and optimise sporting performance, as is the credo of modern sport. Rather, its driving force was to emphasise both the elites’ difference from their subjects and their affinity with similar elites elsewhere in Europe, achieved using consumption, exclusive habits, and codes of conduct.

The transition from agrarian society’s traditional sporting life to a modern culture of sport, which has been studied extensively in previous research, is not the whole answer when interpreting the tennis playing of the Vasa kings. Typologies of sport history tend to identify a number of characteristics of modern sport against which older forms of sport are measured. The result is history written backwards, with the sporting life of earlier times assumed to be a rudimentary form of modern sport, which in turn is the predetermined end point in the history of sport. This was not the case with tennis in early modern Sweden. This study shows that sporting life in the past must instead be studied in its particular sociocultural context, which was clearly different from that of modern society. It is also misleading to see sportification as a continual development from the Renaissance on, as the literature suggests. In fact, there were two separate processes of sportification, driven independently by different conditions in two distinct periods.