author
active 1288-1322 de Cessolis Jacobus
A Dominican friar from medieval Italy, he turned the game of chess into one of the era’s most popular guides to moral and social order. His vivid allegory traveled widely across Europe and helped shape how later readers imagined both chess and society.
1 Audiobook
Game and Playe of the Chesse A Verbatim Reprint of the First Edition, 1474
by active 1288-1322 de Cessolis Jacobus, William Caxton
About the author
Active between 1288 and 1322, Jacobus de Cessolis, also known as Jacopo da Cessole, was an Italian Dominican friar associated with Cessole in Piedmont. Very little is known about his life with certainty, but surviving records connect him to the Dominican world of northern Italy in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
He is remembered for a remarkably influential work often known as the Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium super ludo scacchorum, or the Book of the Customs of Men and the Duties of Nobles, or the Book of Chess. In it, chess becomes more than a game: each piece stands for a role in society, and the board becomes a way to talk about ethics, duty, rank, and good government.
The book was enormously popular in the Middle Ages, circulating in many manuscripts and translations. Its reach lasted well beyond Jacobus’s lifetime, and it became one of the best-known moralized treatments of chess in medieval Europe.