Her Playing Eye: Courtesans at Chess in the Book of Games (c. 1283/84)

Khushi Nansi

SMArchS Aga Khan Program

Advisor: Huma Gupta

Readers: Lerna Ekmekçioğlu & Pamela Patton

In a thirteenth century educational codex of the Iberian Peninsula, with some hundred chess problems, another hundred board and dice games, there feature a hundred and fifty miniatures depicting games at play. Women and men sit across the board from each other, women and women, men and men, young and old, of different faiths and backgrounds. Enclosed, frozen on the frame in the illustrations of the Book of Games: Chess, Dice, and Tables (Libro de los Juegos, c. 1283/84), there is more than what meets the eye.

This thesis speculates upon the complexity of women’s relationships in the thirteenth-century through their representations at games of chess in the Castilian court of Alfonso X, el Sabio (122184). 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. 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? This thesis is a necessary exercise in speculation. It begins with a review of the state of the discussion upon the manuscript in question, and then examines 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 explores 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, lying latent, that we must learn to seek to see, looking otherwise.