At a time when arts organisations throughout the world are facing the gravest crisis in their recent history it is dismaying that some have tried to exploit the covid-19 pandemic to justify contentious initiatives affecting their staff and collections. In Britain last year the National Trust put forward a proposal for both reducing and restructuring its curatorial staff, and in January the Wallace Collection, London, announced a plan to close permanently its library and archive.

As Deborah Freeman Fahid states in the introduction to this catalogue, ‘Abbasid Baghdad in the 9th and 10th centuries has been compared to the Moscow of the 1980s as the intellectual centre of chess, where grandmasters and theoreticians flourished’ (p.15). Chess was introduced early to the Islamic world, from India, whereas backgammon probably has a much older origin, the history of the games is not the focus here, however.

'Will the Age of Chivalry be remembered as the last gasp of medieval art history in this country?’, asked Caroline Elam in her Editorial in The Burlington Magazine of February 1988. The issue, which coincided with the Age of Chivalry exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, celebrated English Gothic Art and was the last time this Magazine has published a special issue on the Middle Ages.