Compilation of texts including De ludo scacchorum seu de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium (Book of the Game of Chess, or, The Customs of Men and the Duties of Nobles)

Compilation of texts including De ludo scacchorum seu de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium (Book of the Game of Chess, or, The Customs of Men and the Duties of Nobles)

This diverse early humanist compendium, mostly in Latin, contains short works and extracts of longer texts relating to political philosophy, religion, history, and literature. The presence of much material related to the political circumstances in the region around Bologna in the fourteenth century helps localize the manuscript. It includes multiple texts by Donato Albanzani (ca. 1328–after 1411), a rhetorician active in Venice, Ravenna, and Ferrara. Albanzani was a friend of Petrarch and Boccaccio, translating their respective works into Italian. Over a quarter of the manuscript is devoted to Jacobus de Cessolis’s De ludo scachorum of circa 1300, a collection of sermons comparing the proper relationships between a king and various subjects to the rules of chess, providing a detailed introduction to the game as it was played in his time. Portions of the manuscript are a palimpsest; the undertext appears to be a fourteenth-century legal text.

Author: Jacobus de Cessolis; Scribe: Franciscus Gennay

1409

Manuscript on parchment, 175 fols.

University of Pennsylvania, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, LJS 267

Northern Italy