Jenny Adams

BOOKS

Degrees of Collateral: Books, Borrowing, and the Business of Medieval Oxford 

(monograph under contract at Penn Press).

———————————————-

Medieval Woman and Their Objects. Eds. Jenny Adams and Nancy Bradbury. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.

“Medieval Women and Their Objects demonstrates how analysis of material culture in literary texts, as well as texts themselves as objects, can yield exciting new information that challenge long-held notions about women in late medieval Europe.” Of my essay in this collection, Transgender and the Chess Queen, “Jenny Adams’s essay combines analysis of physical objects–in this case chess pieces–and Chaucer’sThe Book of the Duchess. This is a fascinating contribution that seeks to reframe the chess scene in this literary piece. ” – Amy Livingstone in The Medieval Review, 2017.

—————————————————

William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Ed. Jenny Adams. TEAMS Middle English Text Series.  Kalamazoo, MI:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2009.

“The Game and Playe of the Chesse is part of Adams’s twofold effort to recognize the importance of the chess-book tradition, particularly Jacobus de Cessolis’s thirteenth-century Liber de ludo scachorum, of which Caxton’s is an augmented translation. In this, it is a companion piece to her well-received monograph, Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (2006). Over the course of the two books, Adams reads the tradition as not merely about gaming, but about representation, about the way games figure society, about the way the self can be allegorized, and about the way material objects-chess pieces-signify.” – William Kuskin, JEGP, 2011.

———————————————-_

Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.