I respond point by point:
I did not want to say that Florence is a diffusion point into the Upper Rhine. I wanted to point at the fact, that if Florence as a capital of the world --or one capital of the world-- is no longer a place for selling cards due to the ban from March 1377 onwards, the already produced cards have to be sold elsewhere. And if I were a merchant in these days, I would try to sell them as far away as the negative effects of card playing are not already known - I would try to sell them north of the Alps, using the well known trading routes open in summer 1377: the Arlberg pass and the Brenner pass. The first leads to the lake of Constance and the Upper Rhine, the second leads over Innsbruck to München, Augsburg and Regensburg and Nürnberg.Phaeded wrote: 21 May 2022, 18:29 Why is Florence necessary as a diffusion point into the Upper Rhine?
At least for me striking is that the earliest mentions of cards in Germany follow exactly this pattern: Constance and Upper Rhine region (Freiburg with JvR saying that the cards arrived in 1377, then the bans in Constance and St. Gallen in 1379 (and later the Zürich ban in 1389)), and the Regensburg ban in 1378, followed by the Nürnberg ban in 1380 (and later the Augsburg ban in 1391). It is clearly the routes over the Arlberg and the Brenner pass, if the cards came from the Italian south.
Sorry Phaeded, but even if I place myself against the common opinion: I don't buy this story anymore (and this is not one of my far too fast comments, I meditate on JvR now for quite a long time). The longer I reflect on JvR, the longer it seems to me that he invents all of these different variants. We should not forget that his main verb is "adaptari", he adapts. He does so because he allegorizes, this is what he clearly says.
And if you read Kopp's literature on it, then Kopp writes more or less nearly every second paragraph that JvR could have invented the content if we would not know it better - but who knows it better? I don't. And third: the early Swiss cards reported in Kopps work don't have a queen, they all stick to early structure with king, ober and unter, the Mamluk form. It is simply not at all plausible -at least for me-- that all of these variants should be lost and the Swiss somehow should have stuck only with the earliest Mamluk variant by pure chance. In this light, if you read JvR very closely then you can even follow his way of adaptation: he first introduces the queens as in chess, and then goes for his preferred variant including the maiden. And if you read him closely, the he really puts a lot of effort in justifying the queens (and the maiden), it is not at all that he goes over his introduction of the queens as if it would be clear that queens should be there. By that, he changes the game from a war game to a court game - which fits to the moral goal he has (this is the title of his work).
I do want to raise the conjecture, that JvR wrote his book --the literary form it is not at all a treatise, it is a book-- in two steps: first as a tractatus in the first part containing the first five sections, and then, after getting in contact with de Cessolis, he wrote the 6th section of part 1 and then part 2 and part 3. The latter are clearly based upon the knowledge of de Cessolis, he copies his structure and style (this is common knowledge and I also wrote about this in this very forum). And de Cessolis clearly classifies his work as a book ("liber" in latin) - so if JvR would have known de Cessolis from the beginning, he would also have classified his work as a book. Furthermore this two step -procedure helps to clarify all the content-wise contradictions within the text (as e.g. the children playing with cards in the streets in 1377, which is impossible if the cards just arrived in Freiburg).
We should not forget that both were Dominicans, highly trained scholastic monks, and their trained philosophy is mainly the very form-oriented Aristoteles. Perhaps they might report wrongly the number of angels on a needle tip, but certainly they don't spoil the form of a literary product. Scripture is holy for them, and treatises were first short tracts coming from sermon and having the length of a sermon.
I know that I have to show this in detail, but there is still something I do not grasp, which makes me reflecting on and on…
Perhaps: even if you don’t find it plausible what I am trying to say, could we just go on based on the hypothesis, that it could be as I say? Then there might be new insights which otherwise don’t show up…
It is very interesting what you write in
Thanks for pointing to Witz and his card-making again and to JvR writing allegorically on cards. And we do not need Florence, as I tried to explain above.Phaeded wrote: 21 May 2022, 18:29
The preconditions of manuscript production and nascent woodblock printing, albeit of a religious nature:
[...]
But what we have here in the cities of the Upper Rhine is an interest in novel print productions just as cards arrive. One of their texts even lends itself to the idea of pips: The Book of the Nine Rocks uses the metaphor of jumping from rock to rock to illustrate the soul’s journey to God.
I'm still of the opinion that the Dominicans seemed less obsessed with controlling cards than the Franciscans (e.g., St. Bernardino of Siena). In addition to the Friends of Gods, consider the very card-like illustrations of The Speculum Humanae Salvationis or Mirror of Human Salvation (Witz does a painting based on them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knigh ... avid_Water - and of course, cards), of which scholars believe the author was a cleric, and there is evidence he was a Dominican:
.There are, however, good reasons to place the origin of the text in a previous hit Dominican monastery. In Chapter III, the Immaculate Conception is described in accordance with the doctrines of the Dominican Order; Chapter XXXVII tells of the vision of St. Dominic; Chapter XXX includes the theory of the sanctification before birth expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas, a previous hit Dominican next hit, and special honor is also paid to him in Chapter XLII").(Wilson, Adrian, and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984: 10, 27)
It is of course no wonder in this milieu that JvR - a Dominican in Freiburg - writes a religious allegorical interpretation of cards. I just don't see why we need Florence here.
I am interested also in your version of
Phaeded wrote: 21 May 2022, 18:29
I'll take it up in a separate post, but the Knights Hospitallers - a means for the acquisition of playing cards from Mamluk Alexandria - had a chapter house (commandery) near Freiburg and indeed a concentration of such chapters in the Upper Rhine (and Florence had plenty of commercial connections with the Hospitallers' base in Rhodes, but that merely points to the ultimate diffusion point).
Phaeded
Meanwhile, I will try to find another explanation which does not need the sack of Alexandria 1365, this seem to me a too long time to 1377. I try to find a shorter variant (hopefully not only producing fantasy...)