Boundary Conditions: Chess and Cultural Crossings in Medieval and Renaissance Italy takes up the game of chess as a paradigm for exploring how boundaries of culture, gender, and class can be crossed and complicated through all that the game conveys. It considers representations of chess across medieval and Renaissance Italy through a variety of objects, including literary texts, paintings, chess sets, and artistic motifs and infuses analysis of these objects in their respective contexts with attention to the global history of the game as it moves from India to Persia to the Islamic world and into western European circulation.

FMI - Alejandro Cuadrado (a.cuadrado@bowdoin.edu)