Jacobus de Cessolis, The Game and Play of Chess, tr. William Caxton, 2nd edn (Westminster: William Caxton, 1483)

A.2.7

Alla fine della partita, il Re e il pedone vanno nella stessa scatola ‘At the end of the game, the king and pawn go into the same box’ (Italian proverb)

This seminal work on chess was composed by an Italian Dominican friar in the 13th century. It is not a practical instruction on how to play the game, but a moralising allegory in which chess exemplifies ‘a society of reciprocal, contractual relations dependent on individual autonomy at the same time that it maintains a clear sense of hierarchy’ (Adams, p. 155).

William Caxton (c. 1415-1492), the translator and printer of this English edition, learnt all about printing in Cologne (Germany) in the 1470s. He set up his first printing press in Bruges, the capital of Flanders (today part of Belgium), where he published the first edition of The Game and Play of Chess. Shortly afterwards, in 1476, Caxton opened the first printing press in England, where this second edition was printed with two significant changes: the addition of woodcuts and a new preface

The first two woodcuts depict the origin myth of chess: The philosopher Philometer invented
chess as a means of instructing Evilmerodach in ‘humane governance’ after he had killed and dismembered his father, King Nebuchadnezzar (Adams, p. 153). Most remaining woodcuts illustrate the individual chess pieces as described at the start of each chapter, reinforcing the socio-political allegory of chess because the pieces are represented as humans rather than inanimate objects (Fang, p. 294). Although many medieval manuscripts of Cessolis’s text are illustrated, this ‘humanization of the chess pieces’ is unique to Caxton’s second edition (Fang, p. 295)

The new preface, which replaced an earlier royal dedication, addressed a new audience: wealthy merchants. This step may explain the ‘humanization’ of the chess pieces in the woodcuts (Fang, p. 297). While the aristocracy was able to afford chess sets with luxurious pieces matching the descriptions in Cessolis’s text, even rich merchants were more likely to possess crudely cut pieces and the woodcuts in Caxton’s book may have enabled them to participate in the ‘lively and sophisticated visual culture’ of chess, which had previously been reserved for royalty and the aristocracy (Fang, p. 291).

Further Resource
Blog post on the St John’s College Library’s website