Birth of the Chess Queen: A History FROM THE PUBLISHER
Everyone knows that the queen is the most powerful piece in chess, but few people know that the game existed for five hundred years without her. In India, Persia, and the Arab lands, where the game was first played, a general, or vizier (chief counselor to the king), occupied the square where the queen now stands. Not until the year 1000, two hundred years after Arab conquerors brought chess to southern Europe, did a chess queen appear on the board. Initially she was the weakest piece, moving only one square at a time on the diagonal, yet by 1497, during the reign of Isabella of Castile, the chess queen had become the formidable force she is today.
How and why did this transformation take place? Birth of the Chess Queen examines the five-hundred-year period between the chess queen's timid emergence and her elevation into the game's mightiest piece. Marilyn Yalom, inspired by a handful of surviving medieval chess queens, traces their origin and spread from Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and England to Scandinavia and Russia. In a lively and engaging narrative, Yalom draws parallels between the birth of the chess queen and the ascent of female sovereigns in Europe, presenting a layered, fascinating history of medieval courts, with their intrigues and internal struggles for power. Further, she shows the connection between the chess queen, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the cult of Romantic Love, all of which influenced European society for centuries to come. Illustrated with beautiful art throughout, this book takes a fresh look at the politics and culture of medieval Europe, the institution of queenship, and the reflections of royal power in the figure of the chess queen.
FROM THE CRITICS
Liesl Schillinger - The New York Times
Yalom's entertaining (and credible) contention is that the booting of the vizier and the coronation of the queen are linked to the rising status of women in medieval Europe: ''The miraculous Virgin, the chess queen and the beloved lady grew up together and reinforced one another,'' she explains, referring to the cult of the Virgin Mary and the tradition of courtly love. Also crucial, Yalom believes, was the example of medieval warrior queens, who made a chessboard without a queen seem as incomplete as a Ferrari without an engine.
The New Yorker
Chess was invented in India in the fifth century and was spread by Islamic conquests to Europe, where the piece known as the vizier became the queen—the only female in the all-male club of chess pieces. Yalom makes a credible, though circumstantial, case that this rise reflects the power intermittently accorded to, or seized by, female European monarchs. It was in the late tenth century, during the regency of Empress Adelaide, that the vizier underwent his sex change. Five hundred years later, in Queen Isabella’s Spain, the queen was transformed from a timid lady mincing one diagonal step at a time into what one shocked Italian bishop called a “bellicose virago.” But there’s a sting at the end of this feminist historical fable: the queen’s supremacy made the game so much faster and more competitive that it was considered unsuitable for upper-class women.
Publishers Weekly
A senior scholar at Stanford's Institute for Women and Gender who has written extensively on women's history, Yalom (A History of the Wife; etc.) sees the rise of female power throughout the centuries reflected in the history of the chess queen: "She has entered the academy of gendered icons, alongside the Earth Mother, the Amazon, and the Virgin Mary." For 500 years, chess was played in India, Persia and the Arab world minus a queen; she finally made her entrance in southern Europe around A.D. 1000. Drawing parallels between "symbolic queens on the chessboard and living queens at numerous royal courts," Yalom introduces readers to significant queens, empresses and countesses as she traces the spread of chess across Europe. With anecdotes, art, legends and literature, she shows how the chess queen became "the quintessential metaphor for female power in the Western world." Yalom offers an outstanding glimpse at chess as a courting ritual: "The chess queen and the cult of love grew up together and formed a symbiotic relationship, each feeding on the other." She also addresses the current status of female chess players-only 5% of the world's chess players are women-and wonders if "the best female players [will] ever be able to beat the best male players." Combining exhaustive research with a deep knowledge of women's history, Yalom presents an entertaining and enlightening survey that offers a new perspective on an ancient game. B&w illus. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (On sale Apr. 28) Forecast: Chess enthusiasts and women's studies scholars will flock to this title. Booksellers might display it next to The Queen's Gambit (1983), Walter Tevis's recently reissued novel about a female chess champ. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
After A History of the Wife and other books on women, Yalom takes on an inanimate but very powerful female figure. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Some tenuous speculations about the co-emergence of powerful political women and the most puissant piece on the chessboard. Feminist historian Yalom (A History of the Wife, 2001, etc.) first became intrigued by this subject in 1998, when she saw a 14th-century chess queen carved in the shape of a nursing Madonna. (Later, she discovers it's only a "minuscule possibility" that the carving was a game piece.) How did the queen come to be the most powerful of all? Her question sent her to archives, libraries, and chess authorities all over the world. The result mingles a brief history of chess from its birth in fifth-century India to its 20th-century adult ubiquity with a quick study of gender relations through the ages and slim biographies of powerful women in Asia and Europe whose eminence may have been so profound as to effect the evolution of the chess queen from stay-at-home spouse to aggressive warrior. Yalom provides fine photographs of the oldest queens in captivity, showing how the piece has acquired both stature and individuality (few extant pieces from before 1200 have faces). The author also notes how various religious authorities have attempted-and generally failed-to control chess, especially in its early years when lost games sometimes resulted in lost lives as angry players segued smoothly from vicarious to actual combat. (Betting also annoyed religious leaders, who wanted any loose cash to flow their way.) Yalom makes an appealing case, especially in her association of the game with the courtly love tradition and the cult of the Virgin Mary. But in the end she is stuck with what remote history often leaves us: attractive correlations but no smoking causative guns. Oftenenlightening, but approaches daffiness when the epilogue invites us to place the chess queen alongside the Amazon, the Earth Mother, and the Virgin Mary, or to consider Hilary Rodham Clinton as a chess-queen incarnate. (b&w photos throughout; 13 color plates not seen)Agent: Sandra Dijkstra/Sandra Dijkstra Agency
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