ABSTRACT
Francis Willughby's compendium of games is a unique and outstandingly rich source of information on an important domain of human activity, with very little in the way of close parallels elsewhere in the medieval or early modern tradition. A number of manuscripts contain illustrations of game boards; one early English example, dating to the tenth century, offers an illustration with commentary of the initial board setup for a game entitled Alea Evangelii, a version of the northern European game known in Scandinavia as hnefatafl. Games had in fact figured in the European encyclopedic tradition since its reemergence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the thrust of these early encyclopedias was largely theoretical, and they offered very little detail on games: few are even named, let alone described. Comparable to the tradition of encyclopedic writings is the corpus of antiquarian and scholarly studies that address games from an historical or ethnological perspective.
