Chess, Love, and the Rhetoric of Distraction in Medieval French Narrative

• Kristin Juel ^[1]
  1. [1] Saint Michael's College

     Saint Michael's College

     Town of Colchester, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Romance philology, ISSN 0035-8002, Vol. 64, Nº. 1, 2010, págs. 73-97
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The metaphor of the chess game featured prominently in French medieval literature. The game was the focus of allegrical interpretation in chess moralities, and chess play between two individuals was the subject of romances, "chansons de geste", certain types of religious literature, and even beast epic. A chess match between a man and a woman was a popular motif of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in the narrative genres (romances and "chansons de geste". The description of the moves revealed that one of the players -more often, the man- was distracted by the beauty of the other player. This distraction closely resembles the love-trance motif in certain romances of the thirteenth century and the chess motif in "Hun de Bordeaux", "The Voeux du paon" and "Lion de Bourges" [...]