Jacobus de Cessolis, De Ludo Scaccorum, on the game of chess, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on paper [north-east Italy (most probably Venice), first half of the fifteenth century]

65 leaves, 254mm. by 185mm., apparently complete, collation: i^{9 (last a singleton), ii10, iii6, iv-v10, vi8, vii12, gatherings strengthened with strips from an early musical manuscript with neumes (probably tenth-century), 24 lines in black ink in a rounded late gothic bookhand, rubrics in faded red, paragraph marks in red or blue, 2-line initials in red or blue with scrolling penwork,} one large initial 'M' (opening "Multorum fratrem ordinis nostri  ..."), 11-lines high, in pink acanthus leaves heightened with bands of white penwork, enclosing two players seated on a bench either side of a chessboard, on burnished gold grounds, coloured foliate sprays in border terminating in gold bezants, lower margin of fol.22 cut away and replaced with more modern paper, hole in colophon on last leaf repaired similarly, some small smudges and ink stains, else good, seventeenth- or eighteenth-century limp vellum

provenance

(1) Written in the first half of the fifteenth century by the scribe Johannes de Magno, whose partly overwritten inscription is at the end of the text: "Ego Johannes de magnis fecit istum libellum". He was most probably the scribe who signs two manuscripts now in Cividale (dated 1425 and 1445), as 'Iohannes Magno de Veneciis' (Bénédictins du Bouveret, Colophons, III, 1973, nos.10387-88).

(2) The library of the Florentine Ranuzzi family: eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century printed armorial frontispiece; perhaps given to a member of this family or an associate named "Giosepe pelegrini" or "Antonio Maria Monti": contemporary scribbles in red on fols.25v, 32r-42r, and 64r.

(3) The Conte de Marescalchi, most probably Ferdinando Marescalchi (1754-1830), bibliophile and author, appointed ambassador to France by Napoleon in 1804: his nineteenth-century armorial bookplate on front pastedown.

text

"Chess was supposed to have been devised as a recreation for kings. The Dominican Jacobus de Cessolis took the game as a starting point for a Latin treatise (c.1300) on the social classes and the duties of noblemen. The chess-pieces, and their shapes, positions and moves are used as an allegory of human society" (William Caxton, British Library exhibition 1976, p.34). The text was enormously influential, and in the Middle Ages was translated into Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German and Italian. It was almost certainly the first text printed in English.