Secrets of Pinar's Game deciphers some of the court poetry of fifteenth-century Spain. This ambitious two-volume book blends elements of the scholarly monograph with those of a critical edition. It provides the text and an English translation of Gerónimo Pinar's Juego trobado, a card game composed for Queen Isabel, members of the royal family, and ladies of the court. Boase sets out to solve the puzzles of the identities of the forty-six players of the game. Through a combination of literary and historical research, Boase dates the Juego trobado more precisely than previous scholars have. He argues that Pinar composed this entertainment in the summer of 1496 and that the court played it during late July of that year. Although this was a card game about love, relationships, and marriage, Boase claims that his research goes far beyond explaining those aspects of this game. Indeed, his study sheds light on a number of other topics, including jousting tournaments; the characters in and authors of a number of other poetic texts, most importantly the Carajicomedia; and the complicated status of conversos in early modern Iberia.

In the first three chapters, Boase proves that the Juego trobado can provide significant literary insights about songs and courtly verse, as well as some historical ones about people and events during the reigns of the Catholic monarchs. His largely historicist approach is part of a broader reassessment of the large body of fifteenth-century Spanish verse that treats these Renaissance works as far from superficial. They were layered with meanings and sophistication. Political realities and patronage, as well as marriage diplomacy and the poetic conventions of secrecy, all shaped texts like the Juego trobado. Using and tracing intertextual references between Pinar's game and other verse, along with family histories mostly constructed from published editions of chronicles and secondary scholarship, Boase provides a detailed account of court personages in the 1490s.

The author successfully situates Pinar's game within the broader context of courtly verse, explored at greater length in chapters 4 and 5. In addition to this, Boase uses contextual clues from the research done by historians and other literary scholars, in conjunction with his own thorough readings of the literary evidence, to puzzle out the potential identities of a number of poets and jousters. The focus of chapter 6 is the Carajicomedia, a satirical work that paints a picture of sexual debauchery by portraying court ladies as morally depraved and as prostitutes who fulfilled “the sexual appetites of the clergy” (761). Boase puts forth Rodrigo de Reinosa, whose real name was Rodrigo de Linde (or Rodrigo de Lindo), as the author of this anonymous text. Boase also builds a case that Reinosa was a converso and was critical of corruption within ecclesiastical institutions—something Boase suggests Reinosa partly blamed on the increasing involvement of women in the church. Certainly, the text ridicules a number of women.

Boase provides a helpful set of indexes. The book showcases the author's superb command of languages. Overall, his translations of verse and prose from Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, among others, into English are elegant—although they do not capture the meter and rhythm of the originals. His close readings of these poems and analyses of wordplay are persuasive. He makes a compelling case for the cultural literacy of elite women. The game that they played emphasized etiquette and hierarchy. They had broad knowledge of biblical and classical symbols and scientific and medical practices. These women would have also had knowledge of other lyrics and verse and been familiar with some of the recent events and personal histories to which the clues in the cards point. Boase gives a number of fascinating interpretations of the symbols, proverbs, and intertextual references used in Pinar's cards. The book is replete with fascinating anecdotes about individual nobles and interesting details about poetic conventions.

One of the pitfalls of presenting such interrelated information and interlocking pieces of a puzzle is that it can lead to repetition. Much of the information in chapter 6 about the identities of the ladies in the Carajicomedia has already been covered by the author in chapter 2, in which he makes his arguments and interpretations about the cards of the players of the Juego trobado. The author's dogged pursuit of potential interpretations often leads him to outline family trees down several generations and occasionally leads him to make rather teleological assumptions that elide contingencies in order to support his theories. In some of the sections, the book devotes more time and space to the male relatives of the female players than it spends on the women themselves. Another problem with this otherwise good book is the limited engagement with recent scholarship on festivals in his chapter on jousting. Boase sometimes cites later chroniclers without much skepticism in his efforts to make his theories about Pinar's choices of symbols for the players fit. Some of the sources cited are missing from the bibliography, and a few are oddly chosen. For example, he cites a letter by Catherine of Aragon from English translation on a history enthusiast's blog (120) instead of consulting the original or scholarly editions of queenly correspondence.

The translations of the verse and other material from original-language sources help to broaden the possible audience for Secrets of Pinar's Game, but it will be of greatest interest to those already invested in the study of courtly poetry. Scholars and graduate students will find plenty of useful material and provocative insights into elite and literary cultures during a critical time in Iberian history.