debra wrote:I don't want to hijack Rosanne's thread, so I'll make this brief.
Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:
The facts establish that an order WAS memorized, and played, without numbers. Numbers were also added early to most kinds of trumps (just as cards evolved to show titles, numbers on the pips, became double ended, and showed corner indices, all in concert with developing technology and the tastes of players). The only reasonable conclusion is that everywhere Tarot was played, it was played as a card game with an ordered hierarchy of trumps. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise, since the fact of being unnumbered can be shown to be irrelevant to the play of the game.
While this may well be correct, it requires too much speculation about everywhere and all time, in my view.
Well, your view isn't the majority view. Typically when studying a subject, one acquaints onself first with the standard references (which include primary sources, or bibliography for them), or talks to experts in the field, or ideally both, before forming an opinion. For the history of Bolognese Tarot, the standard references are -
Michael Dummett,
The Game of Tarot (1980), chapter 16.
Thierry Depaulis, ed.,
Tarot: jeu et magie (1984), pp. 56-60.
Girolamo Zorli,
Il Tarocchino Bolognese (1992).
M. Dummett,
Il Mondo e l'Angelo (1994), chapter XIX.
M. Dummett and John McLeod,
A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack (2004), chapter 11.
Andrea Vitali and Terry Zanetti,
Il Tarocchino di Bologna (2005).
Assuming you're serious, I trust you'll seek out those resources and study them, if you won't take my word for it. Or, find someone else who is acquainted with the evidence and whose authority you'll respect.
Girolamo Zorli is occasionally on this list - he is one of the founding members of the
Accademia del Tarocchino Bolognese http://www.tarocchinobolognese.it/, an organization dedicated to the promotion of the game (including studies of its history), and runs the
Tre Tre website, which allows you to play the most popular Italian card games online, and also incidentally contains many of the best primary sources about early Tarot, including the Bolognese version
http://www.tretre.it/ ;
http://www.tretre.it/menu/accademia-del ... a-del-tre/ . You can also seek out Andrea Vitali at
http://www.letarot.it/index.aspx?lng=ENG (click "Essays" for a few articles on Bolognese Tarot, among many others of course about Tarot in general) or Thierry Depaulis, to offer your thoughts on the history of Bolognese Tarot. Michael Dummett himself, sadly, passed away in December of last year.
As far as I know, no facts establish that prior to numbering, a single order was memorized and played at any given time, or that a single order prevailed prior to numbering within any given community (eg Bologna) . Nor, as far as I know, do the facts demonstrate that the "preferred" order in any given community remained stable over the long term prior to numbering (eg, 300 years of the Bologna game).
In fact quite the opposite is true,
especially for Bologna, which is why I urge you to consult the standard references before offering your opinion, at least where you wish to contradict everybody who is familiar with the evidence. The conservatism of the Bolognese game, in both style of play and the iconography of the cards, is one of its most marked characteristics, for the whole history of which we can say anything with surety.
Everything known about Bolognese Tarot allows us to suppose that they always used the same kind of cards and the same ordering of trumps in play. The cards were not given numbers until late into the 18th century. Before that, three different rule books, dating from the late 16th and the mid-18th centuries, give the trumps in precisely the same order - except with no "numbers" of course, they are just listed in that order. This order is exactly echoed by Bolognese poems or
appropriati of the 17th and 18th centuries, as it was by Giuseppe Mitelli's free rendering of the Bolognese game, which was printed in book form (a condition you remarked might be nice to see) in 1665.
The iconography of the trumps, from their earliest known printed examples (the Beaux-Arts/Rothschild sheets (BAR), and the Devil card of Angolo Hebreo, mid-16th c.), through the 17th century (a nearly perfectly preserved example in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris), and on into the 18th until today, has hardly changed at all. Most of the changes are superficial, but there are two important exceptions. The Devil was made less fearsome before the mid-17th century (he is no longer eating people like in BAR and Agnolo Hebreo), and, in 1725, the papal legate in Bologna forced all the cardmakers to remove the images of the Popes and Emperors, replacing them with Moors (he also demanded that the Angel (Judgement), but changed into "a lady", but this was not done).
Furthermore, the similarity between the earliest painted cards of the A or Southern Type (of which Bologna and Florence are the two main examples), dating from around 1460, to the printed cards of the Bolognese pack, alluded to above, gives good reason to believe that this conservatism extends far back into the 15th century, plausibly to the origin of the game.
So the conservatism of the Bolognese tradition is confirmed by both external (documentary) and internal (iconographic) evidence.
Of course that's just a summary. If you want the primary evidence upon which those conclusions are based, you need to go to the sources I mentioned. If you don't trust me, ask someone whose opinion you will accept, or do the work yourself.
One might consider the flexibility of poker.
One might consider the flexibility of Tarot too; over 250 games are documented and detailed in Dummett and McLeod. However, many archetypal features can be deduced from the earliest surviving games, enough of which hold them in common that we can reasonably reconstruct the basic features of the original game (wherever it was invented).
Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:Clearly Tarot was used in parlour games like tarocchi appropriati as well, where the hierarchy of the trumps was irrelevant. But this is a secondary use of the cards, not the reason they were invented.
I have not suggested anything other than a game. I suggested the possibility that there were differences in early rules of play.
Nobody would dispute that. But why is it important to insist on this point, as if I didn't know it? Do you have a theory about games not included among those already documented, or that Tarot was not invented to play a particular game?