In Secrets of Pinarâs Game, Roger Boase is the first to decipher a card game completed in 1496 for Queen Isabel, Prince Juan, her daughters and her 40 court ladies. This game offers readers access to the cultural memory of a group of educated women, revealing their knowledge of proverbs, poetry and sentimental romance, their understanding of the symbolism of birds and trees, and many facts ignored in official sources. Boase translates all verse into English, reassesses the jousting invenciones in the Cancionero general (1511), reinterprets the poetry of Pinarâs sister Florencia, and identifies Acevedo, author of some poems about festivities in Murcia c. 1507. He demonstrates that many of Pinarâs ladies reappear as prostitutes in the anonymous Carajicomedia two decades later.
Roger Boase, Honorary Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (Manchester University Press, 1977), The Troubadour Revival (RKP, 1979), Pashtun Tales from the Pakistan-Afghan Frontier (Saqi, 2003), Islam and Global Dialogue (Ashgate, 2005), and many articles on 15th-century cancionero poetry and on the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain.
''Secrets of Pinarâs Game deciphers some of the court poetry of ï¬fteenth-century Spain. This ambitious two-volume book blends elements of the scholarly monograph with those of a critical edition. It provides the text and an English translation of Gerónimo Pinarâs Juego trobado, a card game composed for Queen Isabel, members of the royal family, and ladies of the court. Boase sets out to solve the puzzles of the identities of the forty-six players of the game. Through a combination of literary and historical research, Boase dates the Juego trobado more precisely than previous scholars have. He argues that Pinar composed this entertainment in the summer of 1496 and that the court played it during late July of that year. Although this was a card game about love, relationships, and marriage, Boase claims that his research goes far beyond explaining those aspects of this game. Indeed,his study sheds light on a number of other topics, including jousting tournaments; the characters in and authors of a number of other poetic texts, most importantly the Carajicomedia ; and the complicated status of conversos in early modern Iberia.[...] Scholars and graduate studentswill ï¬nd plenty of useful material and provocative insights into elite and literary cultures during a critical time in Iberian history."- Rachael Ball in Renaissance Quarterly , 72 (3). doi:10.1017/rqx.2019.349
"The multiplicity of questions that Boase wants to answerâthe identity of the ladies represented by the cards and the meaning of the poems associated with them, their connections to events like jousts, Gerónimoâs relation to his sister Florencia, and Juego trobadoâs relation to Carajicomediaâmakes for a bookthat is as ambitious as it is complex. All of the parts of Secrets of Pinarâs Game, however, are filtered through Boaseâs extensive knowledge of genealogy, heraldry, herbalism, bestiaries, cancionero poetry, and proverbial literature, and they reconstruct a world heretofore believed to be unknowable: the world of the court and its pastimes. It promises to be of great value to those who seek to understand the context in which much of cancionero poetry was produced and performed". Frank A. DomÃnguez, in La Corònica 48 (1).
Historians of late medieval Spain, especially the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, and all those interested in European court culture and literature during the late medieval and Renaissance period, and anyone with an interest in bestiary imagery, proverbs, jousting, poetry and the history of polyphonic music.