Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages
The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.
Playing the Catalan: The Rise of the Chess Queen; Queenship and Political Motherhood in Late Medieval Aragon and France
Against the backdrop of the rise of the chess-queen and the political strategies deployed by skilled devotees of the game, this chapter discusses the example of Yolande of Aragon’s mother, Violant of Bar, queen of Aragon, to maintain her sovereignty in the wake of her husband Joan I of Aragon’s unexpected death by misadventure in 1396 as well as the maternal tug of war between Yolande of Aragon and Isabeau of Bavaria over the guardianship of the dauphin Charles of Ponthieu, later Charles VII. The gradual transformation of the chess-queen into the most important piece on the field of play is in lockstep with the evolution of queenly power, authority and stateswomanship in late medieval and early modern Europe.
A Hopewellian Burial Site in the Lower Republican Valley, Kansas
The senior author has for a number of years worked on the problem of the numerous and virtually unknown burial sites on the bluffs bordering the valley of the Republican River in Geary and Clay Counties, Kansas. This work has been a matter of some urgency, owing to the prevalence of unsystematic amateur excavation on the more prominent stone cairns found in the area. Fortunately, the complete excavation of the larger cairns involves too much labor for the merely curious, and it has often been possible to salvage material and information despite disturbance.