Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

This volume treats one of the worst crimes people can commit, murder, as it was perceived and evaluated in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. Originally conceived in 2013, the project then grew out of a number of scholarly events organized by Larissa Tracy. While much work has already been done on violence in the Middle Ages, murder in its specific legal and cultural connotations certainly deserves particular and further attention, although crime and punishment have also been addressed even quite recently (Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. A. Classen and Connie Scarborough, 2012; here not consulted). Crime constitutes a legal case, and should be studied first of all through the lens of legal history, which is the case here in the first section of papers. But it remains unclear how the entire volume really intends to embed the deed within the legal discourse, although Tracy refers to some major law books (leaving out others, again, such as Eike von Repgow’s famous Sachsenspiegel, ca. 1225/1230). The discourse on crime at large, and on murder in specific allows us to understand any society throughout time because murder has been a universal phenomenon. Would it hence make sense to quote Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish, here in the trans. by Alan Sheridan, 1995), who had only a vague idea about the Middle Ages and claimed that the legal system as we know it today emerged only in the early modern age (6)? Tracy uses him as a fig <?page nr="295"?>leaf and quickly turns away from him because early medieval societies knew already of extensive legal codes, some of which are here taken into consideration by individual contributors.

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.

Mediaevistik ◽

10.3726/med.2019.01.153 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 527-528

Author(s):

Albrecht Classen

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Early Medieval ◽

Alfonso X ◽

Modern Age ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

Medieval India ◽

Central Form ◽

The Middle Ages

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.