Hello, I’m Robert. I live in Cumnor, a small village just outside Oxford, though I was born in Canada and raised in California, and have called the UK home for nearly twenty years now.
I hold a BA in Humanities, specialising in Religious Studies, from the Open University, and a Diploma in English Local History from Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, where I spent two years focused specifically on the religious history of Oxford, from the Anglo-Saxon minster to the Oxford Movement. For fifteen years I taught at a private sixth form college in Oxford, and held academic and pastoral responsibility at a managerial level
Alongside that, I’ve spent years researching the places where history, religion, magic and folklore quietly overlap with ordinary life: saints whose legends are really folk stories, cunning folk who worked cures and found treasure, wall paintings and folk customs that survive without anyone quite agreeing on what they mean. That research runs across a few places: this site, tarothistory.com, which I founded in 2006 and which grew an academic research forum in 2008 for the serious study of tarot’s history, and The Cunning Folk Cards, an interactive introduction to England’s village healers and magical practitioners.