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Hofamterspiel

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Hofämterspiel

This is one of the earliest card games on record preserved in its entirety with all 48 cards intact. Its name means "Court-office Game". This handmade deck was commissioned by Ladislaus the Posthumous, king of Hungary and Bohemia and Duke of Austria from 1453 to 1457.
Each suit sign carries the coats of arms of four kingdoms: France (fleur-de-lis), Germany (eagle), Bohemia (lion) and Hungary (stripes).
The illustrations, with their names written in medieval German, depict the precedence of different court functions during the late Middle Ages, together with the values of the cards, numbered 1 - 10 in Roman numerals, except for the king and queen which have no number and are also the only two subjects that do not state the character's occupation.
In all four suits the I features a fool, Narr, or its female equivalent Narryn, and the two highest cards next to the king and queen are the master of the household, Hofmeister X, who was in charge of the court during the ruler's absence, and the marshal, Marschalk IX, in charge of any duty that involved the use of horses or carriages.  With the exception of two subjects, the Jungfrawe, card VI in all suits, and the Trometer, card IIII in Germany and Hungary, all other personages are individual and don’t appear in any other suit.
The images have been smoothly reprocessed by:Pionissimo

http://jlg.cazaux.free.fr/hofamterspiel.htm

The full set

The full set

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Bohemia

Hungary

Germany

France

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Jean-Louis C April 24, 2017 8:09 pm UTC
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Product Information
Author(s)
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Cards
49
Format
Original electronic Click for more information
Scanned image
These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.
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Original electronic format
These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.
This title was added to our catalog on May 28, 2016.