hist-games: Tarok

[Jane & Mark Waks]

Teceangl wrote:
> I believe Tarot is mentioned in Rabelais (1494-1553), specifically in
> Gargantua's games.
> Of course I'm reading a translation, but someone else might know
> whether or not it was 'Tarot' in the original.

Well, pretty close, anyway. If you look at this list from the 1653 
English translation, you'll see that it includes Tarot:

	http://www.isebastiani.com/NotesAndLists/Gargantua-Games.html

At first, I thought that was a mistranslation, because nothing starting 
"taro" shows up in the French. Fortunately, this transcription of the 
1534 edition calls the game out specifically (since it is from the 
Tarock site):

	http://www.tarock.info/gargantua_XXII.htm

Assuming that "au tarau" is correctly translated as "Tarot" (which seems 
very likely), then the answer seems to be yes. Which isn't really 
surprising: everything I've seen seems to indicate that Tarot games were 
reasonably well-known on the continent.

For reference, these Gargantua transcriptions (and a couple of others) 
are listed on the Transcriptions and Facsimiles (and Translations -- I 
ought to fix the title) page of the Period Games page:

	http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/game-trans.html

				-- Justin