Playing at Soldiers: Agustín de Guardiola’s “Goose Game, Moralized for the Spirit”

“While convalescing from a serious illness, I found myself so melancholic that the doctors judged the latter malady more worthy of fear than the former [illness], and in order to root it out with diversion, some friends undertook to play the game of the goose with me. I took note with some care of the construction of that game, and I decided that it would be more useful to apply it to the spirit.” With these words Trinitarian friar Agustín de Guardiola y Aragón introduced his “Game of the Goose Moralized for the Spirit,” an adaptation of a popular pastime found throughout early modern Europe. Though the board for Guardiola’s pious pastime disappeared long ago, a description preserved in Madrid’s Archivo Histórico Nacional allows a reconstruction of the game, which combined exciting play with didactic and devotional purpose. This essay contextualizes Guardiola’s game within monastic culture and the institutional ethos of the Trinitarian Order, a religious institution that, despite its ubiquity throughout early modern France, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere, remains relatively unstudied. In constructing his game, Guardiola drew on a wide array of late medieval and early modern devotional themes, including the ars moriendi and the metaphor of the miles Christi, the soldier of Christ, as well as early modern conceptions about the intersections of mental health and entertainment and ideas about monastic leisure. This essay also examines links between the moralized Goose Game and currents among Trinitarians that reimagined their order’s origins as grounded in a mythic medieval military order. In combining a spiritual message and a history lesson, Guardiola’s Goose Game offered players a complex representation of the world from a Trinitarian perspective.