Ludic Cultures
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Edited by:
Martha Bayless
Ludic Cultures treats medieval and early modern play in all its rich variety: enjoyment and entertainment, laughter and humor, carnival and the carnivalesque, games and amusements, and the relationship between the serious world and the "magic circle" of play. Volumes in the series are grounded in historical realities and theoretical scholarship, transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries and illuminating the culture of play. We invite proposals that explore play in any facet of medieval or early modern cultural production. The series welcomes the submission of both monographs and essay collections that view cultures in Europe and the Americas between 1100 and 1700 through the lens of play.
Submissions
Proposals or completed manuscripts to be considered for publication in this series should be sent to Emily Winkler (emily.winkler@history.ox.ac.uk), the acquisitions editor for the series.
This book innovatively combines medieval manuscript study with contemporary cultural game theory to show how the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight launches a multidimensional game with its late-fourteenth-century elite reader.
The reading games within Sir Gawain and the Green Knight extend to the layout of the poem as found in its one extant manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A X/2. This study offers a more comprehensive examination of games and gaming in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the manuscript as a whole, its four poems and its illustrations, than has been published to date.
Reading, before printed editions, was an activity that involved interacting with the visual layout of the text on the page. The authors find that a medieval reader’s ludic interaction with this singular medieval codex could amuse but also serve as a means to serious ends, specifically redemptive knowledge. Couch and Bell conclude that the textual and visual games of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Cotton Nero manuscript allow a fourteenth-century English Christian aristocracy to align courtly gaming with heavenly goals, thereby justifying elite amusements.
Why do we play games—with and upon each other as well as ourselves? When are winners also losers, and vice-versa? How and to what end do we stretch the spaces of play? What happens when players go out of bounds or when games go too far? Moreover, what happens when we push the parameters of inquiry: when we play with traditional narratives of ludic culture, when we rewrite the rules
An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular plaything is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.
