During the medieval and early modern periods, games permeated the lives of the people of Europe. Games played at the time included parlor and outdoor games, those requiring skill and wit, and others depending solely upon chance. They were the pastimes of royals and nobles, as well as entertainment enjoyed by people of humbler social backgrounds. Some were deemed suitable for cultivated intellectuals, others for children, as a source of mere amusement, but also as tools for teaching them manners and morals.

The volume Games and Visual Culture addresses the prominence and omnipresence of games that was so distinctive of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Vanina Kopp and Elizabeth Lapina have tried to organize the essays around two themes: the place of games in society and the materiality of games. The editors label the type of material that most of the contributions study as books played sitting down (a category taken over from Alfonso X's Libro de acedrex), but in their introduction they provide an excuse to include in the volume essays on physical contests, carving graffiti, and children's toys.

Being so inclusive, the volume becomes rather eclectic, especially given that its geographical and chronological scope is also very broad. For example, Walter Crist's study of graffiti games in the Byzantine Empire reaches back into the first centuries CE, while İrvin Cemil Schick focuses on the chess of the Gnostics, looking at boards produced as late as the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Just as vast is the territory that the research materials analyzed in the chapters come from: they include objects from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and the Northern Isles of Scotland, along with artifacts that are Byzantine, Ottoman, and Indio-Muslim in origin. Regrettably, none of the articles study marginalized sources on the culture of play in east Central Europe.

The contributors to the volume Games and Visual Culture have proposed engaging texts that provide evidence of profound research. The individual essays will likely serve as introductions to the broader works of the authors and be of interest to specialists in archaeology, art history, and literary studies, as well as scholars in book history and the history of religion. Michael A. Conrad's rich and insightful study of Libro de acedrex, dados e tablas was particularly absorbing. Conrad demonstrates that one of the crucial aims of Alfonso X and the scribe-illuminators working on the famed manuscript was to create an anthology of not only texts but also of images that would work together, thus transferring knowledge of games, especially chess. Conrad convincingly argues that images, with their iconographic sources of varied cultural provenances, had a vital (and, until now, overlooked) role to play in this process.

The interplay between words and pictures, with the focus on the latter, is also the subject of the contribution by Louise Fang, who studies the illustrations in the 1483 Caxton edition of The Game and Playe of Chesse. Fang examines the series of woodcuts that enrich this edition of the treatise in the context of the material culture of the contemporaneous chess game. She shows how the wealth of illustrations in the printed book helped to perpetuate and popularize the imagery of this aristocratic and courtly game among a wider middle-class public.

Given that the volume is an exploration through an abundance of sources that can be approached in many ways to extract information on games and their representations, it would have benefited from a clear explanation of its core concept and a more coherent selection of content. Yet the volume provides a valuable contribution to the field, adding to our understanding of games as windows on the culture, social norms, and even religious life of the past. It argues for the importance of examining the visual—that is, performing analysis of the images of games and game playing—as well as related objects—in other words, the materials that were usually intensely used by their early owners and rarely have survived until the present day.

The volume is well illustrated (which is critical, as the analysis of visual sources underpins the ideas of most of the contributions). Unfortunately, the publisher's decision to use a rather small typeface does not make the physical act of reading an easy task.