44 pages • 1 hour read
Katy HaysThe Cloisters
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: The Metropolitan Cloisters
The Cloisters museum may seem fantastical, but it’s a real place overlooking the Hudson River in New York City. It began with the private collection of the American sculptor George Grey Barnard in the early 20th century. In 1925, it was bought by the Metropolitan Museum, financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and updated. Rockefeller hired the architect Charles Collens, who had prior experience designing gothic-style churches, to create the new space. It officially opened in 1938. The Cloisters museum is now a blend of original medieval elements, sourced primarily from France, and new, reconstructionist architecture. It’s famous for its broad collection of medieval art and artifacts, including tapestries, stained glass, and illuminated manuscripts.
There are three gardens within the Cloisters, though the novel simplifies and condenses them. The gardens contain many rare plant specimens intended to convey a garden in medieval times. Many of them reflect the plants depicted in the museum’s artwork. Unlike in the novel, the Cloisters gardens are managed by a team of trained horticulturalists; the senior members are historians with a background in period-appropriate gardening techniques.
Historical Context: Tarot Cards and Fortune Telling
The novel references many divination methods, including augury (the study of birds), astragalomancy (the study of dice), tasseomancy (the study of tea leaves), astrology (the study of the stars), and cartomancy (the study of cards), among others. Tarot, the divination practice that becomes the novel’s driving force, is a specific type of cartomancy. The secret deck that Ann Stilwell uncovers isn’t precisely a tarot deck, but a predecessor of it. Cartomancy involves divination by standard playing cards as well as alternative oracular cards that follow different systems. Today, one can find targeted decks of oracle cards using images of plants, animals, or even figures from pop culture.
Tarot specifically refers to a set of 78 cards. These include 22 “Major Arcana,” which means “Major Secrets” and comprises a set of symbolic figures, and 56 “Minor Arcana” cards, or “Lesser Secrets,” which function much like a deck of standard playing cards. Each features a number of court figures—King, Queen, Knight, and Page—alongside one of four suits. The terms Major and Minor Arcana were not in use until the 19th century, and were believed to have originated with the French writer and occultist Jean-Baptiste Pitois. The tarot system itself is believed to date to 15th-century Italy. At this time, they were used as a game, rather than a system of divination. In The Cloisters, the central characters work to prove that these early cards did have an oracular use as well as a recreational one.
One of the oldest surviving examples of these card decks is the Visconti Tarot, created in the 1400s for Duke Filippo Maria Visconti. It’s now held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. This particular deck is explored in detail through Ann’s early research. By using real moments and figures from history, Katy Hays gives weight and plausibility to Ann’s discoveries.
