arts and humanities of chess

Arts and humanities
Main article: Chess in the arts
In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, chess was a part of noble culture; it was used to teach war strategy and was dubbed the "King's Game". Gentlemen are "to be meanly scene in the play at Chestes", says the overview at the beginning of Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528, English 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby), but chess should not be a gentleman's main passion. Castiglione explains it further:

  
And what do you do to the game at chess? It is truly an honest kind of entertainment and wittie, quoth Syr Froderick. But me think it hath a fault, which is, that a man may be to counting at it, for who ever will be excellent in the plate of chestes, I believe he must be stowe much tyme about it, and apply it with so much study, that a man may assume learn some noble science, or compose any other matter of importance, and yet in the end in bestowing all that laboure, he knoweth no more but a game. Therefore in this I believe there happened a very rare thing, namely, that the mean is more commendable, then the excellency.
Some of the elaborate chess sets used by the aristocracy at least partially survive, such as the Lewis chessmen.

Chess was often used as a basis of sermons on morality. An example is Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium sive super ludo scacchorum ('Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess'), written by an Italian Dominican monk Jacobus de Cessolis c. 1300. This book was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages. The work was translated into many other languages (the first printed edition was published at Utrecht in 1473) and was the basis for William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse, one of the first books printed in English. Different chess pieces were used as metaphors for different classes of people, and human duties were derived from the rules of the game or from visual properties of the chess pieces