Games Medievalists Play: How to Make Earnest of Game and Still Enjoy It

This essay extends Johan Huizinga’s analysis of the concept of play as expressed in language, with particular attention to the shifting semantics of the words “play” and “game” in English over the course of the Middle Ages. It also considers the relationship between playing and interpretation in Huizinga’s own work and in medieval literary studies influenced by him. If play is the way a society expresses its interpretation of life and the world...