Featured on PDR in the collection The Art of Swimming (1587)

During a 1934 lecture to the Sociéte de Psychologie in Paris, Marcel Mauss, “the father of French ethnology”, admitted frustration. What interested him most about culture was often filed away under “miscellaneous”, for his subject matter did not readily reveal its significance: “I was well aware . . . that the Polynesians do not swim as we do, that my generation did not swim as the present generation does. But what social phenomena did these represent?” Everard Digby's 1587 De Arte Natandi (The Art of Swimming), considered the first English treatise on the practice, makes a perfect case study for Mauss’ question, revealing how seemingly innate human practices can be cultural techniques, which ebb and flow over time, like the beautiful freshwater bodies within which…