Toastmasters For The Signore

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I have always wondered why a group of cards could be used for readings when it was a game.
Why was it such a curious mix of sacred and secular?
Why there are Virtues but not Prudence or Wisdom?
Why is there a calm and detached Hanged man not properly tied?
Why there was always a hitch in the cards in numbered sequence that is an anomaly according to what you perceive as a sequence- it is not a ladder to Salvation, it is not astrological, it is not a play or a poem; yet it is parts of all these things?
Why is there a world (secular) next to a depiction of the Resurrection or an Angel (sacred)?
Why are there four persons on a white dais ?
Why does it look like a Fool’s journey ?
Why can ‘t one find other examples of the whole set -not just parts?
Why are the cards all rather obscure in some form or another- the Star looks like Aquarius for example.
Were the cards left overs at the printers or especially designed?
…and what is with the crazy name?
For me it has been nearly forty years of why? Why? Why?
The people who frequent this forum and other forums(who write on it and share their thoughts generously) have added in amazing ways to my understanding of parts of this intriguing thing called Tarot- but not the whole thing except the certainty it is a game created in the amazing time we now call the Renaissance in a country we now call Italy. If I believed in reincarnation I would say I was a merchant in Florence who was fortunate enough to be able to read and write and play games of cards….. Anyways I digress.

I was reading about Visual Rhetoric and found that 80% of written works around in 1400 was in classical Latin and a very small percentage of people could read it, so as we know visual rhetoric was the most used form to inform the majority of the people. Jerome who lived in 4th Century became Christian was trained in rhetoric and he translated for emerging Christianity- the Bible. In classic Rhetoric he asks in a letter…
“what does Horace have to do with the Psalms? What does Virgil have to do with the Gospels? What does Cicero have to do with the Apostle Paul, what does Plato and Peter have in common, or Aristotle and Paul?
What fellowship is there between light and darkness ? Yes I thought exactly….what do all these things have in common with Tarot? Yes there is the answer -Tarot is a visual ‘Rhetoric for Dummies’ There were of course many advice books/ manuscripts on Rhetoric and conduct and courtesy and many were written by “Dictators” and teachers in places like the Bologna University. The earliest one we have still is
By an anonymous writer who composed a short guide for the would-be podestà called Oculus pastoralis,
Translated means the “The Eye of the Shepherd” aprox 1222; in six simple and brief chapters it guides the novice through the requirements of the office, the salary, the address of welcome given by the retiring podestà to the new one, the choice of counsellors, the handling of money accounts. The fifth chapter offers some model speeches on public occasions, such as the death of prominent citizens, on making war and the training officials. There were apparently many of such manuscripts- How to be a good wife, good Priest,
A good merchant and naturally they were illustrated in part. In fact one of the earliest images that there is for the Wheel of Fortune is from an ‘How to ‘ book is in the ‘Poetria Nova’ by Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Or Giovanni of Viterbo’s ‘Government of Cities’ Persuasion by words and we still do it visually today with advertisements.

The subject is vast and there have now been written many books on the subject and it’s history.
One of the methods used in Rhetoric is a word derived from Greek called ‘Heuristic’ which in Greek was ‘invention’ or to find out or self educate and had some tricks to use.. Tropes, memory, drawing to explain something, working backwards from the solution to form the argument, flash card type examples…..
So for example the game title Tarot could be explained as working backwards Orat- it speaks by reflection
(as in the much later Mirror for Princes genre) of the eye or Oculus Orat which I wondered in another thread would be in Italian Occhio Oratore - verbal pun Tarocchi.
Now working backwards from the card we call the World -how would I frame a speech to persuade one to have the highest ideal of a State? How would I remember the points to raise?

~Lorredan
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts

Amiens' missal illumination: Wheel of Fortune

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Lorredan wrote:Here is the Poetria Nova illustration of WOF
http://wp.stockton.edu/chaucer/files/20 ... rtuna2.jpg
This is a wonderful Wheel of Fortune, showing the Three Estates arranged around it. It is one-half of an illustration with two Wheels of Fortune, the other showing Reynard the Fox at the top. (The king on this wheel and Reynard on the other wheel are looking at each other, across the page.) Anyone interested in the images might want to check out some of the following pages. First we have the manuscript as presented at the National Library of the Netherlands site:

Festal Missal
Amiens, Garnerus de Morolio (scribe), Petrus de Raimbaucourt (illuminator); 1323
http://www.kb.nl/manuscripts/show/manuscript/78+D+40

The dual Wheels of Fortune, one with Reynard at the top as king, are shown here:

http://zoom.kb.nl/zoom.php?src=http%3A% ... 3r_randfig

A few years ago the site Got Medieval posted the two wheels, and I posted a couple comments.

Mmm… Marginalia: Wheel of Reynard
http://www.gotmedieval.com/2008/05/mmm- ... ynard.html

I also posted some other images of the Wheel of Fortune with Reynard and the Three Estates, with some detailed descriptions. (It is also worth noting that there are more examples of this Wheel of Fortune than the ones I posted.)

A Complex Wheel of Fortune
http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2009/04 ... rtune.html

Best regards,
Michael

P.S. It seems that the comments at Got Medieval don't always show up, so I'll repost a couple quotes here.
Michael wrote:In Renart le Nouvel Reynard attacks all virtue, treating it in each of the Three Estates in turn. Here is one description:

"The poem is concerned with Renart's final triumph over the last bastions of virtue. During the course of the poem, the loyalty of a knight to his king to his friend and to his lady are all shown as being infected and destroyed by Renart. As for the clergy, Giélée depicts them as being already in Renart's gripand beyond salvation, sailing his ship of Vice, shrouded in hypocrisy in order to avoid detection, blown by the wind of sin. The pope has the rudder, assisted by the cardinals, while the sailors are the clerks, priests, archbishops, bishops, deans, abbots, monks, and friars. However, after recounting Renart's triumph over the laity, Giélée returns to the clergy and describes their final downfall in detail. Renart loads them with gifts (covetousness, guile, avarice, envy and pride) and they all enter his confraternity and are permitted to wear his grey habit of hypocrisy."

Second, I'm not sure it matters in this context who is rising or falling. Boethius maintained that attachment to the fickle favors of Fortune was not the way to God, and that those who would not become divine became instead animals: "he who abandons goodness and ceases to be a man cannot rise to the status of a god, and so is transformed into an animal." So the king (or Reynard) gets to be at the top, but it matters little who is shown rising or falling -- all on the Wheel are fallen.
Michael wrote:This description of Reynard crowned by Fortuna is from Kenneth Varty's 2003 Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present:

"In the second half of the thirteenth century, in the Couronnement de Renart, the fox will be proclaimed king with the approval of the dying king, Nobel, carried off by Pride, Envy, and Renardie (=cunning), a symbolic fable like Branch XI and Reinhart Fuchs because it depicts what could happen at the court of Flanders if law and order were not restored; a fable that castigates a world where the old virtues are dead, where egoistic ambition, treachery and hypocrisy triumph, and where the author, a moralist like Heinrich stands up in accordance with a well-established tradition against the vices of the century. And at the end of this same century, in Renart le Nouvel, Renart dreams of killing the king in order to mount his throne (lines 2,278-87), and Noble separates himself from God by forming an alliance with Renart; and then leaves his place to Renart who is crowned by Fortuna. Renart le Nouvel is a fable in which Jacquemart Gielée shows how the fox succeeds by his cunning in dominating the world: it is a cry of alarm, as was Reinhart Fuchs, to rouse the world to beware of the evil that corrupts the times."
P.P.S. Here is where Robert pointed out the Amiens' missal images, on both the Nat. Lib. of the Netherlands site and the Got Medieval site, back in 2009.
We are either dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, or we are just dwarfs.

Re: Toastmasters For The Signore

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Thank you for the illustrations.
Here is what wikipedia says about the Poetria Nova of aprox 1200 (which is earlier than than the Riems Missal by about 120 years)
The Poetria nova is a preceptive treatise, that is, it gives a specific advice to future writers about the composition of poetry. Its handbook genre is reinforced by multiple illustrations of its precepts entirely invented by Geoffrey of Vinsauf, rather than culled from classical authors. The text itself serves as an illustration of techniques it teaches. Thus, the treatment of amplification is amplified, the treatment of abbreviation is abbreviated, metaphor is discussed in figurative language. As Woods notes, the applicability of the instructions of Poetria nova to both verse and prose and the various ways it could be used in the classroom, combined with the range of styles that Geoffrey of Vinsauf used to illustrate techniques, made it the general all-purpose medieval rhetorical treatise par excellence.
A thirteenth century anonymous commentary on the Poetria nova notes the twofold nature of this book: first, the five parts of the book are the five parts of rhetoric: Invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery; second, the Poetria nova is itself a rhetorical discourse with the necessary parts: exordium, narratio, divisio, confutatio, and conclusio. Its author is, consequently, an accomplished theoretician, orator, and "a good teacher" (Woods 668-9).
The Poetria nova incorporates Ciceronian precept on invention and arrangement, Horatian doctrine on decorum, and instructions on style including the tropes, figures of words and figures of thought derived from the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium
There has been about 200 copies found- so I imagine it was widely read and used. I imagine at the scriptorium the scribes may well have added their own WOF versions.
~Lorredan
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts

Re: Toastmasters For The Signore

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Lorredan wrote:I have always wondered why a group of cards could be used for readings when it was a game.
People use regular playing card for readings too; with courts as people and relations, and pips as things or events. Attitudes and context probably emerge more in the conversation between the reader and client than from the deck itself. In other words, a sequence of playing cards is narratable, but does not form much of a narrative. With the addition of the trumps, tarot card sequences may cross a threshold and become easily discerned narratives in themselves. Each Tarot trick may tell a tale; while each Whist trick may not.

I'm very roughly defining a narrative as an account of a completed sequence of events, where the judgments of the narrator, based on that completed sequence, compares and contrasts with the less informed judgments of the people inside the narrative. The narrative ability to take up the viewpoint of posterity or an omniscient observer is obviously useful to a fortune teller or someone trying to master current events. But it is also useful for making up amusing poems and conversation while playing cards.

Whether such randomly generated tarot narratives can be of any real assistance to the narratives people craft as they view their options in life is another matter entirely; more a question for psychologists than historians.

A more interesting question is why these images were preserved into the beginning of the 19th century, before the occultists get hold of the deck. If the Tarot was used simply as a game, one would expect these vibrant single sided images to have been quickly displaced by easily read, double sided icons, like modern French Tarot game playing decks. Instead, the images are burnished and refined. In many of these refinements, they lose some of their endearing weirdness, but they usually retain their narrative character. Why would card players welcome this? Perhaps there is a conservative tradition of gambler's superstitions that intervenes between the medieval pop culture origins of the cards and their current incarnation as keys to the archetypal world.

Re: Toastmasters For The Signore

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I think that we forget that the cards were played in poor light for most of their History and so more of the card needed to be seen. I am not sure if I agree the cards in the main, became more polished until the 18th century, but then we have only what has survived; this may indicate less use or less popularity or even price. Some of the 16th and 17th century cards are decidely crude in production. German playing cards seem better illustrated.
As to reading- it like Rhetoric and all about the readers persausion I think. In a way a reader becomes an orator and it is usually about Love questions. :ymsigh: I also think for reading there has been an perceptable move to playing cards for Fortune telling and Tarot for meditive contemplation.
I am not so sure about medieval pop- culture-I would guess that was more about carnivals and fashion. I must have a read about what was popular amongst the working class of Medieval Italy - lusty dances and dice and maybe a good meal and avoiding the plague with weird and wonderful concoctions.

~Lorredan
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts

Re: Toastmasters For The Signore

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I started on this line of enquiry when Ross asked what sort of games were about in 1402 in the time of crisis between Milan and Florence that may have given the impetus to Tarot. Not that he said all that :D but that is what I took from the comment about games.
So I went to the only authority I know about gaming was my SIL who plays and designs computer games and he suggested that I read a book by Ian Bogost called Persausive Games naturally this is about 21st Century gaming.
The interesting thing is the use of classical rhetoric structure using Aristotle and Cicero etc. He coins a term called Procedural Rhetoric which is explained this way...
Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes. Following the classical model, procedural rhetoric entails persuasion—to change opinion or action. Following the contemporary model, procedural rhetoric entails expression—to convey ideas effectively. Procedural rhetoric is a subdomain of procedural authorship; its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming.
The program by it's very nature controls the game and redirects your opinions to the truth of the matter.
The example given is a game of farming called Tenure a sort of KFC chicken farm which you finally see the destructive methods you are going to have to use to become the KFC mogul. If you continue in an unethical way you end up destroying everything. So subversivly you realise you have to be a conservationist and finally most likely give up farming.
So really who ever designed the game of Tarot conveyed by it's program or rules that persuasion to have the correct answer in the end. Those highest cards and the wits to play correctly will change your opinion of what is the ideal.Snakes and Ladders for example will not.
~Lorredan
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts

Re: Toastmasters For The Signore

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Maybe my thread title is not self evident so I will put the explanation here.
Toastmasters is a modern organisation
Toastmasters helps men and women learn the arts of speaking, listening, and thinking – vital skills that promote self-actualization, enhance leadership potential, foster human understanding, and contribute to the betterment of mankind. It's Vision is to empower people to achieve their full potential and realize their dreams. Through clubs, people throughout the world can improve their communication and leadership skills, and find the courage to change.
Signore means 'Lord' and Signoria means Lord's power and in the time of Tarot communes or little towns gave a Signore power to keep their area safe- so he became their government. As it usually required military might, the Signore was a military leader as in the case of the Visconti. Outside these towns it was generally unsafe.
Now as these Signores were Soldiers not Kings they were trained in Militery matters and not raised in educated courts- they needed to learn the skills.
Now I mentioned the University of Bologna- so this is from a travelogue
The University of Bologna was probably the first University in the western world.(1088) Its history is one of great thinkers in science and the humanities, making it an indispensable point of reference in the panorama of European culture.
The institution that we today call the University began to take shape in Bologna at the end of the eleventh century, when masters of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic began to devote themselves to the law. The first recorded scholars were Pepone and Irnerio, the latter of whom was defined by the former as "lucerna iuris". With the advice of four doctores thought to be their pupils, in 1158 Federico I promulgated the Constitutio Habita, in which the University was legally declared a place where research could develop independently from any other power.In the 14th Century, so-called "artists" - scholars of Medicine, Philosophy, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Logic, Rhetoric, and Grammar - began to collaborate with the school of jurists. In 1364, the teaching of Theology was instituted.
Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Guido Guinizelli, Cino da Pistoria, Cecco d'Ascoli, Re Enzo, Salimbene da Parma and Coluccio Salutati all studied in Bologna.
What is Rhetoric?
Rhetoric is a derivation of the Greek term rhetorike, which first appeared in Plato's dialogue Gorgias. The formal study of rhetoric began in Greece during the 5th century BCE. Paid itinerant teachers called Sophists taught their students the art of effective public speech-making, or oratory. Plato likened rhetoric to cookery, implying that it was an art of appearance rather than truth. Aristotle, a student of Plato, redefined rhetoric in his treatise on the subject as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." Eventually, the scope of rhetoric was expanded to include written as well as spoken discourse, and now includes any form of symbolic communication. Some contemporary definitions of rhetoric include Kenneth Burke's "the use of symbols to induce cooperation in those who by nature respond to symbols" and George Kennedy's "the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions."
ABC
I do not think rhetoric's use of symbols is a modern device, although the study of it may not have been called bluntly 'symbolic Rhetoric'
~Lorredan
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts

Re: Toastmasters For The Signore

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In the light of Epidectic Rhetoric perhaps the motivation for Tarot, I would like to discuss the Cary Yale Fortitude (Thereafter as a model for most other Strength cards) been the Aristotlian fourth Virtue of Magnificence.
In Nicomachean Ethics Book 1V quote in part..
The magnificent man is like an artist; for he can see what is fitting and spend large sums tastefully. For, as we said at the begining, a state of character is determined by its activities and by its objects. Now the expenses of the magnificent man are large and fitting. Such, therefore, are also his results; for thus there will be a great expenditure and one that is fitting to its result. Therefore the result should be worthy of the expense, and the expense should be worthy of the result, or should even exceed it. And the magnificent man will spend such sums for honour's sake; for this is common to the virtues. And further he will do so gladly and lavishly; for nice calculation is a niggardly thing. And he will consider how the result can be made most beautiful and most becoming rather than for how much it can be produced and how it can be produced most cheaply. It is necessary, then, that the magnificent man be also liberal. For the liberal man also will spend what he ought and as he ought; and it is in these matters that the greatness implied in the name of the magnificent man--his bigness, as it were--is manifested, since liberality is concerned with these matters; and at an equal expense he will produce a more magnificent work of art. For a possession and a work of art have not the same excellence. The most valuable possession is that which is worth most, e.g. gold, but the most valuable work of art is that which is great and beautiful (for the contemplation of such a work inspires admiration, and so does magnificence); and a work has an excellence--viz. magnificence--which involves magnitude. Magnificence is an attribute of expenditures of the kind which we call honourable, e.g. those connected with the gods--votive offerings, buildings, and sacrifices--and similarly with any form of religious worship, and all those that are proper objects of public-spirited ambition...
expenditure that is virtuous. But great expenditure is becoming to those who have suitable means to start with, acquired by their own efforts or from ancestors or connexions, and to people of high birth or reputation, and so on; for all these things bring with them greatness and prestige. Primarily, then, the magnificent man is of this sort, and magnificence is shown in expenditures of this sort, as has been said; for these are the greatest and most honourable. Of private occasions of expenditure the most suitable are those that take place once for all, e.g. a wedding or anything of the kind, or anything that interests the whole city or the people of position in it..
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts
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