IMC 2018: Sessions

The session will be dedicated to the study of representations of the act of playing games as well as of material artefacts related to games. They will cover a broad geographical and chronological range as well as a variety of media and supports. The papers will display a wide spectrum of approaches to medieval games as reflected in visual and material culture. Gaming was a pastime that transcended many boundaries: women and men, the learned and the illiterate, children and adults, the clergy and the laity, the city and the court, the rich and the poor, Christians and non-Christians played games. The sessions will address the questions of who, why and how produced game boards and pieces, who played which games, when, where and why, as well as the means and ways of their representation. They will inquire to what extent games challenged social divisions and to what extent they reinforced them, and will attempt to understand the rules of visualizing this. They will also relate games to other activities, especially love/sex, violence, competition, and leisure. The sessions are related to the volume-in-progress, entitled Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages, edited by Elizabeth Lapina and Vanina Kopf.