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Literary Review
All the moves
PAULINE STAFFORD
THE queen is the most powerful and versatile piece on the chessboard. This was not always so. The Indian game, true to its origins as one of military strategy, placed the general beside the king. First in the Persian and then in the Arab-Muslim world, the general became and remains the vizier. But as the game spread in medieval Europe, the vizier was himself replaced by the queen: haltingly and slowly, as in the Iberian peninsula, where Muslim and Jewish influence remained strong, but, by the end of the Middle Ages, everywhere.
Initially the queen's, like the vizier's, movements were circumscribed. In the latter part of the 15th Century that changed dramatically. Her movements, and the game, were transformed. "Love chess", "Queen's chess" or rather "Lady's chess", "mad queen's/ Lady's chess" — "alla rabiosa", "de la dame enragée" — became a fast-moving game, increasingly one for professionals, ironically marginalising women players. Marilyn Yalom's tantalising book addresses these changes and metamorphoses. Where, when and why was the chess queen born; where, when and why did she become such a formidable piece?
Yalom's answers tie her to the development of women's power in medieval Europe, to the significance of queens, even of specific, individual ones, and to the institutionalisation of queenship. The queen in medieval Europe was a potentially important political figure. In a world where familial politics and the royal court and household were central, the wife of the king, mother of heirs and mistress of the household, was not a private woman but a public figure, often an active and influential one. By the 10th Century she was, in some parts of Europe, consecrated like her royal spouse. At the end of that century, in the 980s, much of Europe was ruled by women. Theophanu, Empress-regent of the Ottonian Empire, Emma queen-regent of Western Francia, and Beatrice, duchess-regent in Lotharingia in the modern Rhineland, ruled in the name of under-age sons. The dowager empress Adelaide linked them all as mother-in-law, mother and aunt, herself wife, mother, grandmother, sister, daughter and heiress of kings and emperors. These women embody the factors that laid the foundations of female royal power and intermittently produced, as here, not merely women's influence, but female rule.
Chess, played at courts where such women flourished, reflects this. The protean medieval symbolism of the game and its queen were rooted in the court's nexus of military and domestic upper-class secular life. In the proto-Romance age of the Carmina Burana, the king was devastated by the loss of his queen, wife and lover; the 13th-Century Italian Dominican, Cessolis, projected onto the queen the virtues of the ideal wife and mother. The 16th-Century Frenchman, Du Pont, poured his misogynistic venom into her meanings — misleading, liar, lazy — his misogyny, as so often, pinpointing the sexual, domestic power of the woman whom he attacked. In that same century Teresa of Avila would reassert the battling king's wife, making her a metaphor for the "holy war" of the individual against evil. The courtly locus of the queen's transformation is underlined by that of the Indian elephant-piece. It also metamorphosed during its spread into Europe, more variously than the general — becoming a standard-bearer, count, old man, bald one, fool or bishop — but in most cases into a figure associated with courts and their internal structures.
A link between the chess queen and her real-life medieval counterparts is likely, but Yalom's attempt to bind their respective stories more tightly is questionable. She associates the birth of the chess queen with the 10th-Century apotheosis of female power in Adelaide and Theophanu. It was in the late 990s, at Einsiedeln within their Empire, that the first mention of the chess queen occurred, in the first European description of the game. In Spain the late 15th Century saw not only a newly powerful chess queen, but a great female ruler in Isabella of Castile. Such seductive conjectures are siren voices. In scant early medieval sources first mention is no necessary indication of first or even recent appearance: as Yalom herself points out, the Einsiedeln monk takes the queen's presence on the board for granted. The chess queen's new powers in the late 15th Century coincide with those of Isabella. But her transformation was paralleled by that of the bishop, or equivalent piece, in Spain and also in Italy, both areas hitherto more or less resistant to the chess queen, though both great centres of chess-playing. This marks a shift in the game itself whose relationship with the powers of contemporary women is unlikely to be straightforward.
Conversely, throughout much of the Middle Ages the queen on the board remained a limited piece, lagging behind both the literary elaboration of her symbolism and the power of some real women, like Eleanor of Aquitaine or Blanche of Castile, whom Yalom, somewhat unconvincingly, includes in her story. This attractive book certainly whets the appetite and is full of interest. But the chess queen's fascinating history calls for a more nuanced understanding of queenship, if such an institution existed, of the interaction of symbol and meaning and of the complex interplay of historical change.
Birth of the Chess Queen: A History, Marilyn Yalom, p.276, Pandora, £19.99. 0 86358 444 6;
US: HarperCollins, $24.95.
0 06 009064 2.
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