El regreso de Francesch Vicent. La Historia del nacimiento y la expansión del ajedrez moderno. Valencia: Fundación Jaume II el Just. Generalitat Valenciana, 2005.

In this exhaustive work, after 15 years of research the author assumes the burden of proof to prove conclusively the Valencian origin of modern chess. With two new findings he is able to date the poem definitively (Valencia 1475); this year coincides in turn with the date of the creation of the new piece, the Queen. The study of all documents on new chess allows him to define the dependency of some on others and to establish a precise chronology. His research rules out the possibility of the existence of a 15th-century document on modern chess from outside Spain. However, the most significant of his contributions is that of the appearance of Vicent’s book and its 100 problems, copied in a manuscript by its author in the early 16th century, probably when he was the chess tutor of Lucrecia Borgia. It is surprising to see how exactly this coincides with the reconstruction proposed by Averbakh 20 years earlier. The original text in Valencian, which survives in some of these arrangements, shows that Lucena’s book was actually a Spanish translation of Vicent’s with the addition of 50 medieval problems, i.e. it represents a regression regarding the book printed in Valencia.  

The work was very well received internationally, mainly as a result of the effort made by the author and publisher in order to produce an English edition (most ably translated by Manuel Pérez Carballo), as is summarised on this website.

Preliminaries. Prologue. Introduction (pp. 1 a 12) Key extract. Chapter 3 (pp. 388 a 418)