Jeu de dames: A Game for Women in Renaissance Europe

Jeu de dames, the game that is known in English as checkers or draughts, not only alludes to women or queens; it forms a motif in Renaissance art, in which women are portrayed as playing the game with each other, with husbands, lovers, and suitors. This Forum article explores the early modern imagery of jeu de dames, specifically from 1400 to 1750. A careful survey of its iconography reveals two rarely mentioned or observed aspects of the game. First, the images visualize its association with various social groups, ranging from the nobility to commoners. Second, at least in the way the players are portrayed, jeu de dames was considered an activity that was equally appropriate for women to play with other women and men with other men, as well as for mixed couples.

Although the etymology of the game's French and Dutch names provides some valuable clues as to its distribution in Europe, until recently, considerably less was known about its social distribution.¹ A database constructed by the authors now contains some 1400 images of people playing the game, which opens up the possibility of analyzing its social role.² For the period 1400–1750, this database contains approximately fifty images of Western European art that show the game of jeu de dames in social settings. Some two dozen paintings, drawings, and engravings depict women as players; previously, the sources available were solely literary or material (such as the existence of game boards in museum collections), and revealed little about the players.

In order to evaluate the settings in which jeu de dames was played, it is perhaps informative to compare the European version with the games of Go and Shogi of the Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan, where both men and women played these games. According to Kôichi Masukawa, female prostitutes were urged to learn to be good players so that they could entertain their clients.³ Although there seems to be no evidence of similar incentives for European women to engage in competitive play, their presence at the playing board in the company of men suggests that similar ideas may have prevailed in Europe as well where either the game facilitated courtship or represented a way in which women were expected to entertain their husbands. There is another, somewhat curious, Asian connection. Preserved in the Hamburg Museum for Ethnography and Prehistory is a tempera painting on silk attributed to Guiseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) depicting a group of Chinese women playing jeu de dames in what appears to be a European setting, at a time when the game was unknown in China.⁴ This unusual example suggests an imagined Chinese scene based on a European reality. Other contemporary iconographic evidence comes from Renaissance Europe. In these pictures, we see both sexes entertaining themselves with a game that does not bear the taint of gambling, as did, for instance, a card game. Jeu de dames thus stands alone as a game that seems to have been enjoyed by both sexes, but one in which gambling had no role at all.

Although many of these images clearly indicate that the game was played for entertainment—not for monetary gain—jeu de dames was also played competitively, although apparently only by men as there are no references to women engaging in such tournaments. During the middle of the eighteenth century, jeu de dames—draughts or checkers—began losing its popularity to chess, especially among the elites. In Japan, however, both Go, of which there is no equivalent in the West, and Shogi, a chess variation, continued to be played by women, and women master players became fairly common in the twentieth century. Only when Shogi became associated with gambling did it lose its appeal for women in Japan. In Europe, jeu de dames lost its appeal not because it became tainted by gambling, but due to the greater popularity of chess, which became increasingly associated with male activities such as science and war strategy. As a result, Europe has had no tradition of...