Floskaartjes

[spoonbender]

Wow, roppo, you are so lucky!

It's a very nice sheet - I'm totally jealous right now.

Thanks for sharing it with us.

Originally Posted by Dwaas

flos - like flos
kaart - like bard but then a much longer a-sound
jes - like yes but then with u sound, so something like "yus"

I agree - except "kaart" is pronounced like card with a longer a-sound, and "jes" so that it rhymes with bus.

So something like "floss-card-yus".

If anyone is wondering about what the name means exactly: the only explanation I have come across is that 'flos' would mean 'rough', supposedly because the floskaartjes were printed on rough, cheap paper; and 'kaartjes' means 'little cards' ('kaartje' is the diminutive of 'kaart').

Spoon

[Dwaas]

yes card of course, instead of bard... thanks spoonbender!

[Debra]

Wow, I missed this thread--this is fascinating; thanks, Spoon. Roppo, you are so resourceful--and so kind to share this high-quality scan.

[jmd]

ditto!

[Rosanne]

That is very interesting- then to see those last two cards that roppo posted are a fool type and a skeleton the two unnumbered cards in Tarot.
They also remind me of the cigarette cards that you could collect post 1900 that were in sets of 18 pairs like Merchants of London Mr and Mrs Miller etc- but no life and death there (of course that maybe the cigarettes) Thanks Spoonbender! ~Rosanne

[DianeOD]

Thanks for the definition of 'flos -'. In other contexts, I was told, it might mean like silk-floss, or 'sea-foam'. Is that wrong... or perhaps that's the meaning in a different language?

In Latin it meant one of a group of flowers.

A Latin song begins O flos carmeli "O flower of Carmel", likening a person metaphorically to the best of..

Wonder how far the term might be traced back? Maybe someone at trionfi.com? I have already put a notice there, asking them to consider this thread.

[DianeOD]

Given what is said about the moral lessons that are supposed to be gained during the use of the little 'flos' cards, it is interesting to see this fifteenth century text:
http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources...liberiHome.htm

What we seem to have, on the one hand is allusion to the idea that human transience makes us like the flowers of the field. Added to this we have the use of memory-jogging works as 'flower-collections' (florilegia) AND - I'll have to look up details, another contemporary theme of the 'Battle of the Flowers/florilegia'

This actually matches beautifully with the use of tokens in the nobles' [verbal] memory games which I've described elsewhere.

Its a 'florilegia' battle, using tokens.

Look at the introduction to that book:
http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources...ose/fiore.html

(If I'm going too fast, please say so.)

Off to check my library to see what I might have here on the Battle of the Flowers.

This is the second really important 'missing link' that has been provided in the last week.. at least for my area of interest in the western card-pack.

[Huck]

Originally Posted by DianeOD

Given what is said about the moral lessons that are supposed to be gained during the use of the little 'flos' cards, it is interesting to see this fifteenth century text:
http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources...liberiHome.htm

What we seem to have, on the one hand is allusion to the idea that human transience makes us like the flowers of the field. Added to this we have the use of memory-jogging works as 'flower-collections' (florilegia) AND - I'll have to look up details, another contemporary theme of the 'Battle of the Flowers/florilegia'

This actually matches beautifully with the use of tokens in the nobles' [verbal] memory games which I've described elsewhere.

Its a 'florilegia' battle, using tokens.

Look at the introduction to that book:
http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources...ose/fiore.html

(If I'm going too fast, please say so.)

Off to check my library to see what I might have here on the Battle of the Flowers.

This is the second really important 'missing link' that has been provided in the last week.. at least for my area of interest in the western card-pack.

I don't see what you see in it, but it's a fighting book - real fighting with swords etc.. Interestingly the author wrote it in Ferrara on the commission of Nicolo d'Este ... that is the location, where the Tarot cards appeared at the surface. Niccolo was young then and had his touble with others.

http://trionfi.com/0/h/07/
contains some links to the text and its origin

The writer lived and worked at the court in Ferrara in the time. Likely he educated also little Sforza, who was educated there. See Niccolo's life (the commissioner):
http://trionfi.com/0/d/02/

[DianeOD]

Look at the threads which are converging here.

(I didn't know that the military text was already mentioned on trionfi.com)

We have information from the "games only" history of the pack - thanks to you.

And also here, as With the "flos-' cards, we have a common form: a 'battle of 2's' which give a series of consecutive-linked images, to each of which is attached a section from a 'lesson' - here in a short, sharp easily memorised form.

So far, so good. We can suppose a 'text' either verbal or in a book, accompanying the first use of the floskaatjes, because After all, it is said that by means of these floskaartjes the children are supposed to learn moral lessons.

So here we have the same pattern of activity - a combination of image and 'moral/training text' - as that which we have recorded for the other kinds of 'tutorial' giuocos in Italy... my written-up example being the one I describe as the 'Joc of the Alphabet'. That was played by members of the neo-Platonic academies, many of whose most eminent members were in the legal profession.

The verbal-contest games of token-and-text played by the neo-Platonics in Italy are a direct continuation of other moral-dissertation games, developed in 12thC Provence, and termed jocs.

Then, between the provencal, and the Italian versions of this kind of 'joc', we hear of a pack of tokens being wanted, and it is specified they are for the 'joc Moresche' or the Saracen joc.

Given the example of Tawaddud, and the practical fact that her dissertation-contests are said to be aided by the use of "signs and tokens of the Almanac makers'.. we find that the mathematical structures of our 52-card pack, and the tarot, as well as the emblems for the tarot's arcana minor, are precisely the ones incorporated in a visual Almanac made for the king of France in 1375 - the so-called Atlas Catala. Until the previous year, the king of France (as king of Provence) had ruled Majorca for several hundred years.

On the one hand, that 'Atlas' charts contain the same matter as Tawaddud expounds by means of her 'signs(emblems?) and tokens. On the other, the Atlas includes one of the new kinds of chart, derived from the maritime chart, and brought into Europe from Genoa - just down the road from Ventimiglia.

The term "ludus cartarum" may, in fact, be translated in a number of ways, including the meaning "chart- map- letter- pieces" excercise.

John of Rheinfelden is speaking within a couple of years of the Atlas Catala's completion.

The 'Joc of hte Alphabet' *is* about using a letter of the alphabet (with/instead of) a picture on the paper, to prompt memory, and thus through a battle of each player's memorised 'florilegia' to create a conceptual journey-map.

An exercise or 'game' - a contest exercise - using 'papyrus/paper pieces' is already recorded in 12thC Sicily, under the Norman kings. The Sicilian style of rhetoric was renowned in Europe.

So.. altogether, what we may be able to posit is this: that what changed the already popular form of the verbal memory-contest game into the new "Saracen' game was simply the addition of tokens - perhaps always on paper. Remember - the 1001 Nights was one of the texts which was known to the chart-maker who created the visual Almanac and worldmap of the Atlas Catala. He quotes it in the brief, 'memory-jogging' captions associated with each region, and its pictorial figure.

The military manual, like the Floskaartjes, and like the context for John of Rheinfelden's dissertation, as well as like the 'Joc of the Alphabet'... and like Tawaddud's use of the Almanac-makers tokens... ALL occur in an atmosphere of teaching and memorised learning.

(I won't go into the reasons why John of Rheinfelden is *very* unlikely to have delivered his exposition in a parish church. They have to do with canon law, and the rules under which the Dominican preachers had to operate..It is entirely most likely that he was instructing young graduates in suitable tutorial exercises. One only needs to compare his comments on other 'games' with those of Erasmus to see what his central topic is)

But doesn't this help make sense of much that otherwise seems to make little sense: such as that reference to the cardinals' game 'not played in the children's way, but as Holy Wisdom contested ('Played') before God.

This possible schema for cards' evolution and transmission would also explain why in John of Rheinfelden's description, we find nothing remotely like rules for the number-sort of card games we now consider the 'ordinary' ones.

As some will know, it also allows us to account for references earlier than 1377 which have been dismissed hitherto - such as the game of 'paginas' that monks were forbidden from playing, or that other early reference to a monk whose pleasure was to make cards for people.

The "ordinary games only" thesis has to reject these, because it sees no place for monks in the present thesis of how cards were used.

A contest-game which was chiefly about seeing could best remember their given associations for a teaching-picture - of any sort, including images of the saints or whatever - enables us to explain, again, why the Charles VI images should be such detailed mnemonic figures.

AND explains why they should be so large, and have a pin-hole in their centre. A tutor could pin them up, and let the children 'compete'.

Extend that use to practice in a mathematical text... and maybe you have a reason for the western number-games.

I long for the day that a mathematician interested in game theory and in medieval mathematical texts will decide to explore the logic of our number-games.

OK... let's leave that bit...

As to relevant people and locations: the region of Liguria contains the renowned centre of wine-making round Ventimiglia, and Polcevera. Wine-themes very common on cards.

One finds a pronounced influence from Arabs there; - well, I've talked about that side of it.

One also finds an older stratum of Celtic, and then Gaulish presence - possibly even the Celtic 'bardic' thesis may prove itself here.

Teh same regions becomes an early centre of card-making;

It is also heavily influenced by the Norman-Sicilian court.

Ventimiglia is right near the border of modern day France.

The sort of map found in the Atlas Catala is directly related to the radically new kind of gridded map introduced at the beginning of the fourteenth century by the Vesconti of Genoa.

In genoa, too, the Chinese-Uigur-Persian Nestorians stayed through the winter at the end of the 13th century. We know they put "Names" on pieces of paper and use them for 'divination' - in particular during the elevation of a member to a high ecclesiastical office.

And Ventimiglia is also the home of the 'Battle of Flowers' - a peaceful counterpart to the *military* Battle of Pairs.

For native speakers, as for Latin speakers in medieval Europe, the same pairing of military 'campus stellae' with earthly "field of flowers" was an entrenched pairing. (Sorry for those allergic to medieval Christianity, but the key to this close link of ideas comes from the literature everyone knew so well - Biblical text).

In this way, the apparently different strands of argument about cards' origins, forms of use, and transmission, look to me as if they are tending towards a common meeting point - likely in this region.

And, incidentally, this was where the embassy had landed from Harun ar Raschid's Baghad, en route to Charlemagne, at Aachen some centuries earlier.

The embassy was most likely again composed of Nestorian Christians. It was held up for a considerable time in this area by local clerics - afraid to permit those peculiar foreigners from going any further. Charlemagne's biographers tell the story.

That last item won't seem exciting here, I expect. But it does to me, because this is just about this exact time that the moralised heavens, which later appear on early Atouts, become seen most clearly in European monastic art.

Its actually not even difficult to link Ventimiglia's 'Battle of the Flos' to imagery of the Egyptian gods, but only by reference to a traditional parade of North Africa, where older images were preserved as late as the 1940s... but I'll leave that for another time.
(Whew!)

[Huck]

Originally Posted by DianeOD

And also here, as With the "flos-' cards, we have a common form: a 'battle of 2's' which give a series of consecutive-linked images, to each of which is attached a section from a 'lesson' - here in a short, sharp easily memorised form.

Sorry, can you guide me to the place, where you've observed that? It seems to be important ... in a book to fighting technique it's natural that pictures of man against man are presented. That's quite different to a game which use a pairing concept.

So far, so good. We can suppose a 'text' either verbal or in a book, accompanying the first use of the floskaatjes, because After all, it is said that by means of these floskaartjes the children are supposed to learn moral lessons.

"Moral lesson" is a high expression. In my youth we had "Schwarzer Peter", made with "dressed" male and female animals with an additional only one black cat, which was the "Schwarzer Peter" (Black Peter). When you got a pair, you couls lay it down. The Black Peter never found a pair, so this card became the last in the game. The player with card got a black nose, made by a coal.

"Moral Lesson" is not the right word for this game, it's just fun for children and not too complicated. Flooskaartjes seems to be a forerunner of Black Peter (Death is Black-Peter). With the additional "live" card it likely was possible to play also other rules (fot instance "memory" - I don't know, how you call it in English language; all cards are turned face down. The players have the right to look at 2 cards - if it meets a pair, they may take the cards as a rophy.
I think, there were socalled CouCou cards in Italy at least since begin of 19th century in Italy, also based on the animal concept and Black Peter rules; but likely occasionally also different cards were used.

....
Doesn't this help make sense of that reference to the cardinals game 'not played in the children's way, but as Holy Wisdom contested ('Played') before God.
....

What are you talking about? Who stated this when in which context?
1457? 1537? What's the quote?