Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Game and Playe of the Chesse

The Game and Playe of the Chesse

Caxton, William
Adams, Jenny

Paperback

Series: Teams Middle English Texts

Literary CriticismFiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 1580441300
ISBN13: 9781580441308
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Published: May 1 2009
Pages: 164
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.40 Width: 7.00 Depth: 9.60
Language: English

First printed in 1474, the English printer William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse says little about the game of chess, despite its title. Instead, both Caxton's Middle English translation and its Latin source, a thirteenth-century treatise by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Cessolis, use chess as an allegory for a political community whose citizens serve the common good. Assigning each chess piece to a real-world counterpart and a corresponding moral code, this example of the speculum regis, or mirror for a prince, genre envisions a kingdom not bound together by kinship, but organized by professional ties and governed by moral law. Moral exempla and maxims drawn from classical sources, which illustrate these principles while engaging the reader, comprise the bulk of the work until its final chapter finally introduces the playe of chess, using rules largely unchanged since the game's introduction to Europe in the tenth century.

2 different editions

Also available

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All