What is it about?
In Secrets of Pinar’s 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 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 Pinar’s sister Florencia, and identifies Acevedo, author of some poems about festivities in Murcia c. 1507. He demonstrates that many of Pinar’s ladies reappear as prostitutes in the anonymous Carajicomedia two decades later.
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Why is it important?
Pnar's Juego trobado has never been deciphered before. It was not thought possible that the court ladies could be identified. This book revolutionises our understanding of the literature and culture of late medieval and Renaissance Spain
Perspectives
The writing of this book has been an obsession that has swallowed up many years of my life, and even now there are countless loose ends still to tie up and many avenues never fully pursued. It all began when I started to think about the most popular fifteenth-century courtly songs, most of which happen to be anonymous, and I wondered if it might be possible to identify the authors and the ladies addressed. It occurred to me that the text of a canción might point to a half-concealed story, with which most of the poet’s peers and contemporaries would have been acquainted, and which a modern reader would have to rediscover by means of painstaking research. In other words, the identity of the lady addressed might be an open secret in the court circles where a canción was sung, read, or recited. It was thus that I came to study Pinar’s Juego trobado, a poem in which many of these songs are cited, and to consider Jane Whetnall’s discussion of the significance of citing poems in her important thesis on manuscript love poetry of the Spanish fifteenth century (1986).
Dr Roger Boase
Queen Mary University of London
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This page is a summary of: Secrets of Pinar's Game (2 vols), June 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004338364.
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