Rebus question
Ah-ha. That old curly question. Feel like saying "render to the ecclesiastics what is due to the ecclesiastics, and to tarot writers what is due to them."
OK. sensibly:
The Latin "rebus" means simply "picture".
From the time when scribes in Europe - I mean those whose labour was in the scriptoria - were taught techniques to ensure that they made fewer errors in transcription, and more accurrately committed to memory what they could read... the term 'rebus' comes to mean something more specific.
It begins, I think one can fairly say, with a form of marginal 'figure' whose purpose is little more than to help one find one's place in a finished manuscript.
But soon those 'figures' become 'figura' so that you can actually follow the written sequence, simply by following the series of pictures. "the story road" as it were.
But this kind of 'figura' becomes increasingly more elegant, and more complex.
THe term "rebus" comes to mean a figure within which specific words or passages are incorporated as literal elements in the picture.
The best of the Charles VI cards are extraordinarily brilliant *rebuses* by that definition. Others may be less brilliant, because incorporating fewer layers of relevant text and allusion, but hold to a clear understanding of what the figures were about.
Others again become mere gabble - some by trying to be clever and modern, and re-interpret the scholarly figures to amuse. Or because a printer decides to make money by mass producing a pack which he may have bought, but doesn't understand beyond its superficial appearance.
If you would like specifics on how the actual words of a text are embodied in imagery of the medieval period, one good source is my constantly-urged basic reading: Carruthers' Book of Memory.
Once the allusions to the older matter blur and distort in the cards produced, cards' relevance to my study ends. For the most part, my interest and study ends/culminates with a discussion of the distinctions in content and intent that are evident between the Charles VI Atouts and the Visconti counterparts.