Summary During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, games were not an idle pastime, but were in fact important tools for exploring, transmitting, enhancing, subverting, and challenging social practices and their rules. Their study, through both visual and material sources, offers a unique insight into medieval and early modern gaming culture, shedding light not only on why, where, when, with whom and in what conditions and circumstances people played games, but also on the variety of interpretations that they had of games and play. Representations of games, and of artefacts associated with games, also often served to communicate complex ideas on topics that ranged from war to love, and from politics to theology. This volume offers a particular focus onto the type of games that required little or no physical exertion and that, consequently, all people could enjoy, regardless of age, gender, status, occupation, or religion. The representations and artefacts discussed here by contributors, who come from varied disciplines including history, literary studies, art history, and archaeology, cover a wide geographical and chronological range, from Spain to Scandinavia to the Ottoman Turkey and from the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and beyond. Far from offering the 'last word' on the subject, it is hoped that this volume will encourage further studies. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations Introduction - VANINA KOPP AND ELIZABETH LAPINA Rhetoric and Reality in the Visual Culture of Medieval Celtic Board Games: Literary and Archaeological Evidence Combined - KATHERINE FORSYTH AND MARK A. HALL 'Turne Over the Leef': Games and Interpretation on Misericords - PAUL HARDWICK Gambling Miners - LENA ASRIH AND JENNIFER GARNER Chess and Cultural Crossings in Boccaccio - AKASH KUMAR Visualizing Chess and Love in Les Eschéz d'Amours - DANIEL E. O'SULLIVAN Game as a Sign of Social Status: Backgammon in the Ottoman Literature and Visual Culture - TÜLÜN DE?IRMENCI Chess of the Gnostics: The Sufi Version of Snakes and Ladders in Turkey and India - ?RVIN CEMIL SCHICK Playthings: Ivory on Ivory - ELINA GERTSMAN The Playing Eye: On the Transfer of Game-related Knowledge through Miniatures in Alfonso X's Book of Games (1283/84) - MICHAEL A. CONRAD Children's Toys in Italy, 1350-1550 - ANNEMARIEKE WILLEMSEN The Printed Book and the Visual Culture of Chess in the Late Middle Ages: William Caxton's 1483 Edition of The Game and Playe of Chess - LOUISE FANG Graffiti as Gaming: Vikings at Play in the Orkney Islands - JULIE MELL Scratching the Surface: Graffiti Games in the Byzantine Empire - WALTER CRIST