medieval society. Each chess piece could be correlated to a distinct social ranking—starting with the obvious correlations of the King, Queen, and Knight. Rooks represented the King’s emissaries in his scheme. To each of the eight Pawns, Cessolis assigned a different peasant-class profession:
Tillers of the earth
Metal workers
Tailors and notaries
Merchants and money changers
Physicians and apothecaries
Tavern and hotel workers
City guards
Couriers
Further, Cessolis was almost comically specific in describing how the powers and restrictions of each piece matched the rights and responsibilities of that piece’s human counterpart:
When the
queen
, which is accompanied unto the
king
, beginneth to move from her proper place, she goeth in double manner…she may go on the right side and come to the square before the
notary
…. Secondly on the left side where the
knight
is. And thirdly indirectly unto the black point before the
physician
. And the reason why is for as much as she hath in her self by grace the authority that the
rooks
have…she may give and grant many things to her subjects graciously. And thus also ought she to have flawless wisdom.
—From a fifteenth-century English translation of Cessolis
Cessolis also included a practical guide for playing the game, encouraging his audience to experience the symbolism in action. It was the right sermon about the right game at the right time. After many centuries with little real intellectual progress, the twelfth century had seen an “early Renaissance” with a vast increase in literacy, the birth of the great northern European universities, and important intellectual contributions from Peter Abelard, St. Bernard, and John of Salisbury, among others. All of this eventually fueled a seismic shift into a new political consciousness in the noble class.
Liber de moribus
used the chess metaphor to help individuals track their evolving relationship to society, and its popularity marked a real turning point. “Before the
Liber
,” argues University of Massachusetts medievalist Jenny Adams, “the predominant metaphor for the state was the human body, which represented types of people as parts subordinate to the body as a whole….If the head [i.e., the King] of a body decided that the body should walk, the feet would have to follow. By contrast, the chess allegory imagines its subjects to possess independent bodies in the form of pieces bound to the state
by rules
rather than biology. If the chess King advances, the Pawns are not beholden to do the same.”
This new consciousness did not, of course, alter the fundamental class division between the tiny noble minority and the serf majority—a division that the Middle Ages had inherited from the older Mediterranean society. But it did change the way that those divisions were enforced. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, feudal society developed an elaborate legal justification for itself, enabling what Adams calls a “shift from physical to non-physical coercion.” Knights, shopkeepers, farmers, and other classes now felt a moral and legal responsibility to the state. They had more physical control of their own actions, but were mindful of their role in society, and of being watched by others. Cessolis’s use of the chess metaphor modeled this dynamic beautifully. “A Knight playing the game cannot move himself anywhere but must act according to [his legal moves],” says Adams. “Failure to do so will place both his own body and his community in jeopardy. Nor will this failure be hidden but exposed publicly on the board…. If one can see one’s own ‘self’ on the board, other players can see one’s own ‘self’ too.”
Enabling people to see themselves on the board would turn out to be the second great metaphorical contribution of chess over the centuries, after chess’s capacity for demonstrating
Tillers of the earth
Metal workers
Tailors and notaries
Merchants and money changers
Physicians and apothecaries
Tavern and hotel workers
City guards
Couriers
Further, Cessolis was almost comically specific in describing how the powers and restrictions of each piece matched the rights and responsibilities of that piece’s human counterpart:
When the
queen
, which is accompanied unto the
king
, beginneth to move from her proper place, she goeth in double manner…she may go on the right side and come to the square before the
notary
…. Secondly on the left side where the
knight
is. And thirdly indirectly unto the black point before the
physician
. And the reason why is for as much as she hath in her self by grace the authority that the
rooks
have…she may give and grant many things to her subjects graciously. And thus also ought she to have flawless wisdom.
—From a fifteenth-century English translation of Cessolis
Cessolis also included a practical guide for playing the game, encouraging his audience to experience the symbolism in action. It was the right sermon about the right game at the right time. After many centuries with little real intellectual progress, the twelfth century had seen an “early Renaissance” with a vast increase in literacy, the birth of the great northern European universities, and important intellectual contributions from Peter Abelard, St. Bernard, and John of Salisbury, among others. All of this eventually fueled a seismic shift into a new political consciousness in the noble class.
Liber de moribus
used the chess metaphor to help individuals track their evolving relationship to society, and its popularity marked a real turning point. “Before the
Liber
,” argues University of Massachusetts medievalist Jenny Adams, “the predominant metaphor for the state was the human body, which represented types of people as parts subordinate to the body as a whole….If the head [i.e., the King] of a body decided that the body should walk, the feet would have to follow. By contrast, the chess allegory imagines its subjects to possess independent bodies in the form of pieces bound to the state
by rules
rather than biology. If the chess King advances, the Pawns are not beholden to do the same.”
This new consciousness did not, of course, alter the fundamental class division between the tiny noble minority and the serf majority—a division that the Middle Ages had inherited from the older Mediterranean society. But it did change the way that those divisions were enforced. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, feudal society developed an elaborate legal justification for itself, enabling what Adams calls a “shift from physical to non-physical coercion.” Knights, shopkeepers, farmers, and other classes now felt a moral and legal responsibility to the state. They had more physical control of their own actions, but were mindful of their role in society, and of being watched by others. Cessolis’s use of the chess metaphor modeled this dynamic beautifully. “A Knight playing the game cannot move himself anywhere but must act according to [his legal moves],” says Adams. “Failure to do so will place both his own body and his community in jeopardy. Nor will this failure be hidden but exposed publicly on the board…. If one can see one’s own ‘self’ on the board, other players can see one’s own ‘self’ too.”
Enabling people to see themselves on the board would turn out to be the second great metaphorical contribution of chess over the centuries, after chess’s capacity for demonstrating
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