In the Cards: Murder and Magic in the Librarya Frances Yates Mystery - Softcover

Jones, Marjorie G. (Marjorie G. Jones)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0892541857 ISBN 13: 9780892541850

Verlag: Ibis Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In collaboration with a Scotland Yard detective, who is also a Freemason, Frances Yates, eminent historian of Renaissance spirituality and proponent of martyred priest Giordano Bruno, employs her unique scholarship to solve a murder and the theft of a rare volume in the renowned musty library of ancient philosophical traditions, where she has long been a resident scholar.

While immersed in an article regarding the significance of mysterious tarot cards, Yates comes to realize that the recurring images of the cards illustrate universal life stages and character traits that may provide clues to the identity of the murderer. Along the way, she encounters more recent scholarship regarding feminist theology that, together with the tarot, prompts her to reconsider her own patriarchal spiritual worldview.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marjorie G. Jones is a graduate of Wheaton College, MA and the Rutgers School of Law. In the 1990s she earned an MA in Historical Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School in New York City where she wrote her thesis on several early, unpublished works of Frances Yates. Since that time, she has taught history at the New School and Mercy College in New York. She is a mother and grandmother and lives with her husband in New York.

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In the Cards

Murder and Magic in the Library

By Marjorie G. Jones

Ibis Press

Copyright © 2018 Marjorie G. Jones
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-89254-185-0

CHAPTER 1

Working late one early fall evening in her small cluttered office on the third floor at the Warburg Institute on Woburn Square, Dame Frances Yates, writing by hand in the lined Boot's notebook she used for drafting, beavered away at her article. In between puffs on her Woodbine cigarette, she nibbled on some butter thins from Fortnum's. These were always kept in her top right-hand desk drawer. The cold remains of a cup of stale Earl Gray tea sat at her elbow.

Her reading glasses, attached to a frayed black ribbon around her doubling chins, were perched on the end of her wide fleshy nose. Cigarette butts piled up in the overflowing heavy glass ashtray at her elbow. Since more than once Frances had been known to set papers on her desk on fire, the fire extinguisher hanging just outside her office was especially handy and reassuring. Several years ago, patiently as always, her research assistant Billy Howard had spent a remarkable amount of time instructing her how to disengage the apparatus from the wall, pull the pin from the canister, and put it to good use when needed. Her unruly nest of white hair was held in place by hairpins. Frances' disheveled appearance was complimented by a somewhat tattered white blouse, patterned with faded blue flowers, held together by a safety pin and blotted with tea stains. Crumbs and ashes accumulated on her generous bosom before making their way onto her worn gray woolen skirt. With her bushy untended white eyebrows arched above her glasses, Frances was lost in thought.

The drab green walls of her office were covered with black and white photographs, taken on her many trips abroad. Yates' desk, along with every available shelf, was piled high with books and papers that tended to spill onto the frayed Oriental rug covering most of the cracked linoleum floor. Whenever she did glance up, the photographs of past adventures with her family and colleagues gave her pleasure and prompted her to reminisce. She especially liked the one of her and Perkin Walker, taken a few years ago while they were sitting on the steps of a temple in the Roman forum. Although some visitors to the office wondered if she ever noticed that with her legs akimbo, the trim on her knickers was showing and that her stockings were laced with runners. A more recent snapshot, taken with Rudolf and Margot Wittkower in front of Columbia University library in New York City, reminded her of her first whirlwind trip to the States the year before. Still, her favorite was the photo of her standing beneath the looming brooding statue of the martyred Bruno at the Campo de' Fiori in Rome.

Tattered thin beige cotton curtains that could use a wash hung limply at the only window overlooking tiny Woburn Square, where shadows played among the early autumn leaves. The leaves were just beginning to turn as the sun set over the great city. A few hours earlier, perched on the wooden benches, workers from nearby university offices and libraries had enjoyed lunch al fresco. A bouquet of wilted peonies from her garden at Claygate perched in a glass jelly jar at the corner of her chaotic desk.

For a few days, Frances was staying in town at the University Women's Club so that she could finish her article on time and not have to travel back and forth to the charming suburb of Claygate. She lived there with her older sister Ruby and their little black cat Hermes, who, to their great delight one day several years ago, had wandered into the garden looking for a home. Per usual, she was working under a deadline — this time for Bob Silvers, editor at The New York Review of Books. He was waiting for still another of the many articles she had written over the past several years for the erudite literary magazine, published in New York since the 1960s. Her many accolades notwithstanding, Frances always was flattered to be invited to contribute to the renowned publication. Finally meeting Silvers in person was a highlight of her trip last year to the States.

This time Silvers had asked her to review a book on Tarot by Michael Dummett. Although, at first, she thought the topic inane, Frances was growing increasingly intrigued, if not for the reasons Dummett had intended. Surprisingly even to her, Frances was wrestling with an intriguing new subject — the mysterious images of the Major Arcana of the Tarot.

Leafing through the very large book, which purported to be a history of Tarot, with its array of reproductions of various decks of cards produced throughout Europe between the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries, she noted quickly — as she would write in her article — that the same images, in varying versions, recurred constantly and always in the same order in the so-called Major Arcana, the first twenty-two cards of the Tarot. Since these images specifically had been banned by the Church in the 1600s, modern decks of playing cards contained only the fifty-two of the four suits. So the first question Frances considered was her favorite: Why? Why had the first twenty-two images been eliminated and what about the Major Arcana was distasteful to the medieval Church? If, as Dummett maintained in his book, the Tarot were "just playing cards," it didn't make sense that they were so terribly troubling to the Inquisition. So perhaps something else going on ...

She contemplated the sketchy but colorful images of the early seventeenth century Tarot de Paris deck — created not long after Bruno's terrible death — when religious conflict ravaged Europe. The sequence she observed and the scattered illusions to Christianity triggered new thoughts in Yates's fertile imagination and stimulated her investigative juices. Indeed, in the context of Renaissance thought and the Hermetic Tradition, she began to suspect that the cards might mean something more. Of course, if she was right, it wouldn't be the first time Frances Yates would be accused of seeing the Hermetic Tradition everywhere — even if in her heart of hearts, she thought it was.

By now it was 8:00 P.M. Most students and staff left the premises by 7:00, so the Institute had quieted down; but, as her pen filled the pages of her notebook, Frances' brain was racing. How she relished that sensation! Although she was soon to celebrate her 75th birthday, her brilliant mind was as sharp and probing as ever; and while sometimes she hesitated before coming up with just the word she was searching for, Frances also knew she had become more discerning and perceptive. Indeed, she smiled to herself as she gazed at the cards, she even thought of an appropriate pun: It could be said that she was at the top of her game!

At long last, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, followed quickly by The Art of Memory, had made her a celebrity-scholar and recent DBE, Dame of the British Empire, and she was deluged with invitations to speak and travel throughout Europe and America.

Wondering if she might be onto something, it became apparent that she'd need to look at other variations of the Tarot images. After more than four decades at the Warburg, she knew more or less where to find them in the library's convoluted stacks. Organized according to the intellectual meanderings of Aby Warburg's brilliant mind and his own unique methodology, the system was known to stump many a first-time and even second- and third-time visitor. Instead of traditional categories (history, literature, biography, etc.), the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ibis Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0892541857
• ISBN 13: 9780892541850
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar