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Subject: TMR 07.10.22 Adams, Power Play (Petschar)
From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
Date:    Thu, October 18, 2007 8:30 am
To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
         bmr-l at brynmawr.edu
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Adams, Jenny. Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess
in the Late Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 264. $49.95. ISBN 9780812239447.

    Reviewed by Hans Petschar
         Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek
         hans.petschar at onb.ac.at

The origin of chess most likely leads back to an Indian game which
in its structure corresponds to the basic elements of the Old
Indian Army: soldiers, cavalry, military carriages and elephants.
In mid-seventh-century Persia the knowledge of a Persian version of
the game with a king and minister (firzan) was transferred
to the Arabs. Along trade routes and sea routes the game of chess
found its way to Europe: Spain and Southern Italy were reached by
trade routes to North Africa, and archaeological findings along the
silk road prove the distribution of the game on trade routes to
Russia and Northern Europe.

The earliest written sources for the game of chess in Latin Europe
are the poem Versus de Scacchis, which most likely was
written around 1000 A.D in the monastery of Einsiedeln
(Switzerland) and a letter written 1061/1062 by Petrus Damiani,
bishop of Ostia to Pope Alexander II, where he accuses a Florentine
bishop playing chess in an inn during the night. Precious chess
pieces made of ivory or crystal become part of the treasures of
churches, nobles and regents. Ordinary pieces ware made of wood or
bone, more valuable ones of walrus teeth in Northern Europe.

Decisive for the success of game of chess in Western Europe was the
transformation of the Indian/ Persian war game into a
representation of the court. Then, in the thirteenth century, it
was transformed into a conceptual model of medieval society as a
whole.The transformation of the minister (arab./pers.
firzan) into the European queen is only the most remarkable
example of a complete set of changes in designations and
significances of chess pieces in medieval Europe: thus the military
carriage becomes a fortress, the Arab chess piece of the elephant
(alfil) is interpreted as a bishop in England and Northern
Europe, as a fool in France, while in Italy and Germany the
designation of the piece signifies "judges" or "wise men" in
literary texts.

In contrast to designations and representations of the pieces which
changed fundamentally according to European models of thought, the
basic rules of the game remained stable for a very long time in the
history of the game. As in the Persian and Arab game the medieval
alfil (bishop) moves by jumping diagonally two squares and
the medieval fers (queen) being the weakest piece on the
chessboard, moving just one square diagonally. In comparison to
modern chess, medieval chess has a static character until the
endgame is reached and the dynamic power of the knights and towers
can be exploited.

Due to this inherent character of the game it is not at all
astonishing that medieval chess sources do not contain complete
games but rather problems (of extraordinary quality in some cases)
with concrete tasks to solve and that Arabic sources refer to
prefixed middle game positions on which the players agree to play
on. Entertaining chess problems, which had to be solved in a
gambling atmosphere where bets could be made, and artificial
accelerations of the game through prefixed positions
(tabyas>) certainly stimulated the social permeability and
made the medieval game of chess a pastime not only for nobles but
for different social classes and environments and for different
cultures: Arabs, Jews and Christians, men and women.

Although we have little evidence of chess praxis in Latin Europe
before the twelfth century, after 1100 the sources multiply and
towards the end of the thirteenth century chess as conceptual model
was so deeply anchored in the public consciousness that moralists
and clergymen started to make use of this symbolic system of rules
for their means. The distribution of the game of chess all over
Europe was mirrored (and transformed) in literary discourses and
iconography referring to and making use of the game as a metaphor
and allegoric representation of medieval society. It is exactly
this appearance of chess as a metaphor in late medieval discourses
which Jenny Adams analyses in her new book Power Play.

Adams argues that chess games and chess allegories in medieval
literary texts "encoded anxieties about political organizations,
civic community, economic exchange, and individual autonomy" (2).
Jenny Adams refers to three basic texts from three different
European countries and times. The first reference is Jacobus de
Cessolis's late thirteenth-century, Liber de moribus hominum et
officiis nobelium ac popularium super ludo scachorum. The
Liber narrates the story of a ruler who, through his
knowledge of chess, ceases his tyrannical attitudes and becomes a
benevolent leader. The Liber however does not use the game
of chess to address itself to the king (or a prince) alone but
"seeks to absorb all people in its symbolic domain" (4). In her
most original interpretation Adams argues that the way the chess
allegory is used in the Liber demonstrates a fundamental
shift in the ways medieval peoples had begun to conceive of
themselves and their relationships to their civic community. No
longer the "natural" concept of the "state as body" metaphor but a
socially constructed model based on rules rather than biology
governs the imagination. By replacing the older allegory of the
state-as-body and by addressing his text to all men (citizens),
according to Adams the Lombardian Jacobus reflects a cultural shift
in the ways people imagined their relationship to civil order.
Adams proves her arguments with an extensive analysis of the text
with a strong focus on the exempla given by Jacobus--and
surprisingly not on the descriptions of the chess figures and their
moves--and with excursions on the history of the state-as-body
metaphor and on social conflicts in late thirteenth-century
Lombardy, where Jacobus most likely originates from, where he
learned the game of chess according to Lombard chess rules and
composed his treatise. "Just as Jacobus's treatment of tradesmen as
an integral part of a civic order reflects the political situation
of late thirteenth-century Genoa, his decision to minimize the
clergy's role on the board--the pieces commonly known as bishops
are portrayed in the Liber as community's judges--reflects the
Church's decreased power over secular affairs." (25)

Adams confines her analysis to the "core" text of the Liber
and does not refer to the numerous versions, translations and
localisations (text and illustration) of Jacobus all over Europe,
although the author is aware that "such variations surely reflect
different understandings of the game" (8). And indeed, the
interpretation of the alfil as bishop is only one (English)
localisation, while Jacobus' interpretation of the piece as
"judges" has been taken over by most central European versions of
the Liber. In Spain and Russia the piece remained the old
alfil ("elephant"), thus referring to the origin of the game
and its transfer to Europe.

Adams does not intend however to rewrite the history of the game of
chess--her basic reference remains Murray's 1914 published
History of chess--but instead she aims at a general
examination of chess as a metaphor in late medieval literature.

The second part of Power Play is dedicated to the late
fourteenth century French poem Les Echecs amoureux and a
prose Commentary on the poem roughly 50 years later most likely
composed by Evrart de Conty. By using chess as an allegory for
romantic love and as an allegory for an idealized community which
follows cosmic rules, the poem and Commentary combine romantic
love, political order and the cosmos. Adams reads Les Echecs
and the Commentary basically as a return of the state-as-body
metaphor and refers to the historic background of late fourteenth-
and early fifteenth-century France, where the crisis power led to a
desire for a unified country and in political and literary
discourse to configurations of the state as body and the king as
its head.

The last part of Power Play is dedicated to Chess in mid-to-late
fifteenth century England. First Adams takes a look at Hoccleve's
Regiment of Princes, a Speculum Regis written for
Prince Henry of Wales. Hoccleve not only uses the Liber as
his primary source, primarily focusing on the king and the
qualities of a ruler, but also integrating a new concept in punning
on the game's economic implications: "the Exchequer is not only a
checkered board that dominates Hoccleve's primary source, it is
also the office that owes him his paychek." (14)

Even more on economic and social exchange Adams reflects in her
reading of the Game and Playe of the Chesse by William
Caxton published in 1474 and 1483. While the first edition is
dedicated to a nobleman, the second with a new preface and
additions of woodcuts that do not appear in the first addition is
directed to the people of England.

The first woodcut illustrates Jacobus' exemplum of the bad emperor
at the beginning of the Liber and shows Nebuchadnezzar's
decapitated body lying in pieces on the ground. By showing the
destruction and in the next following woodcuts the "subsequent
rebuilding of the king's body" (149) until he appears as a figure
on the chessboard, Caxton, according to Adams, offers a graphic
reminder of a larger shift in fifteenth-century ideas of political
authority and civic organization. Not only is the strong position
of the king in question but the individual (author) finds its self-
confidence in a society and civic organisation which is governed no
longer by the absolute power of a king but by the rules of economic
exchange. Like the previous parts of the book, the author's
argument is based on a thoughtful reading and interpretation of
sources, which allows for the historical and discursive
contextualisation of Caxton's Chess book.

Linking back the game of chess or to be more precise the concept of
the game of chess and its changes in literary discourses in Italy,
France and England from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century to
a historical context (and discourse) is the basic value of Jenny
Adams' Power Play. Adams' reflections on discourses and
metaphors and their embedding in a historical context go far beyond
what "chess historians" have worked out so far. For this reason,
studies such as this one are of great importance.

Much however has happened in chess history (and archaeology) since
Murray published his fundamental work, although a comprehensive
study integrating new research results is still missing. Towards
the end of the fifteenth century the static character of the
medieval game of chess changed dramatically, when new rules for the
moves of the bishop and the queen were defined and accepted within
a few decades all over Europe. From now on both pieces could
exploit their full potential power on the chessboard in moving
along the complete diagonal (the bishop) and in a straight line in
all directions, horizontal, vertical and diagonal (the queen). Only
at that point did the game of chess become a dynamic game and the
system of rules which is composed by the interrelations of the
pieces and their harmony on the chessboard was transformed from a
static and topological system into a dynamic system where space and
time become the most important parameters. From the sixteenth
century onwards chess manuals refer to this transformation, which
caused great discussion and in many cases wild speculation among
historians of the game. Only recently a serious study has been
published by Jose A. Garzon which gives a plausible historical
context for the origin of modern chess in late fifteenth-century
Spain, while general implications on changing the rules of a game
and changing  a system of thought are still to be discussed in
future discourses and their interpretations.[1]

NOTES

[1] Garzon, Jose Antonio. The return of Francesch Vicent. The
History of the Birth and expansion of Modern Chess. Valencia,
2006. (Spanish original: 2005)

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
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