I can't say much about "Eight Emperors," except that it clearly means one of two things: a rule in which eight cards were called "emperors," whether or not they really depicted emperors, or eight special cards that we might naturally take to have been trumps. I tend to the former, since it could the...

Ross wrote (my highlighting, to pick out what I want to question): For the iconography, obviously I can't say what the original Florentine or Bolognese papi looked like. The artist, or engraver, could have decided to distinguish two of them as feminine, and two as males. In my view, though, the des...

And yet Piscina, the oldest reference to Papi , distinguishes his two popes by noting one wears no crown. I don't see Piscina mentioning this. Are you confusing him with Anonymous? If so, the text says "due papi, uno col Regno, e l'altro senza", "two popes, one with the Reign, and the other without...

Ross, card games are not manuscripts, and their rules don't work the way language does. This idea of yours seems to imply that we should expect card games to start out full of strange complicated rules, and then become simpler over time, as they spread to other places. I'm not exactly an expert on ...

Nathaniel wrote: ↑

05 Jul 2020, 02:27

And why not simply rank the suits like Marziano did?

Marziano explicitly declared the suits unranked.

Does this, in the context of the rest of the post, mean you are conceding that two of them in Bologna might have been females originally, with the same names as we see elsewhere, because what is original is the "equal papi" rule, not what they looked like or were called (which is what I think, with...

What evidence do you have that tarot was popularly played in Bologna and Savoy by non-elites in the mid-15th century? You know that there is nothing like Florence's evidence for Bologna. But of course Florence's cards were being exported, which is how we know of them (Arnold Esch's work on Roman im...

As for why the rule exists, or what it means, I've had a couple of speculations over the years. One is that it is a kind of “fossil” of an earlier trump experiment, in which each suit, headed by a king, was trumped by an emperor or a pope. This is sort of a real world view, in which real kings or du...

To Nathaniel's comments specifically to me - This oddness is in itself one of the strongest reasons for believing that this rule would not have been original. It looks inherently like a later modification. So it is definitely something Ross would need to explain to convince us of his argument. Anoth...

The above is concrete and allows credible speculation. So where is there 15th century evidence of a Bologna influence on Savoy/Piedmont in the context of papal/imperial relations lending itself to the notion of "papi"? My scenario is not, and never has been, that Bologna directly influenced Piedmon...