frelkins said:
Look, all I ask for is evidence. I do this most politely, hat in hand.
This is history. I am happy to agree with you and all, just SHOW ME THE FACTS, please. Until you can offer me a link, a document, a diary entry, a sample card -- any actual EVIDENCE -- then you may fulminate as you wish about what is good history and bad etc. Marshall all the rhetoric you please..
Good thing you didn't study history in my University. They'd have laughed you out of tutorials for questioning something as basic as this: "allegory and symbolism were important parts of Medieval and Renaissance thought and experience, as evidenced in images and literature, including the abundant magical literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Allegory and symbolism turned up everywhere and were rarely, if ever, seen in a secular way. Diviners and magicians relied heavily on them, and magic and divination were daily activities during that entire period", which is such common ground it barely needs to be repeated at all. I should have added that symbols and allegories were, of course, common in religious art. Read a few of Baba-Prague's posts. She makes abundantly the point that in Europe (and tarot is a European artefact, originally), we are surrounded by the imagery, allegories and symbolism that turn up on tarot cards. Spend a little more time with texts and imagery of the period (any text, any imagery, but you asked for one, so how about some Paracelsus?) -and you'll see what I mean.
Why is it so hard to make the link between the same symbol or allegory used by a diviner, a priest or an alchemist, and that used by a poet with a tarot card when he writes a poem that exactly describes a lady of the court? Do you know that love poems written by troubadours addressed ladies and G-d in exactly the same terms? That poets frequently used the same allegories or imagery for secular, mystical or magical purposes? Read John of the Cross without knowing that he is talking about the mystical union with G-d, and then read Bernard de Ventadour, and you'll see what I am talking about. Knowing that, can we absolutely separate all these activities, like so many elements in the periodic table? Love of G-d was seen as a higher form of love, but was also seen as being related, directly and quite openly, to human love, especially by the poets. Most students of the period have no trouble making that link, made explicitly in the use of similar allegories and symbolism. So why the recalcitrant attitude when it comes to tarot cards and their similar imagery and symbolism to that used by mages and diviners, not to mention churches, philosophers and poets?
Those very same ladies who were the object of tarrocchi appropriati, a day before, would have consulted a diviner, who would have worked with those very same symbols. Unless our concept of divination in the Renaissance is so narrow that we can't see beyond the gipsy lady with her hoops, or the astrologer with his charts, the link is clear. That does not make tarrocchi appropriati a form of divination: I obviously didn't make my point clearly enough originally. "Approaching divination", the term I employed, means that the imagery and symbolism used, and some of the games played with tarot (e.g. describing someone according to a common symbol or allegory - like the Queen of Cups to describe your mother), are related to divination. I also made the - serious - point that in Italy, then as now, serious points are often made in a light and humorous vein. Something sadly lacking in much of modern so-called historical research outside that country, though Italian historians still have that gift in abundance.
History without imagination isn't history. It's dead. That's not rhetoric, it's simply what a good historian knows and applies, to illuminate and guide his research. You want evidence? Come to Europe and get yourself around our cities. Or read up on some literature, philosophy and learned treatise of the period. And then start using your gift of imagination, bring what you learn together - and make it sing.
But perhaps it's time for me to challenge Frelkins: what was divination in 1420 in Italy? Give us a definition! And what is the reason that allegories and symbols appeared on tarot trumps?
As for when the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance started - I tend to be of the modern school, and think them more of a continuity. There were several flowerings of art and culture in Europe during the period between the fall of the Roman Empired in the West, and its fall in the East (the 1000 year period that 19th Century historians lumped together as "the Middle Ages") - not least the time of Charlemagne and the 12th Century Romanesque period, without forgetting, of course, that phenomenal civilisation of Moorish Spain, which was so much in advance on the rest of Europe that it makes a nonsense of the very notion of "dark ages" or "Renaissance". Pre-university schools have inherited a lot of their notions from 19th Century historiography - when historians believed that history could be a science, and when progress was assumed to be a given, a fact of life - but faculties have moved away from such absolutism, and their vision of the world, and their methodology - not to mention their categorisation - are different from those of a Momsen.
I think the mods will be okay with my answering a direct question. 