Arts, Dining & Entertainment

Dartmouth professor discusses chess and medieval courtship

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Wednesday, Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. — RUTLAND — Dartmouth professor Jane Carroll will look at how the game of chess was used for courtship in earlier times in a talk at Rutland Free Library on Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. Her talk, “Knight to Queen: Chess, Courtly Life, and the Game of Love in the Middle Ages,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.

Imported from the Arabs and Persians in the ninth century, chess became a status symbol, an allegory of battle, and a metaphor for love. Carroll will examine the medieval art of flirting, the power plays of love, and the skill of negotiation as expressed through the game of kings.

Carroll earned her BA from Smith College and her PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, before becoming a Senior Lecturer in Dartmouth’s Art History Department, where she teaches courses in Gothic, Medieval, and Northern Renaissance Art. She also serves as an Assistant Dean of the Faculty at Dartmouth. Carroll is the editor of Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the author of several articles on Dominican nuns and late Medieval art.

The Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays series is held on the first Wednesday of every month from October through May in nine communities statewide, featuring speakers of national and regional renown. Talks in Rutland are held at Rutland Free Library unless otherwise noted. All First Wednesdays talks are free and open to the public.

For more info, call 802-773-1860, or visit www.vermonthumanities.org.

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