About the Book
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 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 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.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
"...A partir del Juego trobado, y sin dejar de atender a su correcta edición y esclarecimiento, lo que Boase nos ofrece es algo parecido a una piedra de Rosetta, como la que permitió a Champollion el acceso a la escritura jeroglíflica del antiguo Egipto [...] Revela [...] el planteamiento conceptual y el rigor metodológico de Boase, cuando la erudición profunda se pone al servicio de una consistente visión crítica sobre el cosmos genérico del verso cortesano [...] Sin duda, estamos ante un valioso texto recuperado, pero no menos ante una lectura crítica de indudable trascendencia." - Pedro Ruiz Pérez, Bulletin Hispanique, vol. 121 (2009)
"...Boase nada menos que contextualiza y transcribe los poemas citados en la obra de Pinar, adentrándose en el mundo de las justas y otras formas lúdicas y teatrales de la corte...", "...nos descubre algo absolutamente asom¬broso: que el Juego trobado de Pinar nos proporciona las pistas para comprender el significado de la famosa y obscena Carajicomedia...", "...Boase, con un trabajo magistral, nos demuestra que el Juego trobado es toda una mina para el estudioso no solo del Cancionero castellano sino también de las formas de vida cortesana de España y Europa a finales del siglo XV...", "...animo a adquirir y leer este hermoso libro, que uno cierra, gracias al ingenio y maestría de Roger Boase, sintiéndose un poquito más sabio.” - Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, Revista de Poesía Medieval, 33 (2019), 151-54.
“Y precisamente por estas razones (sus destinatarias femeninas, su función de pasatiempo aristocrático y su condición temáticamente marginal y dispersa) es que la presente publicación constituye una aportación de gran importancia para los estudios filológicos y para los estudios sobre la mujer europea de la Baja Edad Media y del Renacimiento temprano. Fruto de una labor tenaz a lo largo de más de una década, Roger Boase ha culminado un trabajo de edición y de exégesis encomiables.", "...la atención prestadaa cada una de las damas de la corte deslinda muy bien su poder y bagaje o trazos de su biografía, como también las lecturas profanas que compartían [...] en un ambiente en el que perduraban los ideales del amor cortés...", "Roger Boase [...] nos permite calibrar mucho mejor los saberes femeninos (y masculinos) en la esfera cortesana de los reinos hispánicos, los cuales [...] gozarán de clara pervivencia en la cultura literaria del Renacimiento castellano.” - Rafael M. Mérida Jiménez, Lectora, 25 (2019), 368-70).
''Secrets of Pinar’s Game deciphers some of the court poetry of fifteenth-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 Pinar’s 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 find 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 answer—the identity of the ladies represented by the cards and the meaning of the poems associated with them, their connections to events like jousts, Gerónimo’s relation to his sister Florencia, and Juego trobado’s relation to Carajicomedia—makes for a bookthat is as ambitious as it is complex. All of the parts of Secrets of Pinar’s Game, however, are filtered through Boase’s 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. Domínguez, in La Corònica 48 (1).
