Cheat! : Representations of women as cheating at cards in early modern times

Résumé 0

Between the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, representations of women and gameplaying are notable for references to cheating. Card games are a particularly significant case: an “honest” pastime when practiced in aristocratic circles, they are negatively marked if practiced in the street and/or among commoners. The image of cheating becomes a kind of emblem of the status of the premodern woman, while also metaphorically expressing the role of concealment in the courtier culture of the period studied. This article addresses the modalities of depiction and the reception of these representations alongside the diffusion of the literature on probability, which continued to develop in the seventeenth century, as well as treatises and pamphlets revealing the techniques of card manipulation and cheating, associating prestidigitation, illusionism and ludic practices.