Paolino da Venezia, Tractatus de Ludo Scachorum. A cura di Roberto Pesce. Collana Medioevo e Rinascimento, Testi. Venice: Centro di Studi Medioevali e Rinascimentali “E. A. Cicogna”, 2018, 179 pp., 51 b/w. ill.

Abstract

Recent scholarship has increasingly paid more attention to the game of chess as a central form of entertainment combined with a strong didactic component. Chess has a very long history, probably dating back to early medieval India, and was passed on to the Arabs and from them to the Europeans. Both kings such as Alfonso X el Sabio and theologians such as the Dominican Jacopo da Cessole were deeply involved in reflecting on this game and explaining it to their audiences, as is well documented in the volume Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan (2012). Shortly after 1321, the Venetian Paolino da Venezia, papal penitentiary and apostolic nuncio, composed his own treatise on chess, his Tractatus de Ludo Scachorum, which Roberto Pesce here introduces, edits, and translates into modern Italian in an exemplary fashion.