The
rise of chess being a romantic symbol is closely tied with the rise
of the troubadour, entertainers who were often singers, poets and
storytellers who sought to perform for noble and wealthy courts.
Skilled troubadours also were often experienced chess players, and
through their songs and poems of courtship and romance, brought about
the idea of chess as a romantic instrument once they began to involve
chess terms and roles in their repertoires. Some classic stories from
this period include the game of chess, at least in some version of
Tristan and
Iseut,
and The Romance
of Lancelot of the Lake (Yalom,
p.128-130).
An interesting thought to note outside of Yalom's material is that
the idea of romantic love, much like chess, was a controversial idea
at best within the Catholic Church and Muslim beliefs as well at the
time.
As
women and men alike in the nobility began playing chess for a
pleasant diversion as well as to test their intellect, it became
almost expected of some noblewomen to be experienced chess players
and mixed-gender games became more commonplace, possibly in part to
the rise of the queen piece in chess (Yalom, p.126). This served as a
way for the genders to mingle in an acceptable manner, and as a place
where a man and woman could play on equal terms. Yet according to
Yalom, a romantic ideal that arose was that in the game of chess,
where players competed as equals, a lovely woman could have an
advantage over a male competitor by way of her advantage in the 'game
of love', presumably referring to the romantic notion that a
chivalric man would do most anything for the affections of his
beloved (Yalom, p.127). This was the opposite case in some Western
literature that included Arab women as chess experts, in which case
the women often found themselves beguiled by a Christian knight and
lost on account of being distracted by their charm (Yalom,
p.131-133). A key text that promoted the relationship between chess
and romance was Le
Livre
des Eschez Amoureux
Moralisés (The
Edifying Book of Erotic Chess),
in which the author Evrart de Conty lays out a very long text, both
in poem and prose, on the nature of both the game of love and chess.
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