Introduction (by M. Howard)

It has been 50 years and some months since Gertrude Moakley wrote her pioneering work of careful scholarship and daring hypotheses, all in a manner accessible to the general reader, that is, anyone who might want to see a snapshot into the early days of the tarot deck.

It is my belief that the work can still serve as one of the best introductions to the subject of the origin of the tarot. All it needs is a little updating, to tell the reader those few places where her sources were inaccurate, what remains controversial in her work, and how new information since then affects the validity of her hypotheses. In fact, I will argue, while the new information requires a more complicated picture than she presented, in the end her main approach is only strengthened by it.

Before writing her book, she published a short article in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library for Febryary 1966. I have chosen to ignore that work, preferring instead to focus on her "last word" on the subject. However I include it as an Appendix for anyone who would like to peruse it. There is much  information about her sources that is not in the later work. And a few things in her schema are different, 

Summaries invariably do not do justice to their authors, at least in the minds of some who read them. I want to avoid that problem by presenting the entire text, word for word. My justification for so doing is that although she wanted her book to continue to be available, it was not judged "commercially viable" to do so. So while it is still available in libraries in North America, and copies can still be purchased on the rare book market, it is not very accessible other places, and upwards of $70 is too much to pay for a small book of 124 pages including illustrations. She deserves better than to be hoarded for commercial purposes.

Moakley gave the copyright (and all her research notes) to Stuart Kaplan of U.S. Games thinking it would facilitate republication with updates. In actual fact it only made it impossible for anyone else to do so, as can be seen from the queries addressed to him by others shortly after her death. Here I cite the report of tarot history author (Tarot Symbolism etc.) Robert O'Neill of a conversation with Mr. Kaplan (I get this from http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=20):

In the course of a conversation, I asked if he intended to republish and he answered that it wasn't commercially viable. But the context of the conversation was his current activities and his plans to make his collection/library available. His current activities involve finishing a novel he is writing and finishing Volume 4 of the Encyclopedia. So his answer may be influenced by his own priorities. Also, I don't think he sees himself as the person best qualified to do the updating and modifications in the book that would be needed. So i think his emphasis is more on making the material accessible to scholars who would do the work and republish the material. 

The time is long past for Moakley to get the audience she deserves. If the copyright holder wishes to protest, I will happily withdraw her words from the blog.

This blog is largely taken from my posts on a "thread" on Tarot History Forum that I initiated and others contributed to, regarding the evaluation of her work (http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1168#p19038. I will try to incorporate their contributions as much as feasible. (Readers of this blog are invited to make their own contributions via the "Comments" section of the individual posts.)

That thread, in turn, was stimulated by Alain Bougereal's initiation of another thread to commemorate Moakley on the occasion of her birthday (http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1167),  providing the links there to two essays on Moakley, one a recent commemoration of her birth and death by Sherryl E. Smith (https://tarot-heritage.com/2013/03/27/honoring-gertrude-moakley/) and the other a fairly detailed summary and assessment by Michael J. Hurst, another admirer of her work (http://wikivisually.com/wiki/User:Michael_Hurst/Moakley) who unfortunately has since passed away himself.

My own view is that more needs to be done; so I am trying to "pick up the baton", so to speak. I am not as informed about tarot history as some people, only being involved in it for around 10 years, but it has been an intense 10 years, with much attention to the work of others, including translating some important work from Italian to English (Andrea Vitali at http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=5&lng=ENG and Franco Pratesi, http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1100 or http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com/).

The most perceptive of those who came after Moakley in a positive direction was John Shephard in 1985. He wrote a book, now quite neglected, in which one chapter developed Moakley further. I will include selections from that work and show how it is in line with the most recent discoveries regarding the Florentine version of tarot known as minchiate.