Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature pp 209–222Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Afterword: Medieval Ludens

  • Chapter

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

Abstract

Medieval scholarship has traditionally operated on an assumption about, rather than an investigation into, both the term and the theoretical concept of “game.” Such an assumption is ironic not only in light of the many medieval texts that serve as games themselves, but because the scholar who first considered the seriousness of games was himself a medievalist: the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.2 Although Huizinga’s 1938 publication, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, remains the foundational text for the field of cultural game studies, as this collection illustrates, there is still much to explore about premodern games. For Huizinga, the “ludic function” is not just a way to explore and understand culture: it is cultural production. The ludic function creates a cultural product by creating meaning and cultural memory through the experience of play and of the playing of games. The chapters in this book highlight the ludic function by showing how medieval writers, players, readers, ecclesiastics, and others produced, enjoyed, and interpreted the games they played. But it is also important to understand the history of cultural game theory and its roots in medieval culture. The aim of this afterword is to consider these chapters in their larger theoretical context and to demonstrate not only how medieval studies fits into the history of cultural game theory, but also to demonstrate how the significance of the ludic function can generate future research on games in the Middle Ages.

The most we can say of the junction that is operative in the process of image-making or imagination is that it is a poetic function; and we define it best of all by calling it a function of play—the ludic function, in fact.

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture1

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD   119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1950).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Studies of Homo Ludens include Jacques Ehrmann, “Homo Ludens Revisited,” Yale French Studies 40 (1968): 31-57

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. E. M. Gombrich, “Huizinga’s Homo Ludens,” Johan Huizinga 1872-1972: Papers Delivered to the Johan Huizinga Conference, ed. W. R. H. Koops, E. H. Kossman, and Gees van der Platt (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 133-54

    Google Scholar 

  4. Robert Anchor, “History and Play: Johan Huizinga and His Critics,” History and Theory 17.1 (1978): 63-93

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Margaret Carlisle Duncan, “Play Discourse and the Rhetorical Turn: A Semiological Analysis of Homo Ludens,” Play and Culture 1 (1988): 28-42

    Google Scholar 

  6. Richard J. Schoeck, “Chaucer and Huizinga: The Spirit of Homo Ludens,” in Tales Within Tales: Apuleius through Time, ed. Constance S. Wright and Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: AMS Press, 2000), pp. 97-103

    Google Scholar 

  7. Hector Rodriguez, “The Playful and the Serious: An Approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens,” Games Studies 6.1 (2006): 1-19

    Google Scholar 

  8. Laura Kendrick, “Games Medievalists Play: How to Make Earnest of Game and Still Enjoy It,” New Literary History 40 (2009): 43-61

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Joost Raessens, “Homo Ludens 2.0: The Ludic Turn in Media Theory,” (Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  10. Eric Zimmerman, “Jerked Around by the Magic Circle-Clearing the Air Ten Years Later,” Gamasutra, February 7, 2012, accessed April 2, 2014, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6696/jerked_around_by _the_magic_circle.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Cultural game theory is distinct from the more mathematical, economic, and political game theory first conceived by Hungarian mathematician and physicist, John von Neumann, in his 1928 article “Zur Theorie der Gessellschaftsspiele.” The larger field was initiated by the publication of the foundational text, Theory of Economic Games and Behavior, by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Ken Binmore, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  13. Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution and Game Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  15. Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Vintage, 2000), p.18. As does everyone else, Ackerman begins her discussion with Huizinga: “From time to time, this book becomes a fantasia on a theme by Huizinga, in which I play with some of his ideas, amplify them, follow their shadows and nuances” p. 18.

    Google Scholar 

  16. I am distinguishing “deep game” from “deep play” to highlight how an analysis of games (whether textual or physical, such as chess and hunting), as a way to understand the culture of the past, differs from previous analytical considerations (such as linguistic wordplay.) I also think it is important to differentiate the kind of theoretical analysis of cultural game discussed here from the more immersive, anthropological play approach initiated by, and still associated with, Geertz. For his observational “thick description” of play, see Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Bantam, 1972), pp. 412-54.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), especially Chapter 7, “Defining Games,” pp. 71-83

    Google Scholar 

  18. Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), pp. 23-9. See also Kendrick, “Games Medievalists Play,” especially pp. 48-55, for more on the status of both terms in Old- and Middle English.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Brian Edwards, Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction (New York: Garland, 1998), p. 12.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Roger Callois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

    Google Scholar 

  21. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959) and Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1974)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randall Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

    Google Scholar 

  23. See Gregory Bateson, “A Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious,” “A Metalogue: How Much Do You Know?,” and “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), pp.14-20, 21-26, and 177-93.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Victor Turner conceives of the liminal as a game/play space in which to work out aspects of culture in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  26. Sutton-Smith’s influence has created an ever-increasing emphasis on play studies in human psychology, as well as prompted increased studies of play in animal behavior. For an excellent overview of the current state of play theory both in psychology and in biology, see Robin Marantz Henig, “Taking Play Seriously,” The New York Times Magazine, February 17, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/magazine.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, trans. C. Gatteno and F. M. Hodgson, (New York: Norton, 1962), especially Chapters 4-6

    Google Scholar 

  28. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971).

    Google Scholar 

  29. Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  30. Mary Midgeley, “The Game Game,” Philosophy 49 (July 1974): 231-53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Jonne Arjoranta, “Game Definitions: A Wittgensteinian Approach,” Game Studies 14.1 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  32. Espen Aarseth observes that 2001 is “Year One” for game studies “as an emerging, viable, international, academic field,” in “Computer Game Studies, Year One,” Game Studies 1 (2001): 1.

    Google Scholar 

  33. See Clark Abt, Serious Games (New York: Viking Press, 1970)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design: Reflections of a Master Game Designer (New York: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Greg Costikyan, “I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games,” in Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, ed. Frans Mäyrä (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002): 9-33

    Google Scholar 

  36. Juul, Half Real; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2 (2007): 95-113

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Markus Montola, Jaako Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games, Theory and Design (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann, 2009)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Mary Flanagan, “Creating Critical Play,” Artists Re:Thinking Games, eds. Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, and Corrado Morgana (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), pp. 49-53

    Google Scholar 

  42. Adrienne Shaw, “What is Video Game Culture?: Cultural Studies and Game Studies,” Games and Culture 5 (2010): 403-24

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Steffen P. Walz, Towards a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Game (Pittsburg, PA: ETC Press, 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  44. Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2011)

    Google Scholar 

  45. Greg Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and K. Robert Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Greg Costikyan, Uncertainty in Games (Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press, 2013)

    Google Scholar 

  47. Sebastian Deterding, “The Ambiguity of Games: Histories and Discourses of a Gameful World” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, ed. Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 23-64

    Google Scholar 

  48. Eric Zimmerman, “Manifesto for a Ludic Century,” in The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, ed. Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 19-22.

    Google Scholar 

  49. For more on literary game theory, see the special editions “Games, Play and Literature,” Yale French Studies 41 (1968) and “Play,” New Literary History 40 (2009).

    Google Scholar 

  50. Elizabeth W. Bruss, “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,” New Literary History 9 (1977): 153-72

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. James S. Hans, The Play of the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981)

    Google Scholar 

  52. Mihai Spariosu, Literature, Mimesis and Play: Essays in Literary Theory (Philadelphia, PA: Gunter Narr Verlag 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  53. Peter Hutchinson, Games Authors Play (London: Methuen, 1983)

    Google Scholar 

  54. J. A. G. Marino, “An Annotated Bibliography of Play and Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 12 (1985): 306-53

    Google Scholar 

  55. R. R. Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game and Narrative Theory (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1990)

    Google Scholar 

  56. Ruth Burke, The Games of Poetics: Ludic Criticism and Postmodern Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 1994)

    Google Scholar 

  57. Warren Motte, Playtexts: Ludics on Contemporary Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)

    Google Scholar 

  58. Brian Edwards, Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction (New York: Garland, 1997)

    Google Scholar 

  59. Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

    Google Scholar 

  60. Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge; and Sebastian Detering, “Fiction as Play: Reassessing the Relations of Game, Play and Fiction,” in Proceedings of the Fourth “The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference,” August 13-15, 2009, Oslo University, Oslo, Norway, pp. 1-18.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pp. 4 and 9. Cultural memory initiated with sociologist Maurice Hawlbachs and art historian Aby Warburg in the 1930s and developed as a field in the late twentieth century

    Google Scholar 

  62. Jan Assman, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (1995): 125-33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. Ehrmann, “Homo Ludens Revisited,” Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 31-57

    Article  Google Scholar 

  64. Warren Motte, “Playing in Earnest,” New Literary History 40 (2009): 25-42

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Jesper Juul, “The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece,” Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, ed. Stephen Gunzel, Michael Liebe, and Dieter Mersch (Potsdam: University Press, 2008), pp. 56-67

    Google Scholar 

  66. Mia Consalvo, “There Is No Magic Circle,” Games and Culture 4.4 (2009): 408-17

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Jaakko Stenros, “In Defense of a Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play,” Transactions of Digital Games Research Association 1.2 (2014): 147-85.

    Google Scholar 

  68. See Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  69. Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

    Google Scholar 

  70. “Games Medievalists Play.” For general discussions of game/play in relation to medieval literature, see John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 154-202

    Google Scholar 

  71. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966)

    Google Scholar 

  72. John Leyerle, “The Game and Play of Hero,” in Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Norman Burns and Christopher Reagan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 49-82

    Google Scholar 

  73. Richard Lanham, “Games and High Seriousness,” in The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 65-81

    Google Scholar 

  74. Glending Olson, “Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge,” Viator 26 (1995): 195-221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  75. For earlier discussions of game/play in relation to specific medieval texts, see G. D. Josipovici, “Fiction and Game in The Canterbury Tales,” Critical Quarterly 7 (1965): 185-97

    Article  Google Scholar 

  76. Stephen Manning, “Game and Earnest in the Middle English and Provencal Love Lyrics,” Comparative Literature 18 (1966): 225-41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  77. Michael W. McClintock, “Games and the Players of Games: Old French Fabliaux and the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 5 (1970): 112-36

    Google Scholar 

  78. Beryl Rowland, “The Play of the Miller’s Tale: A Game within a Game,” Chaucer Review 5 (1970): 140-46

    Google Scholar 

  79. G.Joseph, “Chaucerian ‘Game’-’Earnest’ and the ‘Argument of Herberage’ in The Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 5 (1970-1971): 83-96

    Google Scholar 

  80. Martin Stevens, “Laughter and Game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Speculum 47 (1972): 65-78

    Article  Google Scholar 

  81. Stephen Manning, “Rhetoric, Game, Morality and Geoffrey Chaucer,” SAC 1 (1979): 105-18

    Google Scholar 

  82. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Dice Games and Other Games in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas” PMLA 95 (1980): 802-11

    Article  Google Scholar 

  83. Michael Olmert, “The Parson’s Ludic Formula for Winning on the Road to Canterbury,” Chaucer Review 20 (1985): 158-68

    Google Scholar 

  84. Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)

    Google Scholar 

  85. Nathaniel B. Smith, “Games Troubadours Play,” in Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts, eds. Moshe Lazar and Norris J. Lacy (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1989), pp. 3-15

    Google Scholar 

  86. Glending Olson, “Chaucer’s Idea of a Canterbury Game,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian Zacher (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 72-90

    Google Scholar 

  87. Florence Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  88. Don A. Monson, “The Troubadours at Play: Irony, Parody and Burlesque,” in The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 197-211.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  89. Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p.14.

    Google Scholar 

  90. Fradenburg, ‘“So That We May Speak of Them’: Enjoying the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 28.2 (1997): 224 [205-30].

    Article  Google Scholar 

  91. Recent ludic medieval scholarship includes Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  92. Stephen D. Powell, “Game Over: Defragmenting the End of the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer Review 37 (2002): 40-58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  93. Jenny Adams, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  94. Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in His Cultural Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  95. Nicola McDonald, “Games Medieval Women Play,” in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn Collette (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 176-98

    Google Scholar 

  96. Betsy McCormick, “Remembering the Game: Debating the Legend’s Women,” in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn Collette (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 105-31

    Google Scholar 

  97. Robert Hanning, Serious Play: Desire and Authority in Ovid, Chaucer and Ariosto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  98. Andrew Higl, Playing the Canterbury Tales: The Continuations and Additions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012)

    Google Scholar 

  99. Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially Chapter 1, “Artful Play.”

    Book  Google Scholar 

  100. For more on “both/and” exegesis, see Catherine Brown, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  101. Lourens Minnema, “Play and (Post) Modern Culture: An Essay on Changes in the Scientific Interest in the Phenomenon of Play,” Cultural Dynamics 10.1 (March 1998): 21-47

    Article  Google Scholar 

  102. Jesper Juul, “10 Years of The Ludologist,” The Ludologist, May 28, 2013, accessed April 10, 2014, http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/10-years -of-the-ludologist.

    Google Scholar 

  103. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2007), p. 91, original emphasis.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Betsy McCormick
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Serina Patterson

Copyright information

© 2015 Serina Patterson

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

McCormick, B. (2015). Afterword: Medieval Ludens. In: Patterson, S. (eds) Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497529_11

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation