| Summary: | In the medieval educational codex the Book of Games: Chess, Dice, and Tables (Libro de los Juegos) completed in Seville in 1283, there is more than what meets the eye. Featuring some hundred chess problems, another hundred board and dice games, each accompanied by miniatures depicting games at play, players sit across the board from each other. Enclosed, frozen on the frame in the illustrations, men sit against women, kings and queens, women and women, courtesans and knights, monks and men, nuns and children, young and old—a range of players of different faiths and backgrounds.
This thesis examines the covert complexity of women’s relationships in the thirteenth-century Castilian court of Alfonso X, el Sabio (1221-84), through their representations at games of chess. Chess in the medieval imaginary was a game not only strategic, but one also laden with sexual connotations. It mirrored the site of battle and the court—the composite of a series of moves—it replicated the advance of courtship and seduced the mind for the forfeit of a hand. Medieval epics and material culture visualize this phenomenon: when a man and a woman are represented at chess, it is read as a game between lovers. In the Book of Games, what is going on between women—for whom the archive always limited and fragmentary—what have our eyes missed? To explore this question, this thesis represents a necessary exercise in speculation. It begins with a review of the state of the discussion upon the manuscript in question, delving into the various threads of movement encapsulated within, to query the notion of autonomy in making. Through a close reading of key illustrations bearing a trace of personal reception, it probes the central methodological question of seeking to see, theorizing gaze and nazar in sites of potential encounter. Understanding the encounter, and alternate forms of intimacy made possible through play, I observe the women looking at each over the chessboard in a moment of mutual regard. This thesis argues the Book of Games possesses an already existing unseen complexity—perhaps queer or perhaps questioning—lying latent, that we must learn to seek to see, looking otherwise.
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