Transcriptions and Facsimiles
This page is dedicated to transcriptions and facsimiles of primary source
material on period games. The currently available sources are:
-
Charles Knutson, of MacGregor Historic Games, is co-ordinating an effort
to put much of Alfonso X's Book
of Games up on the Web.
-
The complete Prose Works of Alfonso X, including the invaluable book of
games, can be ordered from The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Ltd.;
ordering info can be found here.
(Note that the online edition isn't publically usable, sadly.)
- PDF of The Alfonso MS,
the most important medieval work on games. This PDF combines Sonja Musser
Golladay's translation with the facsimiles from Charles Knutson, into a
teaching document.
-
The SCETI project has
a collection of scans of a set
of Italian manuscripts about Rhythmomachy from the 16th century by
Benedetto Varchi. These beg for a transcription and translation.
-
John Cotgrave's Wit's Interpreter. There are currently a couple
of sections for this:
-
On this site is Justin's transcription of Picket.
-
Ruben Krasnopolsky has transcribed several
sections, including the second and third edition descriptions of L'Ombre,
and a separate translation of Picket.
-
Imran Ghory has trancribed the
section on Gleek.
- Cotton's Compleat Gamester. A couple of sections are available:
- His discussion of Picket, which
apparently heavily plagiarized from Cotgrave;
- His description of Tick-Tack, which
is unfortunately rather cryptic.
- Ruben Krasnopolsky has started transcribing
parts
of Cotton; so far, he's transcribed the game of Put.
- KnowOdds has put up several
sections, mainly from the beginning of the book.
- William's Fulke's translation of The Philosopher's
Game, the one extensive period English book on Rythmomachy.
- Randle Holme's Academy of Armory, a 1688
book on heraldry, which manages to touch on almost every subject on Earth.
He gives sketchy but interesting rules for a wide variety of games.
- Gilbert Walker's Manifest Detection of
Diceplay,a book on dicing, specifically concentrating on how people
cheat at dice; mid-16th century.
- The Cavalier poem
A
New Game at Cards; not quite period and not immediately useful, but
an interesting tidbit. (NOTE: dead link, routing through the Wayback Machine.)
- Greg Lindahl put together a brief list of period
game references from Minsheu's 1599 Spanish/English dictionary. He includes
a pointer to a larger set of period dictionaries, and suggests that others
may want to dig through the other dictionaries for more such tidbits.
- Ruben Krasnopolsky has transcribed part of the
Diccionario
de Autoridades, an 18th century Spanish source with interesting things
to say about games. He also has a useful
collation
of card game references from the EMEDD dictionary database.
- Gargantua, by Rabelais, is a 16th century novel notable (among other things)
for a rather useful pedantry. One chapter is especially intriguing, because
it has a probably-comprehensive list of games of its day.
-
Thierry Depaulis has provided several useful transcriptions, including:
-
Justin's transcription of Metromachy, a late
16th century Latin book that describes what appears to be effectively a
war game.
-
Here is a periodish painting of
some
sort of ice games, by Hendrick Avercamp. Also, see
this scene
and this one
and this one;
all clearly show ball-and-stick games.
And here is Breughel's
painting The
Hunters, which may have some sort of ice games going on in the distance.
- Imran Ghory has transcribed The
Royal Game of the Ombre, from 1665.
-
Antron de Stoc has transcribed a section from Bellot's
Familiar Dialogues (1586), relating to the game Trump.
I've put up a slightly longer excerpt
of the same text, since it lists some other games as well. Godfrey
de Shipbrook has a facsimile
of the entire book online.
-
Faire Tyme Toys has a good page
on the Silliman Etching, a late (17th century) but moderately useful
image of children at play.
- Google Books has
a facsimile of an 1836 transcription of the
Opúsculos legales del Rey Don Alfonso el sabio, which includes
things like gambling laws.
Other sources of transcriptions in general:
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