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Les EschÃ©z d Amours A Critical Edition of the Poem
and its Latin Glosses Gregory Heyworth Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Gregory Heyworth; Daniel E. Oâ€™sullivan; Frank Coulson
ISBN(s): 9789004250703, 9004250700
File Details: PDF, 1.83 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
Les Eschéz d’Amours
Medieval and Renaissance
Authors and Texts
Editor-in-Chief
Francis G. Gentry
Emeritus Professor of German, Penn State University
Editorial Board
Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University
Cynthia Brown, University of California, Santa Barbara
Marina Brownlee, Princeton University
Keith Busby, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University
Alastair Minnis, Yale University
Brian Murdoch, Stirling University
Jan Ziolkowski, Harvard University and Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection
VOLUME 10
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mrat

Les Eschéz d’ Amours
A Critical Edition of the Poem and its Latin Glosses
Edited by
Gregory Heyworth
Daniel E. O’Sullivan
with
Frank Coulson
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Les Eschez D'amours : a critical edition of the poem and its Latin glosses / Edited by Gregory
Heyworth, Daniel E. O'Sullivan ; with Frank Coulson.
pages cm. – (Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-21253-4 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-25070-3 (e-book)
1. Echecs amoureux. I. Heyworth, Gregory, 1967- editor of compilation.
PQ1459.E153E83 2013
841'.1–dc23
2013006878
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters
covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities.
For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 0925-7683
ISBN 978-90-04-21253-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-25070-3 (e-book)
Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Abbreviations and Sigla. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
General Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1. Date . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2. Historical Context and Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3. Title . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4. Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5. Manuscript History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
6. Literary Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
7. Codicological and Linguistic Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
8. Editorial Policy and Principles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9. The Latin Glosses of Venice Fr. App. 123 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
10. Plot Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
PART TWO
LES ESCHEZ D’AMOURS
Edition with Critical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
PART THREE
THE LATIN GLOSSES OF VENICE FR. APP. 123
Glosses and Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
General Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 673

Index Nominum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 678
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Over the past decade, we have incurred a long list of debts to the many
people and institutions who have supported us in this complicated and
technically demanding project. To those who have generously shared their
time, effort, and expertise, who have extended us forbearance or granted
absolution for our mistakes and impositions we offer our heartfelt grati-
tude.
Throughout, the staff of Manuscript Collections at the Sächsische Landes-
bibliothek, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) has accomodated us in
every way, for weeks and months at a time. Karl Geck and Frank Aurich have
shown us special kindness. Our work would not have been possible without
generous summer research and travel grants from the College of Liberal Arts
and ORSP at the University of Mississippi. The chairs of our departments –
Don Dyer of Modern Languages and Ivo Kamps of English – have helped
us see this task through to completion and given guidance in innumerable
ways.
Without the technical expertise in multispectral imaging of the Lazarus
Project team, Roger Easton, William Christens-Barry and Ken Boydston,
with extra imaging help from Keith Knox, large portions of the manuscript
would never have come to light. To them, and to the students of the Sally
McDonnell Barksdale Honors College who helped in the recovery – Sarah
Story, Marie Wicks, Emilie Dayan – we owe thousands of otherwise illegi-
ble lines. We are profoundly grateful to the National Center for Preservation
Technology and Training for the grant that allowed us to build the trans-
portable multispectral imaging lab for this project, and particularly to Mary
Striegel, chief of materials conservation.
When in a graduate course at Princeton, John Fleming mentioned a
great, lost poem as a gateway to the Rose, he planted a seed that has taken
nearly two decades to bloom. To him belongs the key to the garden, if not
also the mirror and the comb. Samuel N. Rosenberg, Christopher Callahan,
and H. Wayne Storey have offered their considerable philological talents
in moments of vexation. Similarly, Jamie Masters has, as always, given ele-
gant solutions to intractable Latin problems. To Ilya Dines for his unerring
palaeographical eye and knowledge of medieval birds and beasts, and to
D’ Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, master armorist, whose name alone in-
spires confidence, we happily acknowledge our appreciation. We thank
viii acknowledgements
Marie Wicks for her help with the index. For finding the Eschéz a home, we
thank Alastair Minnis, and for her boundless patience, we thank our editor
Marcella Mulder.
Finally, to our children who have quite literally grown up with the
Eschéz—Colm and Marion O’Sullivan, and Rafael and Kyra Knispel-Hey-
worth—and to our wives Patricia O’Sullivan and Sandra Knispel, we owe
everything above and beyond the commas.
ABBREVIATIONS
AA Ovid, Ars Amatoria, ed. E.J. Kenney (Oxford Classical Texts, 1994)
Abert Abert, Hermann, “Die Musikästhetik der Échecs amoureux.” Romanis-
che Forschungen 15:3 (1904): 884–925
Alda William of Blois, Alda, in La “comédie” latine en France au XII e siècle,
vol. 1, ed. Gustave Cohen (Paris, 1931)
Arch. Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, ed. W. Wetherbee (Cambridge,
1994)
CMLC Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism, eds. & trs. Preminger, Hardi-
son, and Kerrane (New York, 1974)
CP Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy. ed. & tr. S.J. Tester (Cambridge,
1973)
De planct. Alanus de Insulis, Liber de planctu naturae, ed. & tr. James J. Sheridan
(Toronto, 1980)
De reg. De regimine principum, eds. McGrade, Kilcullen, and Kempshaw (Cam-
bridge, 2001)
DLMF Dictionnaire des locutions en Moyen Français, ed. G. Di Stefano (Mon-
treal, 1991)
EAM Evrart de Conty, Le livre des Eschez amoureux moralisés, eds. Françoise
Guichard-Tesson and B. Roy (Montreal, 1993)
EETS Early English Texts Society
Eschéz Les Eschéz d’Amours
Espinette Jean Froissart, L’Espinette amoureuse, ed. Anthime Fourrier (Paris, 1963)
Etym. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, eds. and trs. S. Barney, W. Lewis, J. Beach,
O. Berghof (Cambridge, 2006)
FVS Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Hermann Diels (Berlin, 1903)
Galpin Galpin, Stanley L., “Les eschez amoureux: a complete synopsis with
unpublished extracts.” The Romanic Review 11 (1920): 283–307
HC Murray, H.J.R., A History of Chess (Oxford, 1913)
Höfler 1 Les échecs amoureux”: Untersuchungen über die Quellen des II. Teiles,
Dissertation (Munich, 1905)
Höfler 2 “Les échecs amoureux.” Romanische Forschungen 27 (1910): 625–689
Junker “Über das altfranzösische Epos Les échecs amoureux.” Berichte des freien
Deutsche Hochstiftes zu Frankfurt am Main, N. F. 3:2 (1886–1887): 29
Körting Altfranzösische Übersetzung der “Remedia amoris” des Ovid (ein Theil
des allegorisch didactischen Epos “Les échecs amoureux”) nach der Dres-
dener Handschrift, ed. Gustav Körting (Leipzig, 1871)
Met. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. & tr. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1984)
Mettlich Ein Kapitel über Erziehung aus einer altfranzösischen Dichtung des XIV
Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1902)
NE Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1984)
OCT Oxford Classical Texts
x abbreviations
Pamph. Pamphilus de amore, in La “comédie” latine en France au XII e siècle,

vol. 2., ed. Gustave Cohen (Paris, 1931)
PL Patrologia latina, cursus completus, ed. J.-P. Migne
PVH Deguileville, Guillaume de, Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine, ed. J.J. Stür-
zinger (London, 1893)
RA Remedia amoris, ed. E.J. Kenney (Oxford Classical Texts, 1994)
Raimondi “Les eschés amoureux: studio preparatorio ed edizione (I. vv. 1–3662).”
Pluteus 8–9 (1998): 67–241
RR Jean de Meun and Guilluame de Lorris, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Felix
Lecoy (Paris, 1965)
RS Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. Ernst Sieper, EETS, extra series 89 (London,
1903)
Scac. Jacobus de Cessolis, Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac
popularium super ludo scaccorum, or The Book of Chess by Jacob de
Cessolis, ed. & tr. H.L. Williams (New York, 2008)
TL Tobler-Lommatzsch altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, eds. Adolf Tobler and
Ernst Lommatzsch (Wiesbaden, 1955)
Sigla
D Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Oc 66

D1 Main copyist and rubricator
D2 Secondary rubricator and corrector
V Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Fr. App. 23
V1 Main copyist
V corr. Main textual editor
V1 Glossator one. The Latin gloss edition takes V 1 as the default glossator.
We note the hand, therefore, only for V 2 and V 3
V2 Glossator two
V3 Glossator three
† Dagger indicates a Latin gloss in V (see appendix for edition and trans-
lation).
./. Dotted obelus indicates a crossed-out letter (lit.), word (vox), or passage
(lect.).
[…] Single brackets enclose a lacuna of one or more letters or words.
*** A line of spaced asterisks indicate a lacuna of one or more lines in the
text of D.
[[…]] Double brackets indicate the modern editors’ completion of a phrase
left in ellipsis by the glossator without which the gloss does not make
sense.
hi Angle brackets enclose a word or words inserted by a modern editor,
either conjectural or, when in the Latin glosses in V and their trans-
lation, deemed grammatically or metrically necessary to complete the
line.
| A vertical line indicates a line-break in verse when conventional verse
formatting cannot be observed.
abbreviations xi
|| Double vertical lines separate variants or rejected readings of different

words or phrases in the same line of verse.
: A colon separates variants or rejected readings of the same word or
phrase in the same line of verse.
Italics Within the text of the poem, letters or words in italics indicate an
ellipsis or lacuna in D substituted by a reading from V.
(+1) Line is hypermetric by one syllable.
(–1) Line is hypometric by one syllable.
PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
G. Heyworth
The anonymous, 14th century Eschéz d’Amours is a poem that deserves a

place in the canon of the great works of the late Middle Ages. The most
important literary response to the Romance of the Rose, it is among the
longest verse works in French literature and the first known poem in any
European vernacular to have attracted a contemporary commentary ded-
icated uniquely to it.1 In the early 15th century, John Lydgate produced a
glossed paraphrase of the chess game, entitled Reson and Sensuallyte, that
comprises the Eschéz d’Amours’ first episode.
While its prose commentary and other derivative works enjoyed wide
diffusion, the Eschéz d’Amours itself seems to have existed only in a handful
of manuscripts, of which only two survive today: a fragment of 13,269 lines
missing beginning and end, held in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice (Fr.
App. 23), and a nearly complete version of just over 30,000 lines, missing
the end, in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden (Oc. 66).2 Over the
last century and a half, several excerpts of the poem have been edited and
1 At roughly 30,350 lines, D is less than half the length of the 14th-century Ovide moralisé,
much of which, however, is merely a translation from Latin. The Roman de Troie (30,316 lines)
and Claris et Laris (30,369 lines) are approximately the same length as the D manuscript of the
Eschéz, but judging from the issues in the narrative still to be resolved, the Eschéz is several
thousand lines short of completion when it breaks off in D with a scribal catchword indicating
a subsequent quire now missing. The Eschéz d’ Amours is the subject of a more than 350-
folio prose commentary by Evrart de Conty entitled the Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés
(EAM). The Eschéz’ status as the first vernacular beneficiary of a full-blown commentary was
first noted by Pierre-Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle (Geneva, 1980) p. 91, n. 32,
following Marc-René Jung, “Poetria: Zur Dichtungstheorie des ausgehenden Mittelalters in
Frankreich,” Vox Romanica, 30, 1971, p. 60.
2 There are seven extant manuscripts of the Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés. For a
discussion of the influence of the commentary on French literature, see the introduction to
the edition by Françoise Guichard-Tesson and Bruno Roy (Montreal, 1993). In addition to the
Venice and Dresden MSS, there were at least two other manuscripts, one of which, judging
by the explicit “Accompli fut,” contained the complete poem (D. Doutrepont, La Librairie de
Phillippe le Bon, 1420 [Brussels, 1906], items 93 and 216). Of these two, one at least was still
in existence as of the mid-17th century (Antonius Sanderus, Bibliotheca Belgica manuscripta
[1644], item 519 of the Codices Ducum Burgundiae in Palatio Bruxellensi, p. 11).
4 g. heyworth
published both in book and article form, although to date no edition of the
complete poem (such as we have it) has ever been undertaken.3
To be sure, the Eschéz d’Amours poses a formidable bulwark of obsta-
cles to reading, leaving the would-be editor in a position not dissimilar
to that of the work’s narrator, as it were, en l’ angle matéz. In addition to
being anonymous, the poem is also untitled, its identity having been estab-
lished by later convention rather than by authorial imprimatur. Its subject
matter—is it or is it not about chess?—not to mention its genre and lit-
erary filiations, are ambiguous, or perhaps merely confusing. The ending,
which might have provided clues to many or all of the above, is missing.
It is also damnably long, a fact that undoubtedly disinclined early scribes
and fed modern publishers’ apprehensions. All these factors (the last in par-
ticular) colluded in its neglect up to the fateful moment in 1945 when the
only near-complete copy was nearly destroyed by water in the infamous
bombing of Dresden, leaving the manuscript’s once pristine parchment a
faded and murky Rorschach of figures on blotting paper. A dismal micro-
film of Oc. 66, the original then beyond the reach of Western scholars in
the former East Germany, convinced two generations of scholars of the
work’s demise, a fate they duly pronounced in rueful paean to its impor-
tance.4 The Venetian manuscript, itself mortally wounded by amputation at
both ends, received brief editorial triage in the form of Christine Kraft’s Die
Liebesgarten-Allegorie der échecs amoureux (1976). An excerpt of a fragment,
this edition seemed bent on obedience to the law of diminishing returns, an
ambition that, measuring by the critical attention it attracted to the poem,
it effortlessly fulfilled.5 Not until the early 1990s, when Gianmario Raimondi
visited the newly restored Dresden manuscript in situ, was a more accurate
3 Gustav Körting, Altfranzösische Übersetzung der “Remedia amoris” des Ovids. Ein Theil
des allegorisch-didaktischen Epos “Les échecs amoureux,” nach der Dresdener Handschrift her-
ausgegeben (Leipzig, 1871); Josef Mettlich, Ein Kapitel über Erziehung aus einer altfranzösis-
chen Dichtung des XIV Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1902); Hermann Abert, “Die Musikästhetik
der Échecs amoureux,” Romanische Forschungen, 15:3, 1904, pp. 884–925; Alberto Rivoire,
“Li eschés amoureux”: frammenti trascritti dal codice marciano con introduzione e appendice
(Torre Pellice, 1915); Christine Kraft, Die Liebesgarten-Allegorie der échecs amoureux: Kritis-
che Ausgabe und Kommentar (New York, Bern and Frankfurt, 1976); Gianmario Raimondi,
“Les eschés amoureux: studio preparatorio ed edizione (I. vv. 1–3662),” Pluteus 8–9 (1998),
pp. 67–241. Raimondi’s unpublished 1997 doctoral thesis from the University of Rome, Les
eschés amoureux: Studio preparato all’edizione dei vv.1–16300, is the most comprehensive effort
to date.
4 Kraft, p. 27, Gilles Roque and H.H. Christmann in Le livre des eschez amoureux moralisés
(eds. Guichard-Tesson, Roy) LVIII, note 2; Badel, p. 264.

5 Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle: étude de la réception de l’œuvre (Genève, 1980).
general introduction 5
appraisal of its actual state made. With the benefit of ultraviolet light, Rai-
mondi pronounced most of the first part (up to folio 78) “perfettamente
leggibile,” and the rest, though more seriously damaged, 80% recuperable
when amplified by pre-war edited fragments by Mettlich and Abert.6
That Raimondi ultimately chose Venice as his base manuscript—despite
its deficiency of length—and managed to collate only a fraction of Dres-
den against Venice, however, seems to contradict his early optimism. In
fact, the manuscript is severely damaged throughout, and frequently illegi-
ble even under ultraviolet light. To the unaided eye, much of it resembles
a 30,000-line crossword puzzle in Middle French, minus the clues. Only
the recent advent of multispectral photography and pioneering technol-
ogy developed especially for this project has made Dresden Oc. 66 legible
enough to attempt the first critical edition of the entire work. Although not
without lacunae, the present edition seeks to restore the poem to its place in
literary history by providing not only an annotated text of Dresden collated
against Venice, but a thorough introduction as well as an edition and trans-
lation of the important Latin glosses that accompany the latter manuscript.
Our objectives in the introduction are threefold: to place the poem within
its historical, literary and linguistic context; to give an account of the signif-
icance of the poem’s substantial glosses from the Venice ms.; and to correct
false or unsupported conclusions regarding the poem that have cropped
up of late among scholars working from fragments and selections currently
available in the absence of a reliable and synoptic text.7
6Raimondi, p. 91.
7Among these I number my own early article, “Textual Identity and the Problem of
Convention: Recovering the Title of Dresden Oc 66,” Textual Cultures 1:2 (2006), pp. 143–151.
chapter one
DATE
G. Heyworth
Among the basic questions a reader poses of a text’s identity—what? by

whom? when?—only the last may be answered with any certainty for the
Eschéz d’Amours. The primary evidence comes from a passage originally
adduced by Gustav Körting, one of the poem’s earliest commentators:
Chilz Gavainz, dont je te sermonne,
Tant fu de gentil couvenant,
Et telz est encor maintenant
Bertrans, li nobles connestables,
Qui tant est preux et honnourables
C’on ne saroit le pareil querre
En France ne en Engleterre,
Et, se j’avoie dit ou monde,
Pour la vaillance ou habonde
N’aroye je mespriz de rien,
Tant a de vertu et de bien
Et de prouesce en sa personne.
Et s’a la voulenté si bonne
Et si d’accort au dieu plaisir
Qu’il na de rien si grant desir
Que de rendre, s’il fust possible,
Le regne et le peuple paisible,
Et que la guerre ad fin menast,
Si quez vertuz partout regnast
En bonne, amiable union.
Vecy noble condicion
Et bien seant en chevalier!
J’en souhaite en France un millier
Qui tout fussent, pour son grant preu,
Aussy vaillant et aussi preu. (Eschéz, 100rb)
The poem’s “Bertrans li nobles connestables” is undoubtedly Bertrand du
Guesclin, who became constable of France under Charles V on October 2,
1370 and died on July 13, 1380, two months short of Charles’s own death in
September of the same year. Because the author lauds him in the present
and, having established him as the epitome of 14th-century knighthood,
8 g. heyworth
could have been expected to have made dole of him in death, not to mention
of the king, we may assume that both he and Charles V were still alive at the
time of writing. Du Guesclin’s decade-long tenure as constable, then, reliably
brackets the composition to the 1370s.
This terminus ante quem can be established independently by comparing
a passage in the Eschéz to one in Froissart’s Espinette Amoureuse, a closely
related work that dates reliably to 1369.1 The Espinette provides a template
for the Eschéz’ use of the Judgment of Paris myth that frames the narrative.
While Froissart’s version follows the main line of the story—Eris (Discord)
casts a golden apple bearing the motto “For the fairest” at the feet of Juno,
Minerva, and Venus, sparking a catty quarrel for supremacy adjudicated by
Paris, it adds significant, unique details. Specifically, Froissart replays the
Judgment with a noble French youth in the role of Paris, a young man given
to the idle pursuit of games, including chess, one whose refractory habits
nettle his tutor, the god Mercury. When asked by Mercury which of the three
goddesses he would choose on her merits, the young lover opts obtusely for
Venus, to his tutor’s chagrin:
‘Dont son [Paris’s] jugement a bon tieng
Et le tenrai et le maintieng,
Ou que je soie ne quel part.’
Mercures lors de moy se part
Et me dist: ‘Che moult bien savoie!
Tout li amant vont celle voie.’ (Espinette, 519–524)
In its opening scenario of the Judgment of Paris, the Eschéz follows the
Espinette stroke for stroke—a jejune lover-schoolboy and the same cast of
allegorical characters—culminating in the Acteur’s confirmation of Paris’
choice and Mercury’s identical reaction:
Je dy qu’il me samble orendroit
Que chilz Paris bien et adroit
Juga de la pomme doree ….
Adont s’est Mercures ravis,
Et tout droit vers le ciel s’en vole,
Qu’oncquez n’y ot plus de parole,
Fors tant qu’il dist, ‘Bien le savoye!
Tous li mondez va celle voye.’ (Eschéz, 1861–1863; 1872–1876)
1 In his authoritative edition of the Espinette, Anthime Fourrier presents a strong argu-
ment based on both internal and historical evidence for dating the poem “aux approches de
1370,” L’ Espinette amoureuse (Paris, 1963), pp. 30–32.
chapter one – date 9
Mercury’s comment in the Eschéz, “Tous li mondez va celle voie,” derives,

of course, from Reason’s address to the lover in the Roman de la Rose, who
warns identically “Touz li mondes va cele voie” (ed. Lecoy, v. 4311). The
Espinette, however, assigns Reason’s line to Mercury, and it is this innovation
that the Eschéz follows by relay, confirming the relationship and priority of
the former to the latter. At least as concerns the Judgment of Paris theme,
the Eschéz mirrors and responds to the Espinette and thus must postdate it.
Returning to the Eschéz’ reference to Bertrand du Guesclin, we may be
able to refine the chronology further. According to Körting, Bertrand’s efforts
to bring the Hundred Years War with England to an end and “rendre, s’ il
fust possible,| Le regne et le peuple paisible,” refers to the Truce of Bruges, a
two-year lull in the war between June, 1375 and June, 1377, when Edward III
died and Charles V recommenced hostilities.2 The argument is plausible,
although one could counter that while the truce brought peace, it released
the French free companies or Tard-venus to pillage and despoil the coun-
try as they had in the 1360s, creating as much chaos as war itself. Ulti-
mately, though, the Truce of Bruges represents du Guesclin’s only notable
peacemaking initiative. Taking 1375 as a likely terminus post quem, one
could mount a further argument for a terminus ad quem of 1378 when
Charles V launched his campaign to confiscate Brittany from John V of Brit-
tany. Although a Breton and a Breton patriot, du Guesclin was the head of
the Caroline army whose Breton soldiers promptly deserted. Du Guesclin
himself, who pursued the campaign reluctantly, was briefly suspected of
treason and resigned his constableship, sending his sword to the King and
resolving to return to Spain to the service of Henry of Trastamara, whose
throne he had helped secure in the late 1360s. Although he soon recanted
his renunciation of office, this incident was significant enough to have tem-
pered any contemporary account of his loyalty and service as constable.
Given the passage’s unqualified approbation for du Guesclin, c. 1377 seems
to be a not unreasonable date for the appearance of the complete poem.
2 Gustav Körting, Altfranzösische Übersetzung de Remedia Amoris des Ovid (Leipzig, 1871),
p. vii.
chapter two
HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND AUDIENCE
G. Heyworth
The Eschéz d’Amours speaks from a crucial moment in history to a carefully

considered audience. Such a claim may rightly seem counterintuitive given
the ahistorical character of the work. Written at the beginning of the second
or Caroline phase of the Hundred Years War (1369–1389), the Eschéz has
a place somewhere between two groups of dream allegories. The first, of
which the most important was Guillaume Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de
la vie humaine, spirited its readers away to allegorical landscapes fraught
with abstract dilemmas, spiritual, emotional and intellectual, but remained
largely oblivious to the real dangers and imminent privations of a country
under siege, bankrupt, and on the brink of anarchy. The second is a group
of political poems that use the dream as a thin veil for pointed political and
historical comment: the Somnium super materia scismatis of Honoré Bovet,
the Somnium viridarii and its translation Le Songe du vergier of Evrart de
Trémaugon, and Le Songe véritable. Intellectually, the Eschéz belongs to a
period of paradox: the great efflorescence of secular learning and classical
translation under the bibliophile Charles V that took place, inexplicably, at
what would seem to be one of the most politically dire and inopportune
moments in French history.
The first or Edwardian phase (1337–1360) of this war of succession to the
French throne witnessed a series of calamities for the French forces. Begin-
ning with the naval Battle of Sluys of 1340 in which the French fleet was all
but annihilated, and followed in 1346 by the catastrophe of Crécy, the French
fate was sealed a decade later by the Battle of Poitiers in which King Jean II
was captured. With the king imprisoned in England, though still nomi-
nally the head of government, a crisis of practical authority erupted among
Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, the Dauphin Charles, and an Estates Gen-
eral incensed by the monarchy’s political and financial mismanagement. In
the absence of a unified central government, power devolved to regional
lords and clergy, who levied a taille or land tax on the peasants and bour-
geoisie and compelled their labor under the rules of the corvée in order to
repair towns and estates damaged by English depredations. In response to
12 g. heyworth
the perceived inequities of these measures, and given the lack of clear
authority from the crown, the peasants rose up against the nobility in 1358 in
a series of provincial and Parisian revolts, the so-called Jacqueries.1 Domes-
tically Charles managed to bring the peasants and their leaders brutally to
heel. However, in order to rebuff an English invasion and repair the crown’s
relationship with the Estates General sufficiently to countenance his return
to the capital, he was forced to accept the humiliating Treaty of Brétigny
whereby Jean ceded to Edward III a third of northwestern France in return
for Edward’s abandoning his claim to the French throne.
In addition, France agreed disastrously to a king’s ransom of three million
gold crowns. Equivalent to twice the country’s yearly budget, the sum was
quite simply unpayable. Instead, over the nine-year truce that followed the
Treaty, the French temporized, contriving to delay payments long enough
to set the country back on its feet and to fortify its demoralized military.
Late in the decade, Charles, who had been crowned king in 1364 after the
death of his father, along with his main generals Bertrand du Guesclin and
fellow Breton Olivier Clisson, conceived the strategy of nullifying the debt
by resuming the war.2
The problem they had faced since the onset, however, one made painfully
clear by the debacles of Crécy and Poitiers, was that France had no answer
to England’s vastly superior bowmen. Of course, the dominance of English
infantry had been a relatively recent development. In 1337, at the very
beginning of his reign, Edward III had forbidden upon penalty of death
the practice of all games except archery, a decree held valid for the entire
populace, both noble and peasant.3 Edward’s logic was simple, providential,
1 This version of events sympathetic to the commons belongs to Jean de Venette, The
Chronicle of Jean de Venette, tr. Jean Birdsall, ed. Richard Newhall (New York, 1953), p. 73.
Samuel Cohn, Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe (Manchester, 2004), sees the Jacqueries
of 1358 as triggered by the vacuum of authority in the absence of the King, but due just as
powerfully to earlier social tensions unrelated to the war.
2 See Siméon Luce, “De quelques jeux populaires dans l’ancienne France, à propos d’une
ordonnance de Charles V,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’année – Académie des inscriptions
et belles-lettres 6 (1889), pp. 499–501.
3 “Quia populus regni nostri, tam nobiles quam ignobiles, in jocis suis, artem sagittandi,
ante haec tempora, communiter exercebant, unde toti regno nostro honorem et commoduni,
nobis in actibus nostris guerrinis, Dei adjutorio cooperante, subventionem non modicam
pervenisse,” Thomas Rymer, Foedera (London, 1704–1735), vol. III, p. 704. Froissart enlarges
upon the injunction to include a requirement by which all nobility and “honnestes hommes
de bonnes villes mesissent cure et dilligence de estruire et aprendre leurs enfans la langhe
françoise, par quoy ils en fuissent plus able et plus coustumier ens leurs gherres,” Chroniques,
ed. Joseph Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1867) vol. 2, p. 419, making manifest Edward’s early
intention to prosecute a war of annexation and integration.
chapter two – historical context and audience 13
and ancient. In both Republican and Imperial Rome, games of chance were
considered a subversive “orientalisation” of a naturally bellicose people,
while soldiers and the praetorian guard were enjoined by law to eschew all
games but those that involved physical exercise.4 The same spartan ethic
combined with a traditionally held fear of epicurean leisure (otium) as
the source of sin impelled St. Bernard to proscribe chess to the Knights
Templar in the 12th century, while in 1254 Saint Louis, following church
edicts, banned the game along with dice in all of France.5 Thus, when
Edward renewed the ordinance in 1365, Charles knew that war was in the
offing. On April 3, 1369, he issued his own ban on chess, tables (table games)
and dice, coupled with public encouragement for archery or the jeu de
butte.6
Although seemingly disengaged from contemporary events, the Eschéz
d’ Amours, like its closest model the Espinette amoureuse, is in fact deeply
complicit in a discourse reprehending games and leisure in favor of the
contemplative and active lives.7 It mounts an unequivocal argument against
4 On the Lex alearia, see Giovanni Rotondi, Leges populi publicae Romani (Milan, 1912
[Hildesheim reprint 1966]), p. 261. On Roman prohibitions against gambling except on games
of strength, see Justinian’s Digest 11.5. 2–3. On the “orientalisation” of Roman soldiery through
leisure and games, see Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 9.1; 11.5.
5 On St. Bernard, see Richard Eales, “The Game of Chess: an Aspect of Medieval Knightly
Culture” in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood: Papers from the Strawberry Hill
Conferences, vol. 1, eds. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey, (Woodbridge, 1986), p. 29;
note too his famous catchphrase, “otiositas mater nugarum, noverca virtutum,” De Consid. II,
13; Opp. I, 431 B. Louis’s edict is mentioned in Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the
Crusades, tr. Shaw (London, 1963), p. 265, while the decree itself is recorded in Ordonnances
des rois de France, ed. E. de Laurière (Paris, 1723), I. 70, 74. The Roman discomfort with otium
made its way into Christian ideology via the Justinian Code: in De audientia episcopali, all
church officials are banned from playing games of chance for risk of involvement in the
material world, on which see J.-M. Mehl, Les jeux au royaume de France du XIIIe au début
du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1990), p. 343. Judging by Joinville, Louis’ reasoning seems to rely upon
the latter.
6 Edward’s renewal of the decree came on June 12, 1365, in Rymer, Foedera, op. cit., p. 770.
Charles’s ban (Ordonnances des rois de France, I. 172–173) stipulated a more modest penalty
of a fine of forty sous. For a discussion see Luce, “De quelques jeux …,” op. cit., pp. 501–502,
and Philippe Antoine Merlin, Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence (Paris, 1813),
vol. 6, pp. 541–542. It is interesting to note that in the mid-1370s, Charles V appointed Guichard
Dauphin, France’s celebrated Master of the Bowmen of France (Maître des Arbaletiers, 1379–
1394), as tutor to the Dauphin Charles.
7 Froissart’s Espinette amoureuse, like the Eschéz d’ Amours, introduces a young lover who
indulges in a host of games, from dice to chess, and like Guillaume de Machaut’s Dit de la
fonteinne amoureuse written only a few years earlier, it offers tacit, oblique criticism of the
life of idleness in which its noble protagonists indulge. To the extent that Froissart’s poem
was written just after the publication of the Ordonnances of 1369, its ironizing of the game–
14 g. heyworth
chess and its voluptuary ethos in response to the Ordinance of 1369. To be

sure, the poem’s position vis-à-vis chess and its historical and ethical ramifi-
cations is a question that has been obfuscated both by its earlier presumed
title, Les Esches amoureux (which seems to affirm that a positive vision of
chess and love overarches the poem), and by the exordial dedication:
A tous les amoureux gentilz,
Especialment aux soubtilz
Qui aiment le beau jeu nottable,
Le jeu plaisant et delitable,
Le jeu tres soubtil et tres gent
Des eschéz, sur tout aultre gent …. (Eschéz, 1–6)
Rather than proffer cordial approbation for the game, its players and their
lifestyle, however, the dedication levels admonition on a young, chess-
playing elite, namely university students and the nobility.8 We come to rec-
ognize its tone as arch only from having read the later discourse of Pallas.
Condemning the life of “oyseuse” (idleness) that belongs to the realm of
Venus, the goddess of wisdom targets games, (“Oyseuse ne quiert que deliz,|
De jeux et de vins et de liz,”) and exhorts students in particular to avoid idle-
ness if they wish to “Attaindre aux haulz divins miracles.” Finally, she warns
the Acteur specifically of the deleterious effects of chess and its lifestyle:
“Tous maulx” will come to him,
… se tu quiers, par aventure,
Aucuns aultrez jeux delittablez
Comme jeux de dez, de tablez,
Ou le jeu des eschecz naÿs, …. (Eschéz, 11452–11455)
And again, she counsels him never to return to the chess of love.
playing nobility may be topical. In Machaut’s case, the Fonteinne amoureuse may have been
written to observe the marriage of the Duc de Berry to Jeanne d’Armagnac, and the Duke’s
subsequent tenure as a hostage in place of his father as stipulated in the Treaty of Bretigny
(see Ernst Hoepffner, “Anagramme und Rätselgedichte bei Guillaume de Machaut,” Zeitschrift
für Romanische Philologie 30 [1906], pp. 401–413 and Hoepffner, Oeuvres de Guillaume de
Machaut [Paris, 1921], vol. 3, xxv–xxviii). Any criticism of the Duke’s ludic lifestyle, then,
would be mitigated by complaisance to a patron.
8 As Simeon Luce comments, “Toutefois, les échecs restèrent toujours une distraction
reservée au petit nombre, un délassement aristocratique,” “De quelques jeux …,” op. cit.,
p. 503. St. Louis’s 1254 ban on chess extended to members of the clergy and thus to all
university students in Northern France who held their places in statu clerici. University
conduct books in England and France standardly inveighed against chess, proscribing its play
among students in public places, Rashdall’s Medieval Universities, eds. Powicke and Emden
(Oxford, 1936), vol. 3, pp. 419–421.
Briefment, se tu veulx mettre a euvre

L’art que chilz saigez te desceuvre
Et bien acertez penser y,
Tu te verras en fin guery
De ceste langueur dolereuse
– Vueille ou non Venus l’amoureuse –
Si quez jamais n’avras envie
D’estre de l’amoureuse vie
Ne de la pucelle matter
Dont Amours te fait se haster. (Eschéz, 13581–13590)
Politically, Pallas’s advice to abstain from all games, particularly chess, is
significant in its extremity. On this topic alone, the Eschéz-author, usually a
deferential collator of his moral authorities, contradicts his primary source
outright. In the De regimine principum, which I quote here in the 14th-
century French translation of Jean de Vignay, Giles of Rome advises the
young monarch to achieve wisdom, yet also not to shun games: “Et si ne
doivent pas eschiver du tout les jieus et les recreacions et les esbatemenz,
mes il en doivent user atempreëment et en tiele manere que il ne soient
pas empeëchié a governer le reaume.”9 The sole authority for Pallas’s stance,
then, is contemporary French law.
The Eschéz d’Amours, however, is a very long poem and we have reason
to assume that over the half-decade or so during which it was composed, its
intended audience shifted in answer to historical exigencies. If the first half
of the poem is a fanciful, allegorically detailed invective against the life of
Venus, the second half is an increasingly practical, allegorically spare Mirror
for Princes, a narrative that replaces the “game” of chess with real-life tactical
advice on politics, government, and public service, of which chess was but
an otiose microcosm. Whether as a consequence of the Ordonnances of 1369
or not, the poem’s relationship to chess as socio-political metaphor is unique
in the annals of medieval literature.
An important, if auxiliary, conceit in medieval romance and chansons de
geste, chess mastery served as a means of revealing that inward dimension
of knighthood—strategy, self-control, tactical skill and social savvy both on
the battlefield and in the cockpit of the court—invisible to the bloodthirsty
cut-and-thrust of traditional chivalric narrative. The Gauvain of Chrétien de
Troyes’ 12th century Roman de Perceval, who famously uses a chessboard to
9 A Thirteenth Century French Version of Egidio Colonna’s Treatise De regimine principum
now first published from the Kerr MS., ed. Samuel Molnaer (New York, 1899 [AMS reprint
1966]), book 1.9, p. 40.
16 g. heyworth
defend himself against the onslaught of a mob of commoners, serves as

an early exemplar for the chess-playing knight whose behavior turns the
game into a topical allegory.10 Following the example of Gauvain, Huon de
Bordeaux and Garin de Monglane, in eponymous 13th-century poems, dis-
tinguish themselves as preeminent knights of Charlemagne’s court through
their skill at the chessboard.
If chess played a peripheral role as plot device in medieval literature of
adventure, it became the focus of a new branch of didactic literature. Two
works of the 13th century launched the sub-genre of the chess morality:
the Quaedam moralitas de scaccario (c. 1250), a text spuriously attributed
to Pope Innocent III but closely associated with John of Wales, and Jacobus
Cessolis’s Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium super ludo scaccho-
rum from the last quarter of the century. Quickly absorbed into the vernac-
ular in such minor poems as the Jus des ésques of Engreban d’ Arras, and the
Jeu des eschés de la dame moralisé, the Latin works shared the same method
of anatomizing the chessboard and its pieces as a socio-political allegory
of medieval life, fortifying their moralizations along the way with classical
maxims.11 Their signal difference lies in the Quaedam’s religiously inflected
in malo take on the game that contrasts markedly with the Liber’s secular, in
bono treatment.12
The Eschéz d’Amours represents a compromise between the peripheral
use of chess within the action of chivalric narratives and its centrality within
the static frame of the moralities. Here, for the first time, chess becomes the
major allegorical conceit that at once drives the plot and delivers its ethical
10 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, ed. William Roach (Paris,
1959) vv. 5886–6006.

11 The Jus dates roughly to the end of the 13th or beginning of the 14th centuries, making it
an approximate contemporary of the Liber de moribus, although Felix Lecoy, in his edition of
the Jus des ésques (“Le Jeu des Echecs d’ Engreban d’ Arras” in Mélanges de Philologie Romane
et de Littérature Médiévale Offerts à Ernst Hoepffner, Publications de la Faculté des lettres de
l’ Université de Strasbourg, fasc. 113 [Paris, 1949], pp. 307–312) floats the possibility of the
vernacular poem’s antecedence to Cessolis. The Jeu, dating at least from the mid-14th century
if not later, can be found in the edition of Östen Södergard, “Petit poème allégorique sur
les échecs,” Studia Neophilologica 23 (1950–1951), pp. 127–136; it has recently received critical
attention by Kristin Juel, “Defeating the Devil at Chess: A Struggle between Virtue and Vice in
Le Jeu des esches de la dame moralisé,” in Daniel O’Sullivan ed., Chess in the Middle Ages and
Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World (Berlin, 2012),
pp. 87–108.
12 For the distinction between the Liber and the Quaedam as treating respectively order
and disorder in the world, see Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature of Chess in the Late
Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 43–45.
freight, becoming a narrative model for 14th and 15th century chess liter-
ature. Yet while all other poems of the period that work chess into their
narrative web adopt Cessolis’s in bono vision of the game, embroidering it
with ever deepening coils of allegory, the Eschéz finds meaning by extricat-
ing itself and its protagonist from chess’s metaphoric entanglements. Where
Philippe de Mézières expends thousands of lines of advice to the young
Charles VI in book III of the Songe du vieil pelerin (1389) on a labored allegory
of the four corners of the chessboard, and Pierre Salmon recurs reflexively to
chess exempla and moralities drawn from Cessolis in the Dialogues (1409–
1415), the Eschéz mentions chess twice in the latter 20,000 verses, and then,
like the Quaedam, only to pass censure.13
We are left with an odd picture of the Eschéz in its literary and historical
context. It is at once an outlier among the Mirrors for Princes produced at
the end of Charles V’s reign and the first regency and tumultuous reign of
Charles VI, yet also the prototype of them all. A poem that grows in didactic
seriousness, it alienates itself gradually from its own allegory as its audience
evolves beyond the vaguely dissolute youth, aristocratic and academic in
pedigree, of the beginning. The later poem becomes an ever more narrowly
focused advice text to a ruling nobility and ultimately, perhaps, a future king
in jeopardy of losing his path.
The Charles V of the 1370s was a man living on borrowed time and thus
mindful of both his public and private legacy. Although only in his thirties,
he suffered from a series of debilities most likely related to an attempted
poisoning by arsenic during his contest with Charles the Bad for control
of Paris in the mid-1360s. The outward sign of his impending doom, two
parts astrology to one part pathology, was a lingering abscess or sursanure
on his left arm that, according to his doctors, would spell death within a
fortnight were it ever to dry up.14 As early as 1374, Charles had begun to
prepare for the education of his young son in the event of his own death.15 His
13 Philippe de Mézierès, a knight and privy counselor to Charles V, baldly contradicts the
rationale of the Ordonnances of 1369, arguing in the Songe for the importance of chess as a
military tool through the example of an Arabian Caliph said to have played chess on his way
to battle. Salmon’s Dialogues are edited by Anne Hedeman as Of Counselors and Kings: The
Three Versions of Pierre Salmon’s Dialogues (Urbana-Champaign, 2001).
14 Froissart, Chroniques, op. cit., vol. 9, pp. 280–282. Ultimately, it dried up in early Septem-
ber 1380 and he was dead by the sixteenth.

15 Fearing the malign influence of his brother the Count d’Anjou, the King drew up Letters
Patent signed in October of 1374 in Melun, designating the Queen as regent should he die
before Charles’s thirteenth birthday, on which see Françoise Autrand, Charles VI: la folie du
roi (Paris, 1986), p. 13
18 g. heyworth
concern seems to have been dual: (1) that his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou,
Berry and Bourgogne, self-seeking profligates addicted to idle games and
gambling, would exert malign influence on the young Dauphin, and (2) that
his son demonstrated signs of frivolity, a lack of interest in study, and per-
haps a certain emotional instability that demanded firm moral and intel-
lectual correction.
On the first count, certainly as concerns gaming, he was demonstrably
correct. In 1370, the Duke of Berry caused a minor scandal for losing so prodi-
gally at dice that he was forced to hock his rosary in order to get into a game.
Early in the regency of the 1380s, the Duke of Bourgogne did indeed manage
to lead the young Charles VI astray, as one 17th-century historian records: “au
lieu de l’appliquer à l’étude … il ne lui proposoit que des parties de plaisir:
le jeu, la chasse, les spectacles, la musique et les festins,” in short, nearly
the same list Pallas forbids to the young Acteur.16 On the second count, one
can only surmise whether Charles V recognized early adumbrations of the
insanity that would claim Charles VI in his mid-twenties. From Froissart’s
account of Charles V’s deathbed comments, however, we hear his estima-
tion of his son’s intellectual weaknesses and his desire for their remediation:
“li enfféz est jonez et de legier esprit, sy ara mestier que il soit menéz et
gouvernéz de bonne doctrine.”17 The Eschéz delivers precisely the moral and
political “bonne doctrine” that Charles requests. Whether that was its charge
is another question.
In the latter half of the Eschéz d’Amours, the poet paints himself into
a curious allegorical corner regarding his intended audience. Either he is
writing for the edification of the young Charles VI or he has made an egre-
gious error, it seems, in choosing his sources. A liberal adaptation of Giles
of Rome’s treatise on governance, the poem’s second half is an unremit-
ting lecture by Pallas to the Acteur on the theory and praxis of princely
government. If Pallas’s audience were not a prince destined for the throne,
she would hardly have wasted thousands of lines of instruction on a com-
moner, a choice that would belie her authority as the embodiment of wis-
dom and prudence. Of course the Acteur, to the extent that he is the “author”
of the Eschéz, cannot literally be the young Charles VI. Moreover, Pallas’s
16 On the Duke of Berry, see Siméon Luce, “De quelques jeux,” op. cit., pp. 502–503. On the
Duke of Bourgogne, see Charles Perrault, Abbé de Choisy, Histoire de Charles VI (Paris, 1695),
p. 14.
17 This characterization of the young Charles VI is specific, although not unique, to MS
Leiden VGGF 9 (vol. 2) f. 51v in The Online Froissart: A Digital Edition of the Chronicles of Jean
Froissart (www.hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart/index.jsp).
allegorical audience is not the same as her ultimate audience. Rather, the
Acteur functions as a placeholder for a somewhat broader, more inclu-
sive category of listener-pupils. The problem for the author of the Eschéz,
then, becomes how to define the parameters of a multiple audience with-
out compromising the allegorical frame in which the audience is singular.
The Eschéz-author shoulders this problem in a carefully crafted dialogue
between Pallas and the Acteur that floats the possibility that while the lat-
ter may not want to rule, and Fortune may choose not to grant him kingship,
he should at least be prepared for it. The crucial passage begins with the
Acteur’s statement of the problem:
‘Dame,’ dis je, ‘certainement
Vous m’avés du gouvernement
Dez princes parlé mout avant,
Et je vous diz bien, je m’en vant,
Que j’ay tres bien retenu toute,
Car la matiere me plaist moult,
Et l’ay ouÿ tres voulentiers,
Tout ne m’en soit il ja mestiers,
Car je ne quiert, n’il ne me chault,
Que j’aye ja estat si hault.
J’ay plus chier la moyenne vie,
Car je n’ay de regnier envie
Ne de seignourir nullement.’ (Eschéz, 81va)
The sentence, “Car je ne quiert, n’il ne me chault,” (“Because I do not seek,
nor does it happen to be,| that I have such high estate”) implies that he is
not royalty at all. And yet his status is made equivocal by the suggestion that
volition, rather than birth, is the obstacle to his accession, an innuendo to
which Pallas’s response lends greater conviction,
‘S’il dont est ainsy, beaulx amis,
Que Fortune la decepvable
Ne te soit pas si savourable
Qu’on te feist prince terrestre,
Ou que tu ne le vueillez estre,
Comme tu dis, par aventure,
Il te fault mettre ailleurs ta cure
En aucun aultre estat loable,
Mais que tu voyes ayable.’ (Eschéz, 81va)
At this point, Pallas turns to the tasks of the royal counsellor, the implication
being that the Acteur is either royalty or nobility with access to the inner
circle of government.
More interesting, however, is how the passage self-consciously navigates
the movement from a moral, and therefore generic, allegory to a political,
20 g. heyworth
and therefore historically specific one, embracing simultaneously an eclec-

tic and an esoteric audience. Mirrors for Princes fall generally into three
categories: those that were written to answer the pedagogic needs of a par-
ticular individual; those dedicated to a prince or a royal family but intended
for the consumption of the children of nobility; those that discourse broadly
and theoretically on governance and are designed for an academic audi-
ence.18 Giles of Rome is unusual in seeking an audience that straddles these
social registers by providing theoretical arguments for rulers and exempla
for the commoners: “car ja soit cen chose que ce livre soit fet por enseigner
les rois et les princes, toute voies le pueple puet estre enseignié par de livre.”19
The Eschéz-author translates Giles’s didactic inclusivity into literary form.
Combining the genres of the popular dream allegory with that of the specu-
lum regis constitutes, here in the 1370s, a novel experiment in decorum, of
which the Eschéz is among the first of its kind.20
18 The distinction was first made by Lester K. Born, “The Perfect Prince: A Study in
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Ideals” Speculum 3:4 (1928), pp. 470–471.
19 Giles of Rome, De reg., 1b23–27, p. 5.
20 Technically, the Eschéz is not a dream poem as the narrator is not asleep. He is therefore
cognizant of and responsible for his choices, a fact that complements the seriousness of a
Mirror for Princes designed as a pragmatic pedagogic instrument. On the question of hybrid
dream allegory and politically informed narrative, see C. Marchello-Nizia, “Entre l’histoire
et la politique: le songe politique,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 183 (1985), pp. 39–53; and
J. Quillet, “Songe et songerie dans l’ art politique du XIV siècle,” Etudes philosophiques (1975),
pp. 327–349.
chapter three
TITLE
G. Heyworth
The poem that we have been calling the Eschéz d’ Amours is in fact anepi-
graphal. Neither of the two existing manuscripts assigns a title to the work,
nor has there surfaced any 14th-century mention of the poem contemporary
with its authorship. In the absence of authoritative witness, we may look
to the opinions of later sources. A title, however, is not merely a matter of
convention but also of suitability; a good one should answer the question of
what the work, considered in its entirety, is really about. Because the poem
lacks an ending, synoptic judgments of its content and narrative objective
are difficult, although by no means impossible. In other words, identifying
the text requires not merely a careful historical consideration of the text’s
conventional titles from medieval sources, but a textual argument for the
poem’s overarching ambition. Three options present themselves, each with
an internal logic as well as a medieval pedigree: Les Eschéz amoureux, Raison
et sensualité, and Les Eschéz d’Amours.1
Over the past century and a half since the poem resurfaced, Les Eschéz
amoureux has served as its default title. The opening lines contain both
words in relatively close proximity:
A tous les amoureux gentilz,
Especialment aux soubtilz
Qui aiment le beau jeu nottable …
Des eschéz …. (Eschéz, 1–3; 6)
Written at the turn of the 15th century, some quarter century after the
composition of the poem itself, Evrart de Conty’s commentary confirms this
choice when he refers to his source as “le livre rimé Des Eschez amoureux”
(1r 11). Significantly though, Evrart seems to derive the title from the passage
cited above, repeating its key words and formulae. Thus, his prologue begins,
“Pour ce que la matere d’amours est delitable en soy … et par especial aux
1 On the orthography of “Eschéz” as opposed to “Eschez” or “Eschés,” see section 7.3
below, “special linguistic problems.”

22 g. heyworth
jones gens du monde,” picking up the cues to the audience’s youth and
“especialement” from line two, and continuing, “pour ce que c’ est le plus
beau jeu” (1r 14), an echo of the dedication’s signature “beau jeu nottable.”
I pay the details peculiar scrutiny here because they suggest that Evrart’s
title is a matter of his own inference from the text, rather than from an
authoritative, independent attestation. We are dealing here, then, with an
interpreter’s opinion of the poem’s content and narrative aspirations, an
opinion that has been accepted as authoritative, largely without ado, by
some other, later interpreters.
Whether for better or for worse, Evrart’s vicarious witness has proven
decisive. In his 1822 catalog of the Dresden Königlichen Bibliothek, Adolf
Ebert speculates that our poem is identical with one held at the Biblio-
thèque Nationale in Paris that he had found already titled and described
in Thomas Dibdin’s A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in
France and Germany published the previous year. In 1839, the subsequent
cataloguer of the Dresden library, Karl Falkenstein, who had clearly taken
only cursory notice of the beginning and end of the manuscript, lists Oc. 66
as “Les Eschez Amoureux,” citing Ebert and the corroborating evidence of the
illustrations, three of which contain chess scenes.2 Since Falkenstein, “Les
Eschez Amoureux” and its variant spellings has gone almost uncontested.3
There are several reasons to reconsider Evrart’s opinion, however. First,
neither in the opening nor anywhere else in this very long poem does
its author ever collocate the words “eschéz” and “amoureux” in a single
phrase, unlike the other two title options that enter severally throughout the
text. Second, inasmuch as a text’s subject and its readers’ predilections are
discrepant categories, the prologue’s envoi to a reader is hardly equivalent to
a title. Third, as I have argued elsewhere, the dedication is ironic: it defines
an audience with a fondness for chess and a proclivity toward frivolous
love play as a target for moral corrective. That this irony was apparent to
the poem’s first commentators is unlikely. Both Evrart de Conty and John
Lydgate understand the poem as moralistic, but seem to feel—counter to
what Pallas avers—that chess is at worst an ambivalent ethical metaphor
and at best a positive one.4 Either way, “Les Eschez amoureux” (The Chess
2 Ebert, Geschichte und Beschreibung der königlichen öffentlichen Bibliothek zu Dresden
(Leipzig, 1822), p. 322. Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France
and Germany (London, 1821), vol. 2, p. 209.
3 Falkenstein, Beschreibung der königlichen öffentlichen Bibliothek zu Dresden (Dresden,
1839), pp. 431–432.

4 Evrart, for example, comments: “Finablement, l’ entente principal de l’acteur dessusdit
chapter three – title 23
of Love) is a title whose meaning conveys none of the poem’s indictment

of the values of chess and love, proclaiming rather a cheerful disregard for
the poem’s moral center, and perhaps even implying a partisanship with the
Venutian cohort.
In quantitative terms, the most serious obstacle to accepting “Les Eschez
amoureux” as the title is the simple fact that only a very small portion,
roughly one-seventh of the poem, has anything to do with the eponymous
chess game and its allegory. Wandering through the Jardin de Deduis, the
narrator first happens on Deduis and the chess maiden on 23r; he plays a
game with her beginning on 25r, is checkmated on 27v, and is counseled
on his conduct as lover and chess player by Amours until 45r, whereupon
at 46r Pallas enters. Her discourse, lasting nearly a hundred folios until
the manuscript breaks off at 144, is an exhortation to forego the feckless
“vie voluptueuse” and embrace either the active or contemplative life. It
mentions chess twice, and then only to condemn it.
This radical disjunction between the poem’s ludic beginning and its di-
dactic middle and end has troubled many of the poem’s modern scholars.
Gustav Körting was the first to remark upon the seeming irrelevancy of the
conventional title to the majority of the text, commenting in 1871 that the
relationship of the “acteur” to his beloved chess opponent is not significant
enough in the scope of the entire work to justify naming the poem after it.5
Heinrich Junker considered the chess game “incidental” (“nebenher”) to the
discourse, as did Joseph Mettlich.6 Of those who accept the title, Ernst Sieper
acknowledges the problem of relevance but dismisses it, concluding that the
Evrardian title “hews to the core of the subject” (“den Kern der Sache trifft”)
and that his title is still an early attestation, a conclusion ventriloquized
by his student Hans Höfler.7 Finally, Alberto Rivoire and more recently
et la fin de son livre, c’ est de tendre a vertu et a bonne oeuvre et de fouir tout mal et toute
fole oyseuse,” EAM, 1r 29–31. Given his focus on chess as the central allegory in the rest of the
EAM, one may conjecture that he didn’t consider chess a subject of “fole oyseuse.”
5 Gustav Körting, Altfranzösische Übersetzung der Remedia Amoris des Ovid (Leipzig,
1871), p. vi.
6 Junker, Grundriß der Geschichte der französischen Literatur von ihren Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart (Münster, 1889), p. 158; Mettlich, “Ein Kapitel über Erziehung aus einer altfranzö-
sischen Dichtung des 14. Jahrhunderts zum ersten Male veröffentlicht,” Wissenschaftliche
Beilage zum Programme des Königlichen Paulinischen Gymnasiums zu Münster (Münster,
1902), p. 3.
7 Sieper, Les Eches Amoureux: Eine altfranzösische Nachahmung des Rosenromans und
ihre englische Übertragung (Weimar, 1898), p. 112; Höfler, “Les Echecs Amoureux,” Romanische
Forschungen 25 (1910), pp. 685–686.
24 g. heyworth
Christine Kraft and Gianmario Raimondi favor the conventional title, but do
so based on their editions of the fragmentary San Marco manuscript, which
excerpts the chess game and its allegory to the exclusion of the majority of
the poem.8
If “Les Eschéz Amoureux” is a fitting title only for the chess section,
what then should the entire poem be called? One attractive alternative is
to abandon the chess game as the poem’s defining scene and shift scrutiny
backward to the poet’s early discourse with Nature. Lydgate’s Reson and
Sensuallyte, a loose paraphrase of a portion of our poem made sometime
in the first decade of the fifteenth century, chooses this option, and not
without solid grounds. Following the prologue, our poem provides what may
be considered an introduction to the issues at stake in it.9 Here the narrator
is confronted with the person of Nature who, responding to his professed
desire to attain “noblesce” and the true “dignité de l’ omme,” informs him of
two paths he may take, one running east to west, and the other west to east.
The latter, she maintains, is the path of “sensualités” and is to be avoided as it
leads to a bestial rule of the senses, while the former is the path of “raisons,”
the singular quality of humanity, an argument to which Pallas returns in
folio 47r. Indeed, the phrase “raisons et sensualités” occurs early on as the
first line of folio 5 in Dresden, announcing a signal prolepsis of the choice
the narrator will face between the Jardin de Deduis and the intellectual life
of Paris at the poem’s end. The east-west dichotomy, deriving ultimately
from both classical and biblical literature, turns on a long held Western
prejudice that the orient is the locus of the fantastical and the voluptuous.10
Significantly, however, the east is also the place where chess originates, from
whence it made its way westward.11
8 Rivoire, Li Echés Amoureux: Frammenti trascritti dal codice Marciano con introduzione e
appendice (Torre Pellice, 1915); Christine Kraft, Die Liebesgarten-Allegorie des Echecs Amou-
reux: Kritische Ausgabe und Kommentar (Frankfurt, 1977); Gianmario Raimondi, op. cit.,
pp. 67–241. Domenico Ciampoli proposed a new, albeit parenthetical, title, “Li Vergier
d’ amours” that ignores the problem entirely, I codici francesi della R. Biblioteca Nazionale di
San Marco in Venezia, descritti e illustrati (Venice, 1897), p. 132.
9 The opposition is explored in depth in Jean le Bel’s mid-14th-century Li ars d’amour, de
vertu et de boneurté, ed. Jules Petit (Brussels, 1869), vol. 2, esp. p. 31ff.
10 In our poem, the narrator is actually presented with three ways, the active life, the
intellectual life and the idle life. This tripartite scheme derives from the Bible, Numbers 20:7,
which shows strong affinities to the Stoic “middle road,” and in Luke 13:24. The topos of
dual, circular paths running in opposite directions (right-left/ left-right) derives from Plato,
Timaeus, among others, on which see “Literary Context” below.
11 Jacobus de Cessolis gives chess’s origin as Babylon in his 13th-century Liber de moribus
hominum et officiis nobilium super ludo scacchorum, in The Book of Chess by Jacob de Cessolis
To study the chess of love, as Amours would have the narrator do, is thus
to direct one’s intellectual energies eastward in contravention of Nature’s
advice. Given Nature’s authority, the predominance of Pallas’s argument in
the text, and the fact that the Acteur goes on to author this highly scholastic
poem, we may assume that the manuscript ends with a scene in which the
lover exits the Jardin de Deduis toward Paris and onto the path of reason,
self-consciously requiting the lover’s dismissal of reason for sensuality in
the poem’s parent text the Roman de la Rose. Thus, regardless of whether
Lydgate had before him a titled manuscript of our poem, “Reason and
Sensuality,” in whatever form or spelling, seems effectively to overarch both
the larger moral pretensions of the text, the cultural etiology of the chess
game, and the poem’s critical relationship to the Roman de la Rose.
What mitigates somewhat the cogency of this argument is the possibility
that Reson and Sensuallyte was not the title Lydgate gave his poem. Of the
two manuscripts of the English translation that exist—Bodleian Fairfax 16
and BL Additional 297, 29.A—the former, of which the latter is a copy, has
had its title inserted in a sixteenth-century hand, probably that of Fairfax’s
owner John Stowe. The poem’s first editor, Ernst Sieper, maintains that “the
title, there remains little doubt, is an invention of Stowe.”12 His evidence is
highly conjectural: “reason and sensuality” is a common superscription for
similar allegorical texts of the mid-sixteenth century. Sieper’s bluff assertion,
however, may have something to do with the fact that in his earlier study, he
alone contradicted earlier consensus on the inappropriateness of the French
poem’s title, a position he would have to revise were the title of Lydgate’s
translation authentic.
Of course, the opposition of reason and sensuality is a central medieval
antinomy framed originally by Augustine (De Trinitate, 12.12), examined
later by Aquinas (Summa, 1. 81) and conceived by Jean de Meun as the
central conflict of the Roman de la Rose. For Lydgate, the question of whether
the two qualities of man were in any way reconcilable was of burning
importance. His allegorical Assembly of Gods opens to the poet alone by a
lake, “Musyng on a maner how that I myght make| Reason and Sensualyte
in oon to acorde,” (ll. 5.6) and concludes that, “Bothe Sensualyte and Reson
ed. & tr. H.L. Williams (New York, 2008), p. 5, while the earlier Persian Vijarishn I Chatrang
gives it as India via Iran, in The Explanation of Chatrang and Other Texts, ed. J. Tarapore
(Bombay, 1932).
12 Lydgate, Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. Ernst Sieper (London, EETS. extra series 89, 1903),
p. 4.
26 g. heyworth
applyeth| Rather Dethe to fle then with hit to be tane” (2012–2013).13 In its
resolution of the antinomy, then, The Assembly of Gods forms a diptych in
Lydgate’s corpus with Reson and Sensuallyte in which the two qualities are
antagonistic. Thus it seems that Reson and Sensuallyte is or at least deserves
to be Lydgate’s title, a fact that, though suggestive, is still not probative of
the French original’s identity.
Among modern commentators, the only one to refer to the poem as “Les
Esches d’amour” is Pierre-Yves Badel, a choice for which he gives no explana-
tion.14 The missing argument in favor begins at the turn of the 15th century in
a scribal preface to Evrart de Conty’s commentary.15 Where Evrart gives only
“Eschez amoureux” as his source’s title, the scribe adds two crucial details
to the poem’s identity: “Ce present livre fut fait et ordené principalment a
l’instance d’un autre, fait en rime nagueres, et de nouvel venu a cognois-
sance, qui est intitulé Des Eschez amoureux ou Des Eschez d’ amours” (EAM,
1r, 1–3). This attestation is significant for two reasons. First, it provides alter-
native titles for the same text. Second, it suggests that the poem circulated
in two distinct periods of time, that first it was “fait en rime nagueres” and
then, after a period of time long enough for it to have fallen into oblivion,
“de nouvel venu a cognoissance.” Evrart himself corroborates this two-phase
composition: “Et affin que ce livre rime fut plus agreablement et plus gen-
eralment recue de tous, jones et anciens, l’aucteur avec l’ amoureuse matiere
entremella et adjousta pluseurs choses estranges qui profitent grandement
a traictier des meurs et au gouvernement de nostre vie humaine” (EAM, 1r,
18–22). The two titles, with their subtle but acute connotative discrepancies,
are the result of the reception of the text at two different periods, the earlier
of which contained a version featuring the chess game in the Garden, and
perhaps, the beginning of Pallas’s rebuttal, and a second version of the com-
plete work in which Pallas’ reply convinces the Acteur to renounce chess
and thus his allegiance to the God of Love, constituting an “echec d’ Amour”
which is to say his failure or checkmate in the rhetorical contest with Pallas.
13 Lydgate, The Assembly of Gods or The Accord of Reason and Sensuality in the Fear of
Death, ed. Oscar Lovell Triggs (EETS 69, 1895 [Kraus Reprint, 1981]).
14 He merely comments parenthetically “par convention nous le désignons comme les
Echecs amoureux,” Pierre-Yves Badel, op. cit., p. 264.

15 That the preface is not the work of Evrart is suggested by the last line of the preface
referring to the commentary author in the third person: “L’aucteur [Evrart] donc qui le fit
[the Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés] commence ainsi son livre par un tel prologue” (1r
6–7), as well as by the fact that in the B Manuscript (Paris, Bib. Nat. 1508), the preface is written
in a different hand from the text.
Evidence confirming some of the key elements of this theory can be found
in the inventory of the library of Philippe le Bon, Duke of Bourgogne from
1420. Two different copies of our poem, entries 93 and 216, are recorded:
93. Item, ung autre livre nommé le LIVRE DE ECHIES AMOUREUX, escript
en parchemin, de lettre courant, en rime, à deux coulonnes et une histoire,
enluminé d’asur et de vermeil, commençant ou iie fueillet “De tout le monde,”
et ou derrenier “car ainsi” ….
216. Item, ung autre livre de grant volume, rimé, à deux colonnes, couvert de
cuir vermeil, nommé le LIVRE DES ESCHEZ D’AMOURS, commençant ou iie
fueillet “Une dame trop advenant,” et ou derrenier fueillet “Acompli fut.”16
The citations serve multiple purposes. First, like the scribal attestation in
the Commentary, they evince a need to verify the identity of a poem whose
title—here in two competing versions—has not yet been authoritatively
established, and to distinguish it from other similarly titled works in the
same library, namely item 215, “Le Livre de la Moralite des Nobles Hommes
sur le Jeu des Eschez,” a translation of Jacobus Cessolis’s popular thirteenth-
century treatise on chess as social allegory, and the “Livre des Eschez Amou-
reux Moralizé”—i.e. Evrart’s commentary—noted at the end of the inven-
tory. Second, they present two different versions of the poem, each with a
distinct name. The one entitled the Livre de eschies amoureux, inasmuch as
it is anthologized alongside a historical text, was likely considerably smaller
than the deluxe, single work “livre de grant volume” called the Livre des
eschez d’amours, whose designation of length is so remarkable that it is used
for only two works in the entire collection. Moreover, because the inventory
gives the explicit as “Acompli fut,” we can be reasonably confident that this
latter version contains an integral version of the poem.
The two existing manuscripts today, an early version (first decade of the
15th century) containing the chess game and a portion of Pallas’s monologue
and the later (c. 1478), far more complete version, seem to reflect the pattern
of the 15th-century catalogue. A further codicological argument can be
made for the two-version theory. Significantly, the fragmentary Venice is
ruled in a single column of 46 lines, while the longer Dresden, like the deluxe
edition, is ruled in double columns, each with 55 to 56 lines. In other words,
for the Venice to merely to reach the point in Dresden at which the narrative
breaks off, it would need to exceed 673 pages, a sum that would likely have
16 Inventaire de la “Librairie” de Philippe le Bon, 1420, ed. Georges Doutrepont (Brussels,
1906 [Reprint Geneva 1977]), pp. 53, 146.

28 g. heyworth
fallen at least a hundred pages short of the complete work.17 Manuscripts

of those dimensions are unusually rare and unwieldy. My point is that the
choice of ruling for Venice makes sense only if the work being copied were
of moderate length.
Besides Venice, at least two more of these small-format or excerpted
editions must have existed, something we may deduce from the fact that
both Lydgate’s translation and Evrart’s commentary break off soon after
the chess game. As concerns Lydgate, given his investment in the question
of whether reason and sensuality can be reconciled, he would have made
mention of Pallas’s arguments in favor of reason had he indeed had before
him the non-chess portion of the text, and would have had an enormous
investment in the Acteur’s final decision pro or contra. A more convincing
argument along this same line can be made for Evrart’s ignorance of the
complete poem. In the commentary, he concludes with a brief sketch of
Pallas’s argument to the narrator whose details, we should note, render
the precis given in folios 46–48 rather than demonstrating a convincing
knowledge either of the latter portions or the end of the poem. He ends
with the odd verse epilogue, perhaps appropriating a passage or phrase
from the Eschéz itself, “Je layray donc ceste matere| tant soit elle de grant
mistiere.| Je n’y puis briefment plus entendre,” (EAM, 352v, 29–31) suggesting
his incomprehension of what follows. In reality, by explicating the chess
game, Evrart has treated the only “mysterious” part of the poem, the rest
of which is straightforwardly didactic. More likely, then, this neat occupatio
is a way of avoiding the discommodity of a fragmentary source manuscript
containing only the chess game and the beginning of Pallas’s speech with
its outline for the rest of the work. Evrart most probably had no more of the
poem before him.18
Ultimately, given the complete manuscript’s length and the seeming in-
coherence of its subject, the chess excerpt would have made a cheaper,
more coherent, and more attractive book, especially for scacophiles like the
Duke of Bourgogne. It is reasonable to conjecture, then, that the poem’s
conventional title as attested by Evrart derives from an early, small-format
17 Judging by the poet’s use of Giles of Rome’s De reg. as a template for the second half
and the poem’s progress through two-thirds of Giles’s argument, the poem could not have
finished in fewer than another 5,000 lines.
18 This is much the same conclusion as Sieper’s: “Überhaupt geht aus den Worten, mit
denen der Pariser Codex [Evrart’s commentary] über den weiteren Verlauf der Dichtung
berichtet, nicht hervor, dass dem Erklärer eine vollständigere Version, als uns in der Dres-
dener Handschrift überliefert ist, vorlegen hat,” op. cit., p. 105.
version whose subject centers squarely on chess and love, while the longer
one, as attested in the inventory, belongs to the later, complete work.
If a poem’s subject, construed as the rubric under which its various
arguments unite, trumps convention as the primary determinant of title,
Raison et Sensualité deserves the nod. Yet while a poem may be united
rhetorically, it may also find structural coherence in its central conceit.
Although chess is not the subject of most of the poem, the metaphor of
chess may well be. When in the prologue the narrator reveals that he has
recently been checkmated by a queen (“d’une fierge en l’ angle matéz”), we
may assume he is referring to the chess-playing maiden to whom he loses
at the beginning of the poem. The fierge, however, may also be construed
as Pallas (a “virgin” goddess), whose arguments for the contemplative and
active lives effectively checkmate the narrator in a logical corner, forcing his
capitulation. This reading is bolstered by the common idiomatic use of the
phrase “mater en l’angle” that designated figuratively a reversal of fortune
caused by the illogic of the victim as in Rutebeuf’s Le Dit d’ Ypocrisie, ll. 174–
175: “De folie matee en angle.” In this sense, we may read the poem as the
story of two fierges: the maiden who first conquers the narrator to sensuality
and the service of the god of Love, and Pallas who reconquers him, delivering
his former master an “échec d’Amours.”
chapter four
AUTHOR
G. Heyworth
Nothing is known about the author of the Eschéz d’ Amours beyond what
can reasonably be extrapolated from the literary and historical milieu of
late 14th-century France in which he worked, or inferred from the poem
about his character and interests. What is certain is that the Eschéz is the
product of an eclectic mind, encyclopedic in its classical erudition and with
a particular interest in things Ovidian, lavish in its praise for Paris as the
epicenter of Western learning, engaged in the discourse of governance that
followed the popular Aristotelian distinction among the spheres of ethics,
economics, and politics, and thoroughly secular in its tastes.
Grandiose in his conception and range of allusion, the Eschéz-poet shares
a broadminded humanism and an index of common reference with the
authors of Charles V’s circle of literati charged by the king with enriching
French culture through translation and original composition. These fall
generally into five categories whose members and works are worth noting
in detail: (1) translators of the Latin classics and the Bible;1 (2) poets and
moralists around the school of the Roman de la Rose;2 (3) chroniclers;3 (4)
political and social didacticists;4 (5) natural scientists, particularly those
with interests in medicine and astrology.5 Because the Eschéz is panoptic in
1 Pierre Bersuire (Ovid, Livy), Jacques Bouchant (Seneca), Jean d’Antioche (Cicero),
Simon de Hesdin and Nicholas de Gonesse (Valerius Maximus), Macé de la Charité (Bible),
Raoul de Presles (Bible, Augustine), Jehan de Sy (Bible). Anonymous translators of this
period were responsible for a series of other classical texts, including works by Sallust, Lucan
and Julius Caesar, and religious works by Jacques de Voragine (The Life and Miracles of St.
Bernard), Gregory the Great (Homilies), Henry of Suso (Horologium sapientiae), Augustine,
Cassian and Boethius.
2 Honoré Bovet, Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Machaut, Christine de Pizan, Jean
de Montreuil, Jean Gerson.

3 Jean Froissart, Jean Lelong, Pierre d’ Orgemont.
4 Honoré Bovet, Jean Ferron (Cessolis), Jean Daudin (Petrarch, Vincent de Beauvais), Jean
Goulain (Giles of Rome), Nicole Denis Soulechat (John of Salisbury), Jean de Vignay (Cessolis,
Ecloga Theodulae), Philippe de Mézières.
5 Jean Corbéchon (Bartolomaeus Anglicus), Nicole Oresme, Evrart de Conty (Aristotle’s
32 g. heyworth
its survey of 14th-century knowledge, its author betrays affinities to several

categories, although to some more closely than to others.
We can eliminate him immediately as a chronicler, as he shows no inter-
est in contemporary history beyond a brief mention of Bertrand du Guesclin.
The poem is also missing the specific geographical references typical of such
diplomat-soldiers as Philippe de Mézières, whose years traveling in service
to the crown are recorded in local signposts scattered throughout the Songe
du vieil pelerin. Neither diplomat nor knight, he was undoubtedly a cleric
of some sort, as members of the faculty of the university were so obliged,
though likely not in orders. Looking to the poem’s most authoritative voice
for clues, we note that Pallas’s pedagogical interests are stubbornly secular
and humanist, although she delivers several stern reminders of Christian
obligation to do homage to “li Dieux souverains| A qui tu doiz sacrefier;|
Celluy doiz tu glorifier| Et gracez et loengez rendre” (Eschéz, 104ra). Chris-
tian doctrine, however, is nowhere on display in the Eschéz.6 Our poet is
undoubtedly a secular scholar with an interest in Latin translation—Pallas’s
thirty-odd rules for curing love is an adaptation of Ovid’s Remedia amoris—
who is at once squarely in the school of the Rose. Though he shows him-
self an adept poet, his style lacks the polish and pretension of the profes-
sional writer. He is also distinctly not an aficionado of astrology: this sci-
ence, so popular during the reign of Charles V, is obtrusively absent in the
poem.7
To refine the profile further, we must enter deeper into the realm of con-
jecture. Discernible among the many subjects the poet shoulders are sev-
eral predilections and curiosities. Our poet’s effusion at the glories of Paris
(ff. 74r–75v) mark him as someone for whom the awe of urban scale has not
been dulled by lifelong familiarity. Of the many employments and avoca-
tions he lists in this passage, by far the greatest number of lines are dedicated
to the university and its scholars, with whose minds, social backgrounds and
estates he displays sympathy (f. 74vb). Particularly telling is his remark con-
cerning the articulacy of Parisian children,
Problemata), Nicole Saoul de Saint-Marcel, Jean Daudin (Petrus Crescentiis), Pierre d’Ailly,
Thomas de Pisan. Anonymous scholars of the period also provided translations of Aben-Ragel
(De Judiciis seu fatis stellarum), Guido Bonati, and the Quadripartitum and Centiloquium of
Ptolemy.
6 One possible exception is a brief diatribe against simony on vv. 7851–7870.
7 In the EAM, Evrart de Conty discourses at length on astrology in an excursus from his
source text. Because he has been proposed as the author of the Eschéz d’Amours as well, it is
worth noting the difference.
chapter four – author 33
Li petit enfanchon meïsmez,

Selon ce que souvent veïsmez,
Y parlent si tres proprement
Que c’est grant merveil comment
Enfant de si petit eaige
Pevent avoir si prest langaige
Et si soubtil entendement. (Eschéz, 15548–15554)
This smacks of the parvenu from the provinces, but one for whom language
and its purity mattered a very great deal. While the poem’s language betrays
some Picard and Burgundian traces, the author’s purism was a characteris-
tic of university scholars of the late 14th century.8 On this account, we can
assuredly assign him a place in the faculty of liberal arts at a Parisian uni-
versity and an origin in the rural north or northwest of France, likely from
a family of moyen estat as the Acteur suggests of himself (“J’ ay plus chier la
moyenne vie” [Eschéz, 81va]).
Of the poet’s hobbies, chess is the most obvious, but considering chess
was a fixture of university life, this hardly narrows our profile. Music, whose
obtrusion in a long excursus (folios 130–136) commands attention, is more
telling. Here, following Boethius’s De muscia and Aristotle’s Politics 8, the
poet demonstrates a devotion to Pythagorean musical aesthetics as a model
of universal proportion and political harmony that marks him as idiosyn-
cratic for his age. As early as the late 13th century, Johannes de Grocheo in
his Ars musica dismissed the serious Pythagorean as “oblivious to nature and
logic,” while Nicole Oresme, following Aristotle, considered the Pythagorean
theory of the music of the spheres literally and mathematically incorrect.9
The Eschéz-poet seems either to be resistant to or ignorant of the epochal
developments in contemporary music theory in mid-14th-century France
ushered in by the Ars nova of Philippe de Vitry. As Hermann Abert notes,
his discussion of only the three perfect consonances of antiquity to the
exclusion of intervals, as well as the absence of any mention of descant and
contrapuntal music, bespeaks an estrangement from the musical theory and
8 See Gilbert Ouy, “Les orthographes de divers auteurs français des XIVe et XVe siècles.
Présentation et étude de quelques manuscrits autographes,” Le Moyen Français: recherches

de lexicologie et de lexicographie (Milan, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 93–139.
9 Thus Grocheo, “qui vero sic dividunt, aut dictum suum fingunt aut volunt Pytagoricis vel
aliis magis quam veritati oboedire, aut sunt naturam et logicam ignorantes” in Johannes Wolf,
“Die Musiklehre des Johannes de Grocheo,” Zeitschrift der Internationales Musikgesellschaft
(Leipzig, 1899), vol. 1, p. 82. See also Nicole Oresme, De commensurabilitate, 314, ll. 376–
388 in Oresme and the Kinematics of Circular Motion, ed. & tr. Edward Grant, (Madison,
1971).
Exploring the Variety of Random
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and twenty feet above the Gargaphia spring, and much more than
that above the plain of Platæa.
This first phase or development of the second position of the
Greeks was probably not of long duration. The nature of the ground
provides an explanation of it. After completing this march from the
first position, the Greeks seem to have been anxious to form their
army in something like order of battle before ascending to the
summit of the northern ridges (the Asopos ridge), for on arriving
there they would be in full view of the enemy, and at no great
distance from the Persian camp. In other words, they deployed their
army out of sight of the enemy.
There seems to have been a certain amount of quarrelling
between the various contingents as to the order to be taken in the
line of battle. Herodotus describes at some
NUMBERS OF THE
GREEK ARMY.
length such a dispute between the Tegeans
and Athenians as to who should take position
on the extreme left; but then he dearly loved that kind of traditional
history which he represents the two disputants as having introduced
into their arguments.
The matter was decided in favour of the Athenians. It is clear that
the Greeks at this time had a high opinion of the fighting qualities of
the people which had faced the Persians alone at Marathon.
H. ix. 28.
The Greek army was now larger in numbers than
when it entered Bœotia. Reinforcements had been
coming in day by day. The total given by Herodotus at this point in
his narrative may be taken to represent the largest number present
at any time on the field, though it must not, perhaps, be assumed
that all these troops were actually with the army immediately after
198
the first development of the second position had been completed.
The total number amounts to more than a hundred and eight
thousand men, of whom more than one-third were heavy-armed
infantry. When it is remembered that with the exception of two
thousand eight hundred, all the troops were drawn from the
Peloponnese, Megara, and Attica, and that, besides these, large
numbers of the men of military age were serving on board the fleet at
this time, the strenuous nature of the effort which Greece put forth in
this year can best be realized. There is one curious point about the
list in Herodotus. Manifest as is his admiration for Aristides, it is in
this passage only in his long account of Platæa that he mentions him
as commander of the Athenian contingent.
After giving the numbers of the various contingents of the Greek
army, Herodotus closes the account with a remark which, in view of
his previous description of their position as being in the
neighbourhood of the precinct of Androkrates and the spring of
Gargaphia, is difficult to understand. He says, “These (troops) were
drawn up in regular order upon the Asopos.” If by the Asopos is to be
understood what is undoubtedly the main stream of that river, the
army in the first development of the second position cannot have
been even in its immediate neighbourhood, much less upon it. It
cannot have been at any point less than a mile and a half distant.
The probable explanation is that the name of Asopos was applied by
the inhabitants of Platæa, in so far as the upper course of that
stream is concerned, to the brook which has its rise in the springs of
199
Apotripi.
On receiving information of the movement
MOVEMENT OF THE
PERSIANS.
of the Greeks, the Persians moved westward
along the Asopos, keeping, as it would appear
H. ix. 31. from subsequent events, to the north of the river. If
200
Herodotus’ language is accurate in wording, it must
be understood that this movement was made before the second
position of the Greeks had entered upon its second phase; that is,
while they were still out of sight of the Persian army behind the line
of the northern ridges. Herodotus gives the Persian array in some
detail. For all practical purposes of the story of the battle it is
sufficient to know that the Persians proper were at this time on the
left wing, opposite to the Lacedæmonians on the Greek right, and
with a front overlapping that of the Tegeans. The other Asiatics
formed the centre, opposite to the smaller Greek contingents, while
the Bœotians and other medized Greeks on the Persian right were
opposite to the Athenians, Platæans, and Megareans on the Greek
left.
H. ix. 31.
Of the medized Greeks the Phocians were only
represented by a fraction of their force. The remainder
of that people had refused to medize, and from their strong refuge in
Parnassus were evidently doing their best to interrupt the Persian
line of communications, an operation for which their position was
admirably adapted, as it was on the flank of the route from the north,
at that point near Parapotamii and Chæronea where the available is
peculiarly restricted.
The total number of the barbarian portion of the Persian army
Herodotus gives at three hundred thousand. The numbers of the
medized Greeks he does not know, but reckons to have been about
fifty thousand. Probably there is an exaggeration in both estimates;
but it cannot be very great in the first case. The numbers opposing
the Greeks were certainly much superior to their own. The
Thessalian element among the medized Greeks, whose numbers
may have been very large, renders it impossible to make even a
guess at the amount of truth in Herodotus’ estimate.
It is now necessary to consider what was the object of this
movement of the Greeks to their second position. The main motive
mentioned by Herodotus is the superiority of the water-supply at the
new position. No one who has been in this part of Bœotia in the dry
season would be inclined to under-estimate the importance of such a
motive. But if the question of water had been the only motive, an
equally good supply might have been obtained from the Vergutiani
spring, and the wells or springs which must have supplied the
contemporary town of Platæa. The position taken up in that case
would have been beyond the reach of the Persian cavalry—it would,
in fact, have been nearly identical with the proposed position at the
“Island,” which became a prominent factor in the later developments
of the battle.
If the motives given by Herodotus in his account of Platæa be
examined, it will be seen that they are obviously those which would
suggest themselves to one who had been present at the battle, but
who had not been of sufficiently high military rank to be conversant
with the designs of those in command. It was on some such man
that Herodotus relied for his information; of actual official information
he had little or none. He can only say where the army went, what
positions it took up, and what were the incidents and issues of the
combats which were fought. It is further plain that, as in the case of
Thermopylæ, he supplemented this information by a personal
examination of the ground.
It is, therefore, from the incidents of the
THE OFFENSIVE.
battle that a judgment must be formed as to
the nature of the design or designs which determined those
incidents. In the present instance the three most remarkable factors
in the situation were:⁠—
(1) The Greeks had deliberately taken up a position far more
advanced than they need have done, if guided by physical conditions
alone.
(2) They had, after their march from their original position,
deployed their army in order of battle before coming in sight of the
enemy.
(3) Their new position was attained, not by a direct forward
movement, but by a strong inclination to the left.
The first factor can only be interpreted in the sense that the
Greeks intended to assume a vigorous offensive; the second
indicates that the attack was to be of the nature of a surprise; the
third that it aimed at an assault on the Persian flank.
In judging from the subsequent history of the battle, it seems
probable that, had it been possible to carry out this programme in its
entirety, the result would have been a great success. It must have
led to close fighting; and in close fighting the Greek hoplite was
infinitely superior to anything which the Persian could oppose to him.
The failure of the plan—for it certainly did fail—was due to the fact
that the Persians discovered the movement of the Greeks before the
latter were ready to attack; and a surprise was impossible. Moreover,
they took up a new position in which they could not be outflanked.
This the Greeks must have discovered when they completed the
second development of the second position.
This second development of the new position is indicated though
not described in Herodotus’ narrative. Had the Greeks remained in
the position stretching from the Gargaphia to the Heroön, the Asopos
could not have played the part which it did in the subsequent
H. ix. 31.
fighting. The historian has described the movement of
the Persians as having been to “the Asopos, which
flows in this part,” that is to say, approximately opposite the new
Greek position. The Asopos here must be the stream above and
But vide
below the point where the brook joins it. The brook to
note, p. 470. which he has previously applied the name Asopos
H. ix. 30. could not form the obstacle which is implied in the
account of the fighting which occurred
201
subsequently. It is evident what the nature of the movement of the
Greek army must have been. The whole army, after deploying on the
low ground, advanced up the slope of the Asopos ridge. The right
must have been to the east of the site of the church of St. John.
Westwards the line extended along the curve of the ridge, and the
extreme left was probably on the low ground at the north end of the
plain of Platæa, though the amount of the extension in this direction
must necessarily be a matter of uncertainty. The sight of the Persian
army drawn up on the far side of the Asopos, which must have met
the eyes of the Greeks when they reached the summit of the ridge,
would clearly demonstrate to them that the attempted surprise had
failed. The position for the moment was, indeed, one of stalemate;
H. ix. 33–37.
and that this was recognized by both sides is shown
by Herodotus’ tale of the sacrifices offered in both
camps on the day subsequent to the attainment of the position. The
conclusions drawn from them were favourable to the maintenance of
the defensive, but unfavourable to the adoption of the offensive by
crossing the Asopos. It may be suspected that the Greek
commanders assisted in the interpretation of the omens. Mardonius
also had a prophet in his employ, a Greek from Elis, whose previous
treatment by the Spartans had been such as to guarantee his loyalty
to any cause opposed to theirs. He also advised the maintenance of
the defensive, and his advice accorded with that of a third prophet
who accompanied the medized Greeks. Prophecy and tactics
combined had brought matters to an impasse for the time being.
H. ix. 38, 39.

Eight days thus passed without, apparently, any
active operations being undertaken by either side. The
Greeks profited most by the delay. Reinforcements to their army kept
coming in through the passes in their rear, and their numbers were
considerably increased. Mardonius’ attention
EFFECTIVENESS OF
PERSIAN CAVALRY.
was called to this fact by a Theban named
Timegenides, who suggested that the Persian
cavalry should be sent to assail the bands traversing the pass of
Dryoskephalæ. The advice was taken, and on the very next night the
cavalry was despatched. The fatal weakness of the new Greek
position was now made apparent. On its right flank a wide space of
practicable ground, traversed, moreover, by the Thebes-
Dryoskephalæ road, had been left open, by which the Persian
cavalry could without difficulty and without opposition reach the
mouth not merely of the Dryoskephalæ pass, but also of that other
pass on the Platæa-Athens road, the only two really effective lines of
the Greek communications. The Greek army, by taking up so
advanced a position, had ceased to cover those passes, and even
the Platæa-Megara pass was but imperfectly protected.
The cavalry raid met with immediate and startling success. A
Greek provision-train of five hundred pack animals, with their drivers
and, presumably, their escort, was annihilated at the mouth of the
Dryoskephalæ pass.
H. ix. 40. During the two next days there was a good deal of
skirmishing on the main line of the Asopos, but neither
side crossed the stream, so that no decisive result was arrived at.
This form of fighting was nevertheless distinctly disadvantageous to
the Greeks, who suffered from the missiles of the Persian cavalry
without being able to retaliate in any decisive fashion. The Asopos is
not a large stream, and at this time of year would be easily
traversable at any point. Its bed is sufficiently deep to render it a
serious obstacle to the passage of cavalry, if the crossing were
disputed, but an undisputed passage could be made without difficulty
at almost any point of this part of its course.
H. ix. 41.
Mardonius was becoming impatient at the
indecisive character of the operations. The two armies
had now been for eleven days facing one another on either side of
the Asopos. He had evidently made up his mind that this state of
things could not continue, and that a movement of some kind must
be made. Artabazos, who had commanded at the siege of Potidæa,
advised withdrawal to Thebes, which was only six miles north of their
position; it was strongly fortified, and, as the Persian base of
202
operations, was, so he said, amply provided with supplies. He
H. ix. 41, ad
pointed out that they were possessed of ample funds
fin. wherewith a campaign of bribery among the leading
men of the Greek states might be instituted. The
Thebans advocated the same line of action. They knew their
countrymen; so apparently did Herodotus, as his language shows.
Mardonius, however, would have none of such advice; he believed
his army to be a better fighting machine than that of the Greeks; and
it is impossible not to recognize the truth of his view as matters then
stood.
A certain amount of light seems to be thrown on this reported
discussion between the Persian commanders by an incident which
Herodotus reports to have occurred on the night of the same day.
Alexander the Macedonian, who has already appeared prominently
in the history of this time as Mardonius’ representative in the recent
negotiations with the Athenians, is said to have ridden up to the line
of the Greek outposts and to have demanded speech with the
203
commanders of the army. After reciting his attachment to the
Greek cause, he made one startling revelation as to the state of
things in the Persian army, which, if true, would go far to explain the
subsequent course of events, and mould put a new complexion upon
the advice which Artabazos is represented to have given. He said
that he believed Mardonius intended to attack on the following day. If
he deferred doing so, the Greeks were not to retire from their
position, because the Persian supplies are running short. If this
statement is true, it accounts for the
EVOLUTIONS.
pronounced offensive which Mardonius
assumed from this time forward; and, if the enormous difficulties
under which the Persians laboured as to their line of communications
be taken into consideration, it is extremely probable that it was true.
The action of the Phocian refugees away northward was sure to
make itself felt in this department of the war.
This part of Herodotus’ narrative takes the form of a series of
scenes in which the various prominent actors on either side are
introduced upon the stage and use language suitable to the
situation; but, though unreliable in form, it can hardly be doubted that
these tales indicate in a more or less direct way the actual course of
events. That tale among them which is least easy to understand or
explain relates to what passed in the Greek camp after Alexander’s
message had been reported to the generals.
Pausanias, as commander of the Spartans, is reported to have
been alarmed at the prospect of an attack on the following day, and
to have proposed to the Athenians that they should exchange places
in the line with the Spartans, in order that they might then face the
Persian contingent of whose fighting they had had experience at
Marathon. The Athenians accepted the proposal willingly; they even
said they had been on the point of making it themselves. The
exchange was made; but the Bœotians, who noticed it, reported the
matter to Mardonius, who made a corresponding change in his own
line The Greeks, noticing this, returned to their original order.
As an account of what actually happened this can hardly be taken
literally. It seems to refer to some evolution which either Herodotus
or his informant did not understand, though what that evolution was it
is impossible to say. The Athenian element in the story is evident.
H. ix. 48.
The tale which follows, that Mardonius sent a
challenge to the Spartans to fight an equal number of
his army, cannot be taken as serious history. Mardonius was well
aware that until the Greek infantry were thoroughly shaken by his
cavalry it would be unwise to assail them with the Persian foot-
soldiers. His action which immediately followed shows this quite
H. ix. 49.
clearly. He intended,—it may be under the stress of
necessity,—to take the offensive in some form. It was
probably a case of victory or withdrawal. That being so, he
despatched the whole of his numerous cavalry against the Greek
army. Herodotus describes the attack in language which leaves no
doubt as to the gravity of the situation which it created.
“When the cavalry rode up, they harassed the whole
Greek army by hurling javelins and shooting arrows, being
horsebowmen, who could not be brought to close combat.
The spring of Gargaphia, too, from which the whole Greek
army got water, they spoiled and filled up.
Lacedæmonians alone were in position by the spring; it
was at some distance from the various positions of the
rest of the Greeks, while the Asopos was near them.
Being driven back, however, from the Asopos, they
resorted to the spring, for it was not possible for them to
get water from the river, owing to the cavalry and
204
bowmen.”
This remarkable passage indicates with singular clearness what
took place at this exceedingly critical moment of the battle. The
Greek left was forced by the cavalry to retire from the Asopos, where
they had on previous days been skirmishing with the enemy, and to
205
take refuge on the Asopos ridge away from the flat ground. The
second position of the Greeks attained, in other words, its third
phase or development, in which the whole Greek army was confined
to a position on the summit of the ridge.
On the extreme right matters were no less serious. The cavalry
had got round the Greek flank to the
CAVALRY ATTACK
Gargaphia spring, and after driving away what
OF THE PERSIANS.
was probably a Lacedæmonian detachment on
guard there, had rendered the spring unserviceable. The Greek army
was consequently without water, and its retirement from the position
could be at most a question of hours.
The situation of the Greek army was as critical as it well could be.
Between them and the rough ground at the immediate foot of the
mountain lay a band of country over which cavalry could ride; and
they were cut off, not merely from their water supply, but also from
the lines of communication afforded by the three passes. The
Cf. H. ix. 50.
convoys were blocked by the Persian cavalry, and
were unable to reach the camp.
Cf. H. ix. 51,

This fierce attack seems to have lasted two days.
ad init. and On the morning of the second day a Council of War
52, ad init. was held, and it was decided, if the attack were not
renewed that day, to move to a position which Herodotus calls the
“Island.” The attack was, however, renewed, and the movement had
206
to be postponed.
The passage in which Herodotus describes and explains the
nature of the proposed movement is not merely of the greatest
importance in the history of the battle, but is perhaps still more
important as showing the pains which he took to get as accurate a
knowledge as possible of the scenes of the greatest events which he
describes. It is peculiarly noticeable in the case of Thermopylæ, and
it is not less noticeable in this account of Platæa. It is impossible to
conceive that he should have been able to write the description of
the “Island,” unless he had actually seen the ground. His informant
as to the incidents of the battle cannot be presumed to have
described it to him, since no part of the Greek army ever attained the
position, and he cannot therefore be supposed to have seen it.
“At a meeting of the Greek generals,” he says, “it was
determined, should the Persians omit to renew the attack
that day, to go to the Island. It is ten stades distant from
the Asopos and from the spring of Gargaphia, at which
they were at the time stationed, in front of the city of
Platæa. This is how there comes to be an island on the
mainland: the river, flowing from Kithæron divides high up
the hill, and then flows down towards the plain, the
streams being about three stades distant from one
another, and then they join.... The name of the (combined)
stream is Œroë.... To this position they determined to
move, in order that they might have a plentiful water-
supply, and the cavalry might not do them damage as
when drawn up on their front. They determined to move in
207
the second watch of the night, so that the Persians
might not see them leaving their position, and their cavalry
might not pursue them, and throw them into confusion.
They determined, further, on arriving at the new position,
which the Œroë, daughter of the Asopos, encloses in its
course from Kithæron, to send the half of their army in the
course of the night to Kithæron, in order that it might
rescue the service corps which had gone for provisions;
for it was blocked in Kithæron.”
PLATÆA: “ISLAND,” FROM SIDE OF KITHÆRON.

1. Foot of Helicon.
2. Parnassos.
3. Plain of Platæa.
4. “Island.”
[To face page 480.
Note on the Position of the “Island.”

In order to understand this very important passage, it is necessary
to examine the evidence, both documentary and topographical, as to
the position of the νῆσος or Island. It will be well to tabulate the facts
which Herodotus mentions with regard to it.
(1) It is ten stades from the Asopos.
(2) It is ten stades from the spring of Gargaphia.
(3) It is πρὸ τῆς τῶν Πλαταιέων πόλιος.
(4) The river divides ἄνωθεν ἐκ τοῦ Κιθαιρῶνος, and flows down
into the plain.
(5) The streams are ὅσνπερ τρία στάδια distant from one another.
(6) The streams afterwards join one another.
(7) The name of the river is Œroë.
(8) There was a plentiful water supply at the νῆσος.
(9) The cavalry could not annoy the Greeks
THE ISLAND.
there, ὥσπερ κατιθὺ ἐόντων.
Both Leake (“Northern Greece”) and Vischer (“Erinnerungen aus
Griechenland”) identify a strip of flat ground, lying in the plain due
north of the site of the town of Platæa between two of the stream-
beds of the Œroë, as the “Island” of which Herodotus speaks.
This identification may be tested by the facts given by Herodotus:
(1) This piece of ground is ten stades from A 1, which, as I have
said, is apparently the upper part of the Asopos of
Herodotus. (It is thirteen or fourteen stades from the branch
of the river which comes down from Leuktra.)
(2) It is considerably over ten stades, viz. fifteen or sixteen
stades, from the spring which Leake identifies, rightly, as I
think, with the Gargaphia.
(3) It is before or in full view of the city of Platæa.
(4) The words used by Herodotus do not seem to be those
which he might have been expected to use in describing this
piece of land. The streams divide at a point more than two
miles above this.
(5) (6) (7) are adequately fulfilled by it.
It is when we come to (8) and (9), which are the very reasons
stated by Herodotus for the movement to the “Island,” that the
position indicated absolutely fails to accord with the conditions.
In respect to water supply it is conspicuously deficient; and of the
three streams which cross the plain at this point one was absolutely
dry at the time of my visit (Dec., 1892); and this one was that which
would have formed the side of the “Island” towards the Persian army,
viz. O 1.
The second contained water, but in a much less quantity than
before it entered the plain. The third contained water also, but not in
any quantity.
This was at a period of peculiarly heavy rains.
In September all of them would almost certainly be dry by the time
they reached this part of the plain. O 1, being a pure drainage
stream, would be, under ordinary circumstances, dry along its whole
course at that time of year.
There would, under no conceivable circumstances, have been
water enough in this conjectured νῆσος, at that time of year, to
supply an army one-tenth the number of the Greek force. We cannot
even assume exceptionally heavy rain (a most extraordinary
circumstance in the month of September), for in that case the lands
of the Asopos would have been impassable for cavalry, and even
infantry would have been unable to cross them. I speak from
personal experience. I wanted to get down to the river, in order to get
points of survey upon it, since its course is not distinguishable with
certainty, even from a furlong off; but after getting into plough, into
which I sank above my knees, and after my Albanian servant had
come down and nearly disappeared with my plane table, I gave it up.
I could not reach it at that point; and that part of the Asopos had to
remain marked in my map by a dotted line which, although it gives
the course very nearly, does not pretend to the same accuracy as
the rest of the map.
Condition (9) really contains two conditions.
(1) The Persian cavalry could not damage the Greeks so much in
the former position, because⁠—
(2) They would not attack them on the front
Applying (1) to this conjectured νῆσος, I have no hesitation in
saying that the stream-beds which bound it afford no serious
obstacles to cavalry for at least ninety out of every hundred yards of
their course. A horse could cross them in most places without even
easing from its gallop, and, apart from this, the effectiveness of the
recent attacks of the Persian cavalry had been due to the fact that it
had been fighting with missiles and not at close quarters, as
Herodotus expressly says. The Greeks could not have faced them
across a watercourse a yard or two broad, so as to be able to
prevent their passing it, even had the passage been a work of some
difficulty to a mounted man. If further argument on this point be
necessary, I can only say that it is impossible to conceive how the
generals of the Greeks, having found the Asopos an utterly
insufficient protection, could have supposed that the army would be
in safety behind these much slighter watercourses. Have the stream-
beds altered in character? If any alteration has taken place, it can
only have taken the form of the raising of the plain by earth brought
down from the uplands, the result of which would be that the
channels would be deeper now than at the time of the battle.
Condition (9, 2).—Had the Greek position been on this ground,
the attack would certainly have been on the front.
BŒOTIAN PLAIN, FROM PLATÆA-MEGARA PASS.
PLATÆA—WEST SIDE OF Νῆσος.

[To face page 482.
There is another point mentioned by Herodotus which is very
difficult to reconcile with the location of the νῆσος in the position in
which Leake and Vischer place it. He says (ix.
“ISLAND” OF
LEAKE AND
56) that when the Athenians and
VISCHER. Lacedæmonians did actually begin their
movement thither, οἱ μὲν (the Lacedæmonians)
τῶν τε ὄχθων ἀντείχοντο καὶ τῆς ὑπωρέης του Κιθαιρῶνος,
φοβεόμενοι τὴν ἵππον. Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ κάτω τραφ θέντες ἐς τὸ πεδίον,
etc.
Since the Lacedæmonians, had they marched direct from the
Asopos ridge to this νῆσος, would not have had to traverse a longer
stretch of ἱππάσιμος χῶρος than if they had gone round by the
ὑπωρέη (vide map), it is difficult to see why they should have
adopted the infinitely more circuitous route.
I do not, however, wish to lay too much stress upon this
argument, as I believe the real object of the course taken by the
Spartans to have been the relief of the convoys blocked up in the
pass on the Platæa-Athens road, a reason which may be deduced
from Herodotus’ own words in describing the decision to move to the
“Island” (ix. 51)—“They determined, on arriving at this place (the
‘Island’), to send off half the army towards Kithæron in the course of
this night, to recover the attendants who had gone after the
provisions, they being blocked up in Kithæron.”
It does not seem likely that, after the damage which they had
suffered in the second position, they could have come to the
decision to send off from the νῆσος of Leake and Vischer one half of
the army to the pass. It would be obliged to march across a mile of
ἱππάσιμος χῶρος between Platæa and Ridge 4, and to venture
itself, at a distance of from two and a half to three miles from the
remainder of the army.
The reason which mainly influenced both Leake and Vischer in
thus determining the site of the νῆσος was no doubt the question of
distance from the Asopos. They assumed that when Herodotus used
that name he meant the stream coming from Leuktra and the west. It
is almost beyond doubt that he does not mean this stream. The
Asopos to him was the stream A 1 with the main stream below the
junction of A 1; and it is extremely likely that what was the Asopos to
him was also the Asopos to the Platæans. It is only necessary to
stand on the site of Platæa and look northward over the plain in
order to understand how this nomenclature would arise. The course
of A 1 is traceable all along the west foot of the Asopos ridge; but the
upper course of the main stream is undistinguishable unless the river
be in flood.
As this piece of ground fails in such important particulars to
harmonize with Herodotus’ account of the “Island,” it remains to be
considered whether it is possible to apply his description to any other
part of the field.
One fact is quite evident from Herodotus: the “Island” lay between
the branches of the Œroë.
I think it is to be found high up in the interval between the branch
streams, at the point indicated in the map, and that it consisted of
Ridge 4, and possibly of Ridge 3 also. Any one who takes the higher
track from Kriekouki to Kokla cannot fail to be struck by the
peculiarity of the ground, should he happen to look down towards the
plain at the point where the road passes close to the narrow strip of
land which separates the sources of the streams O 1 and O 3. These
sources, as will be seen from the map, are close together, and the
ridge which separates them is quite low at the narrowest part. The
stream O 3 (east branch) flows down towards the plain at first in a
deep valley with a very steep slope towards the “Island,” which valley
it leaves at the point where the streams which unite to form O 3 have
their junction. From this point it flows beneath the “Island,” which
rises steeply above it, whereas on the other side of the stream, i.e.
on the west side, the ground slopes quite gradually up to the
rounded back of the low-lying Ridge 5.
The stream O 1 flows down to the plain in a deep depression.
It is true that at the present day these streams do not join
immediately on reaching the plain; but to show how possible it is that
their courses in the flat alluvial ground may have altered again and
again, within certain limits, in the course of time, I may mention that
when Colonel Leake visited this ground, the stream O 2 did not join
O 3 at the point where it now joins it, but was a separate stream from
it at the point where the Kokla-Thebes track passes the branches of
the Œroë, i.e. more than a mile below their present junction.
There is another very striking point about this piece of ground,
which is noticeable in its contouring in the map. Its insular character
is, if I may so say, emphasized by a large hillock which rises on it
close to O 3, and which is a most prominent object, especially when
viewed from Platæa itself. This hillock may be identified by any one
visiting the ground, owing to its having on the south slope of it a
white building, the only building existing between Kriekouki and
Kokla.
It will be found on examination of the
THE “ISLAND.”
evidence that this locality corresponds most
closely with the description of the “Island,” given by Herodotus, and
furthermore that the incidents of the battle, as related by Herodotus,
support in a remarkable degree the hypothesis that this is the island
which he describes. It may be compared with the nine conditions
deducible from Herodotus with the following result:⁠—
(1) It is, like the “Island” of Leake and Vischer, ten stades from
the stream A 1, the Asopos of Herodotus.
(2) It is, unlike their “Island,” ten stades from the Gargaphia
spring.
(3) It may be peculiarly well described as being πρὸ τῆς τῶν
Πλαταιέων πόλιος.
(a) Because, the site of Platæa city has a slope this way, in
fact, “verges” towards the east, as well as towards the
north.
(b) Because, looking at it from the site of Platæa across the
low Ridge 5, it [especially the hillock] stands out in a
remarkable way.
(4) The division of the streams ἄνωθεν ἐκ τοῦ Κιθαιρῶνος,
whether it be taken as that between O 1 and O 3, or between
O 1 and O 2, is peculiarly striking in either case, the head
waters of the streams nearly touching.
(5) O 3 and O 2 are three stades from one another. O 3 and O 1
are nearly four stades.
(6) The streams do join now, but may well have joined at a point
higher up their course at the time at which the battle was
fought.
(7) The streams are the head waters of the Œroë.
(8) The water-supply of O 3 is derived, as will be seen, from
seven streams. On these streams are two large springs, one
of which is called by Leake the spring of Vergutiani, and is
Paus ix. 2, 3.
apparently the πηγή of Pausanias. Beside
these two springs there are numerous smaller
ones, and O 3 as it passes beneath the hillock on the
“Island,” is quite a large stream; but, like the other streams
which flow to the plain, its volume goes on decreasing the
further it gets into the flat country.
(9a) Reference to the map will show how well the condition is
fulfilled by the ground. The position would be unassailable by
cavalry on south and west. On the west, the slope of the
“Island” is very steep indeed; on the east of the valley of the
stream O 1 is deep. It would seem, too, from the large
accumulation of rocks and stones which have been removed
from the cultivated land at this part, as if this Eastern slope of
the “Island” was till recent times of the same nature as the
rocky hillside of Kithæron.
If, however, O 2 be taken as the boundary of the “Island,” then

there would be this rocky ground on the far side of it The valley of O
2 is not, however, so deep as that of O 1.
The only point, then, at which this ground would be assailable by
cavalry would be at the north end or bottom of the slope. This brings
me to the second part of Condition 9.
(9a) The last fact mentioned explains Herodotus’ words, ὥσπερ
κατιθὺ ἐόντων.
Such, then, are the reasons, taken from Herodotus, which induce
me to take what may appear to be, and is, I confess, a very decided
view as to the position of the ground called the “Island.”
I think, too, that there are other considerations of a strategic
character which support this view.
A brief examination of the map will show that it would have been
difficult for the Greek generals to have chosen a spot in the whole
neighbourhood of Platæa which would have rendered their position
in case of disaster a more hopeless one than it would have been had
they withdrawn to the “Island” of Leake and Vischer. The possibility
of disaster must have been very present to their minds at the time at
which the decision was made to move to the “Island.”
Herodotus’ description of the state of the army under the
continued attacks of the Persian cavalry is brief but graphic. Its
position was, beyond doubt, exceedingly serious. But what would
have been its position had disaster overtaken it on that tongue of
land in the plain of Platæa? It would in the first place have been
surrounded by the Persian cavalry, since the ground between it and
Platæa, a considerable stretch of land, is all ιππάσιμος χῶρος, and
to all intents and purposes absolutely flat. Supposing even that it did
try to cut its way out, it would have been obliged either to retreat to
the west towards the Corinthian Gulf, or to make its way to one of
the passes. In either case the result must have been the practical, if
not actual, ruin of the Greek army.
The way to the Corinthian Gulf, however,
MOVEMENT TO THE
“ISLAND.”
would be outside all calculation, since⁠—
(1) There was no fleet in the gulf which could
possibly have transported even a small fraction of the force
across it
(2) The only path across Kithæron west of Platæa must, from
Xenophon’s description (Xen. Hell. v. 4; and vi. 4), have been
an exceedingly difficult one. It is, moreover, some nine or ten

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Edition with Critical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

Glosses and Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609

General Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 673

Pamph. Pamphilus de amore, in La “comédie” latine en France au XII e siècle,

D Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Oc 66

|| Double vertical lines separate variants or rejected readings of different

The anonymous, 14th century Eschéz d’Amours is a poem that deserves a

(eds. Guichard-Tesson, Roy) LVIII, note 2; Badel, p. 264.

Among the basic questions a reader poses of a text’s identity—what? by

Mercury’s comment in the Eschéz, “Tous li mondez va celle voie,” derives,

HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND AUDIENCE

The Eschéz d’Amours speaks from a crucial moment in history to a carefully

chess and its voluptuary ethos in response to the Ordinance of 1369. To be

Briefment, se tu veulx mettre a euvre

9 A Thirteenth Century French Version of Egidio Colonna’s Treatise De regimine principum

defend himself against the onslaught of a mob of commoners, serves as

1959) vv. 5886–6006.

ber 1380 and he was dead by the sixteenth.

and therefore historically specific one, embracing simultaneously an eclec-

1 On the orthography of “Eschéz” as opposed to “Eschez” or “Eschés,” see section 7.3

below, “special linguistic problems.”

2 Ebert, Geschichte und Beschreibung der königlichen öffentlichen Bibliothek zu Dresden

1839), pp. 431–432.

of Love) is a title whose meaning conveys none of the poem’s indictment

Echecs amoureux,” Pierre-Yves Badel, op. cit., p. 264.

16 Inventaire de la “Librairie” de Philippe le Bon, 1420, ed. Georges Doutrepont (Brussels,

1906 [Reprint Geneva 1977]), pp. 53, 146.

fallen at least a hundred pages short of the complete work.17 Manuscripts

de Montreuil, Jean Gerson.

its survey of 14th-century knowledge, its author betrays affinities to several

Li petit enfanchon meïsmez,

Présentation et étude de quelques manuscrits autographes,” Le Moyen Français: recherches

H. ix. 38, 39.

Cf. H. ix. 51,

PLATÆA: “ISLAND,” FROM SIDE OF KITHÆRON.

Note on the Position of the “Island.”

PLATÆA—WEST SIDE OF Νῆσος.

If, however, O 2 be taken as the boundary of the “Island,” then

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