The Game of Chess Moralized

...but he torments and receives them as much through the evil state of his disordered life as through several other spiteful torments, just as we read of Nero, Emperor of Rome, who had Seneca, his master, killed because he could not bear that he should blame or rebuke him for his follies. And he hated him because he remembered the corrections Original: "lutenies," referring here to the discipline or scoldings a teacher gives a child. and outrages that Seneca had inflicted upon him in his childhood.

And when his mother and his other friends blamed him for the death of his master, he answered, to cover his very great wickedness wickedness (felonnie): in a medieval context, this term denotes a grave betrayal of duty or a violation of the moral and social bond between people, that he had done it because the Emperor of Rome ought not to rise before any man; yet he was so accustomed to rising before his master that he could not prevent himself from doing so in any way.

And because his mother blamed him for this wickedness and for several others, he had her opened up while she was still alive, because he wanted to see her internal organs Original: "membres," used here to refer to her anatomy and womb. and how he had been conceived in her womb. And when he had seen them, he greatly praised those parts and asked for a drink.

And after this, when the wise men of Rome began to blame him for this deed—that is to say, for the anguishes and the pains that she had suffered in carrying him for nine months and in giving birth to him—the villain then responded that he wanted to know what anguishes she had sustained for him. He said that he had vowed that they The Emperor's physicians. should make him conceive a child, so that he might experience in himself similar anguishes to those she had felt and suffered, or to see if he could endure them with less difficulty. And they replied to him that this was not a thing that could be, but was con-