Tennis: A Cultural History

Front Cover
Leicester University Press, 1997 - Sports & Recreation - 452 pages
The cover painting shows an 18th-century Italian game of tennis, and the opening chapter is intriguingly subtitled "Tennis and the Devil." Gillmeister (linguistics, U. of Bonn) provides a sociohistorical survey of this popular sport. Illustrations and photos as well as commentary trace the game from its origins as "the monk's racket" --an attenuated medieval form of football--, through Renaissance literary references to it, to its evolution as lawn tennis in America and Europe. Distributed in the US by Books International. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Contents

the monks racket
1
The tennis games of the Middle Ages
35
The language of tennis
84
Copyright

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