The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City [Hardcover]

Michael Dummett (Author), Sylvia Mann (Collaborator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1980

Sir Michael Dummett, a well-known British philosopher, is the foremost scholar in the field of Tarot history, with numerous books and articles to his credit. He is a founding member of the International Playing Card Society, in whose journal "The Playing Card" he regularly publishes opinions, research, and reviews of current literature on the subject. His encyclopedic, groundbreaking, and painstakingly documented "The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City," established the invention of Tarot in 15th-century Italy and laid the foundation for all subsequent research on the game of Tarot, including exhaustive accounts of the rules of all hitherto known forms of the game. An important result of Dummett's analysis of the historical evidence was to demonstrate that fortune-telling and occult interpretations were unknown prior to the 18th century. During most of their history, Tarot cards were used to play an extremely popular trick-taking game which is still enjoyed in much of Europe. Around the turn of the 16th century, Tarot became popular in France, and from there spread to Germany, Switzerland, and beyond. Also in the 16th century, Tarot was used as a literary motif for poetic parlor games, sometimes termed tarocchi appropriati. Dummett showed that the middle of the 1700s saw a great development in the game of Tarot, including a modernized deck (with French suit-signs and without the medieval allegories that occultists have found irresistible), along with a growth in Tarot's popularity. "The hundred years between about 1730 and 1830 were the heyday of the game of Tarot; it was played not only in northern Italy, eastern France, Switzerland, Germany and Austro-Hungary, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and even Russia. Not only was it, in these areas, a famous game with many devotees: it was also, during that period, more truly an international game than it had ever been before or than it has ever been since . . . ."

Product Details

• Hardcover: 600 pages
• Publisher: Duckworth; 1st edition (June 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0715610147
• ISBN-13: 978-0715610145
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,021,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent History of Tarot Games and Deck Composition, April 9, 1999

By 

seaan (Bay Area California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (Hardcover)

If you want to know the history of Tarot cards and games, this is THE book. Although a few new discoveries have been made since this book was written in 1980, nothing else comes close to the depth and detail of "The Game of Tarot".

The books consists of 600 pages (large pages with small type) of fully footnoted historical comments and game rules. Often the original historical text is presented along with Dummett's translations and interpretations. The detailed asides are both a strength and a weakness of the book: they provide both a broad background, but can sometimes you have to go through a lot of asides to get to the main point. One other minor nit-pick: Dummett has some very strong ideas on some controversial subjects. Although he usually gives an excellent detailed explanation of how he came to that conclusion, I feel that he sometimes overstates the case. All in all, "The Game of Tarot" is the best and most through book on the history of playing cards, and a great reference for Tarot games of all sorts.