Board-er Games

Defining Seventeenth-Century France in Pierre Duval’s Cartographic “enjeux” (ca. 1660)

Abstract

This paper analyzes a seventeenth-century geographic board game designed by the geographer Pierre Duval (1618–1683) to celebrate the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1660. The game takes its players through the events of twenty-five years of war between France and Spain, staged largely along the perimeters of France. Contextualizing the game’s visual structure within the historical and semantic French discourse of borders allows us, I argue, to understand Duval’s object as an agent in border-building practices. These practices were neither located physically on France’s borders, nor were they top-down. Instead, Duval’s game suggests that a border imaginary could be constructed in the capital through collaborative operations in the form, for instance, of play. This border imaginary figured French state boundaries in the mid-seventeenth century as “frontiers” and, I suggest, this involved a gendered as well as a spatial dimension. When seeking to understand state formation and its mediation through visual culture, this paper implies, moreover, that seemingly trivial objects such as games which generally lie outside of the art historical cannon reveal themselves as a rich investigatory terrain.