The Game Board and the Order of the World in Medieval Traditions

Moving from pre-eminent examples of twentieth-century medievalism (in poetry, novels, and movies), the paper scrutinizes the emergence and the socio- cultural functions of board-game-related myths and literary motifs (as mirrors of social conflicts and their possible resolution) within the corpus of medieval Latin and vernacular textuality, mainly focusing on Old Germanic literatures and their cultural milieux. The analysis will unfold through some crucial textual instances, the value of which will be reassessed (also reckoning with visual narratives and word-image interaction in Medieval codicology and further intermodal documentation).