When seeking to define games and gaming, Potter Stewart’s famous description of obscenity-- “I know when I see it”--comes to mind, as games come with a similarly capacious definition. Chess and soccer? These are clearly games. But what about carvings on mirror backs or Old Norse graffiti? I confess that I initially resisted the big-tent understanding of games and play imagined by the editors of Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Yet several essays in, I came to appreciate the open-endedness of this book. Not only does it expand the idea of games itself, but it invites readers to think across cultures and resists any lock-step critical approaches. It also stays remarkably focused on two more specific aspect of gaming: their visual depictions and their often-elastic social functions.
Before I hit the highlights of the collection’s thirteen articles, I offer some overviews. For instance, all authors take time with their archives, and each essay adds something to the volume as a whole. Many essays also have surprising intersections. Some of these are identified by the editors, who have organized the book into the larger categories of “Games and Society” and “Materiality of Games.” Yet many essays find their way to each other across this divide, further deepening the cohesiveness of the collection. Finally, I give kudos to Brepols for not skimping on the images; they are copious, beautiful, and helpful.
Turning now to the individual pieces, I will say upfront that I felt most drawn to the essays about the placement of games in physical space. To this end, Paul Hardwick’s “‘Turne Over the Leef’: Games and Interpretation on Misericords” offers a fascinating introduction to carved scenes of gaming on church misericords. Placed in what is arguably the “devotional heart” of the church, such images (which many times include scenes of wrestling--who knew?!) might feel out of place. Yet as Hardwick argues, this disjunct might well be deliberate, with visual representations of gaming unsettling “the ‘magic circle’ of the ecclesiastical space which, in doing so, both points to its fragility and focuses the mind on the rules of that circle which, if undisrupted, could become unthinkingly automatic” (90).
Hardwick’s article complements the volume’s final essay by Walter Crist, which looks at carvings of game boards throughout Anatolia. In “Scratching the Surface: Graffiti Games in the Byzantine Empire,” Christ describes (and includes pictures of) dozens of carvings of the Greco-Roman games of pente grammai [five lines], ludus duodecim scripta [game of twelve signs], and merels that appear on various Byzantine monuments. Eight game boards alone show up on the stylobate of the Hagia Sophia and other appear in/on public monuments across the Byzantine world. Unlike the misericords, which were hidden, such boards appear in decidedly public settings. Yet at the same time, their placement on the periphery of those spaces testifies to their role as supporting actors to more central activities of the theaters and basilicas that contained them.
Leah Asrih and Jennifer Garner’s “Gambling Miners” and Annemarieke Willemsen’s “Children’s Toys in Italy, 1350-1550” are similarly refreshing in their discussions of gaming objects. These two very different essays overlap in the way the authors move fluidly between images and objects (dice and bowling in the first case, children’s toys in the second), to show how visual representations of objects stack up against excavated, physical things. Willemsen’s piece is particularly interesting as it demonstrates that “Italy had its own characteristic displays of toys” with distinct deviations (more well-fed boys!) from similar representations in other parts of Europe.
To this point I have sidestepped one of the book’s central games, namely chess, the focus of at least four essays in the volume. Two contributors deepen and extend the argument (made by earlier scholars) that chess works (re)imagine social hierarchies. In “The Printed Book and the Visual Culture of Chess in the Late Middle Ages: William Caxton’s 1483 Edition of The Game and Playe of Chesse,” Louise Fang posits that the printer’s woodcuts “made [the visual culture of] chess available to a wider public and contributed to the appeal of the printed book in question at the same time” (295). Meanwhile, in “Chess and Cultural Crossings in Boccaccio,” Akash Kumar demonstrates how the Italian writer used the game to model social malleability, with lower class characters often playing chess as a means to access higher class advantages, many of them sexual in nature.
Two other writers directly take on chess’s ability to stand in for sex. In “Visualizing Chess and Love in Les Eschéz d’Amours,” Daniel E. O’Sullivan deftly analyzes two illustrative programs in this oft-overlooked fourteenth-century work. As he demonstrates, the poem “subverts the immediate power of love by submitting it to a battle with chess,” with each series of pictures working in a different way to “[capture] the duality: reason v. sensuality” (140). In “Playthings: Ivory on Ivory,” Elina Gertsman explores the medieval world’s raciest mirror-back, which features a highly erotic scene of a chess-playing couple. Unpacking this image, Gertsman shows the many ways this image features the act of gaming, which ranges from the sexualized pole that holds up the lovers’ tent to the “play on the comparison between flesh and ivory” (231). Like O’Sullivan’s piece, this essay provides a great model of ways to close read images, and I could imagine teaching both of these side-by-side.
Finally, three other essays contain intimations of chess, even if they only brush up against the game. In my favorite of these, “Chess of the Gnostics: The Sufi Version of Snakes and Ladders,” İrwin Cemil Schick shows how this chess-like game represents “the spiritual path of a novice as s/he advances towards the final goal, which is transcendence of the self and union with God” (175). Schick also provides a useful appendix that shows all the snakes and ladders, and their various starting and ending points. (Thus, for instance, we can see at a glance that “bragging” will snake an unfortunate player down to “bad companionship,” whereas “truth” offers the player a ladder to “the sphere of omnipotence.”)
Closer to chess is Michael A. Conrad’s “The Playing Eye: On the Transfer of Game-Related Knowledge through Miniatures in Alfonso X’s Book of Games” (1283/4).” This article has some keen observations about different games in Alfonso’s famous book. But Conrad makes his strongest point about its images in his conclusion: “Whereas written texts are able to conserve and transfer declarative elements of game-related knowledge, it was the main epistemic function of images to achieve something familiar for the tacit dimension of this practical knowledge, especially by drawing on the ‘codal complementarity’ of texts and images” (258). This emphasis on the practical knowledge encoded in images anticipates Fang’s later discussion of Caxton’s socially disruptive woodcuts and created a nice tie between the two articles.
Farther away from chess but still connected to the game is the opening essay, “Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of medieval Celtic Board Games,” in which Katherine Forsyth and Mark A. Hall look Celtic games (primarily gwyddbull and fidchell), which, as they argue, functioned as a “key element of social and cultural life among the early medieval Celts” (33). Chess specialists should take note a culture in which “anthropomorphic [game] pieces predate figural chess pieces by three centuries.” And in “Games as a Sign of Social Status: Backgammon in Ottoman Literature and Visual Culture,” takes a backseat to backgammon, a game whose social resonance is hard to pin down. Looking at visual examples of backgammon, along with its closely-related game, mancala, Tülün Deĝirmenci finds that these are “activities of a lower social class” even as “there are also written documents showing that these games, especially backgammon, were actually being played by different segments of Ottoman society” (165).
The final essay for me to address is Julie Mell’s “Graffiti as Gaming: Vikings at Play in the Orkney Islands.” This piece feels a bit like an outlier in the collection. I can see the case for graffiti as gaming, and Mell’s use for J. L. Austin provides a nice lens through which to analyze the performative nature of these writing/speech acts. I also enjoyed the essay. But at least for this reader, Mell’s archive and approach did not readily hook up with the other essays around it.
In sum, this is an enjoyable collection of solid essays ripe with points of overlap and intersection.