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Power Play: The Literature
and Politics of Chess in the late Middle Ages. By Jenny Adams. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. x + 272; 9 illustrations.
$49.95 (cloth).
Jenny Adams aims to address a complex set of issues in Power Play:
The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages. As
her title suggests, her central point of interest is the interaction of
the political and the literary around the chessboard, which latter she
considers, variously, in historical and metaphorical terms. None of this
is a simple task, given the significance, both broad and deep, the game
came to hold for European courtly society from the late twelfth century
forward. Indeed, impressing upon the reader how extensively chess pervaded
medieval life is one of Adams's several successes here—and were
her book to contribute no more to enlighten us, her eye-opening effort
by this alone would be well justified. But interrogations that attempt
to reach so far in so short a space, as Adams herself acknowledges in
her introductory pages, "carry with them risks of generalization and also
of specialization. In an effort to combat the former" (she goes on) "I
have tried to confine the first half of my analysis to two allegorical
works (one produced in Italy and the other in France), and the second
half to the ways in which fourteenth-century English writers reacted to
the allegorical traditions initiated by these two earlier texts" (p. 7).
The texts she makes her primary focus are Jacobus de Cessolis's Liber
de moribus hominum et officiis nobelium ac popularium super ludo scachorum
("The Book of the Morals of Men and the Duties of Nobles and Commoners,
on the Game of Chess," best known simply as the Liber de ludo scachorum);
two anonymous works, Les Echecs amoureux and the Tale of Beryn;
Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes and William Caxton's English
translation, as the Game and Playe of the Chesse, of Jacobus's
Liber de ludo scachorum. How well these both satisfy and violate her stated
program (an Italian work, a French one, but three fifteenth-century
English products) perhaps suggests at once the considerable strengths
and the primary weakness of Adams's study.
R. F. Yeager
University of West Florida |
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