Huck
kwaw said:But how trustworthy is the report when the only illustration of one of these 'tarot' decks is not a tarot deck at all? How safe are the other references then?
Kwaw
As I read it, both entries are independent to each other.
One should be a city document or legend from 1574 (collected by the author), the other an opinion of the author around 1850 (based on "not enough" playing card history background, so obviously in error about Aluette cards - which should be natural for playing card history development in 1850).
Naturally still the author might have followed generally the opinion, that Spanish cards are always Tarot cards, so he would have translated "2 Spanish decks in 1574" were "2 Tarot decks in 1574" - then it would have been a related error.
Perhaps this Leyden reference once will be detected, who knows? For the moment the keywords "Leyden, Tarot" don't lead to anything.
Generally I think, that Dutch and Belgish literature has some hidden treasures for playing card research. Just cause neither German or other farther developed playing card research didn't look very much in this direction.
Do you know Jan van den Berghe? A long text about playing cards, around the time of Meister Ingold. Playing card history overlooked it, till we detected it (as far I know) ... although there is no great mystery about this text in Dutch language. It was republished last century.