Thanks for those Steve. I liked this statement in Jennifer B. McDonald's article (the first one) -
"This brings us to D’Agata’s other outrageous proposition — that one needn’t concern oneself with facts because rarely are facts reliable, and that belief alone should be considered as muscular as fact,
even when the belief has been proved to be based on invention. As long as a story “is believed by somebody,” he writes, “I consider it a legitimate potential history.” Hogwash."
(my emphasis)
The point for Tarot history is that the narrative of Tarot's origin in Italy in the fourth - or third at a stretch - decade of the 15th century, as a card game, is not based on an isolated fact or two, which might be undermined by a new fact or two. It is the
unanimous testimony of all the earliest evidence we have - there is no reason to think otherwise. There is nothing ambiguous about what the evidence tells us. There is more than enough evidence to base a theory on, a theory of its place of origin and the meaning of the sequence, and it is good enough to narrow down the time of its invention to within a decade (I would even say 5 years). That's pretty good for something as ephemeral as a deck of cards used to play a game over 550 years old.
Admittedly, if we didn't have the
non-ephemeral examples - the luxury cards of Milan, Florence and Ferrara, etc. - we'd have a much harder time of it, relying only on documentary evidence and the few early examples of popular tarot cards, but even if there were no luxury cards, I don't think anyone would argue for a date outside of a few decades before 1440 (e.g. we can't guess the invention of Karnöffel or Poker as well as Tarot), and in any case it would still be Italy and it would still be a card game.