Although the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries have long been recognized as watershed moments of scientific discovery in Western Europe, recent work in 'historical epistemology' has underscored the complexity and unevenness of the transition from older to newer forms of knowing and acting upon the world. Building on these insights, the essays that make up Arts of Calculation extend our understanding of how people come to count, and how numbers create forms of agency, objects of inquiry, and kinds of cultural authority.
'The eleven essays or chapters are each, at the very least, intriguing, several of them deeply interesting and, for me, revelatory.' - Tom Roper, University of Leeds, ESCalate
PART I: GOVERNING NUMBERS
Calculating Humans; T.Reiss
Calculating Men; P.A.Cahill
The Cultural Meaning of the Number Thirteen and the Liturgical Origins of Standardization; A.W.Ramsey
Curiosity and Quantification in the Seventeenth-Century French Population Inquiries; R.Scafe
PART II: MATHEMATICAL KNOWLEDGE
Renaissance Self-Fractioning; C.Mazzio
Clavius's Number and its Early Modern Afterlife; C.Johnson
Hobbes and the Pre-Modern Geometry of Modern Politics; G.Hull
Mathamatics, Honnêteté, and Political Power under the Sun King: The Case of Fontenelle; J.B.Shank
PART III: ECONOMIES OF NUMBER
Reflections of Bureaucratic Modes of Measurement in Medieval Natural Philosophy; J.Kaye
Accounting for Generosity: Antón de Montoro's Poetic Invoicing; B.Liu
The Commodification of Honor in Early Modern Spain: Francisco de Quevedo's 'To gold'; A.Sokol
PART IV: TRANSCULTURAL EQUATIONS
Crooked Figures: Hindu-Arabic Notation in Shakespeare's Henry V; E.Ostashevsky
Hebrew and the Quatification of the Spoken Word; M.Saatjian
Binary as Transcultural Technology: Liebnitz's Courting of the Kangxi Emperor; R.Batchelor
DAVID GLIMP is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. He is the author of Making Populations: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England.
MICHELLE R. WARREN is Associate Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Miami. The author of History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (1100-1300), coeditor of Postcolonial Moves, Medieval to Modern (Palgrave Macmillan), she is currently working on the French colonial epic.
Description
Although the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries have long been recognized as watershed moments of scientific discovery in Western Europe, recent work in 'historical epistemology' has underscored the complexity and unevenness of the transition from older to newer forms of knowing and acting upon the world. Building on these insights, the essays that make up Arts of Calculation extend our understanding of how people come to count, and how numbers create forms of agency, objects of inquiry, and kinds of cultural authority.
Reviews
'The eleven essays or chapters are each, at the very least, intriguing, several of them deeply interesting and, for me, revelatory.' - Tom Roper, University of Leeds, ESCalate
Contents
PART I: GOVERNING NUMBERS
Calculating Humans; T.Reiss
Calculating Men; P.A.Cahill
The Cultural Meaning of the Number Thirteen and the Liturgical Origins of Standardization; A.W.Ramsey
Curiosity and Quantification in the Seventeenth-Century French Population Inquiries; R.Scafe
PART II: MATHEMATICAL KNOWLEDGE
Renaissance Self-Fractioning; C.Mazzio
Clavius's Number and its Early Modern Afterlife; C.Johnson
Hobbes and the Pre-Modern Geometry of Modern Politics; G.Hull
Mathamatics, Honnêteté, and Political Power under the Sun King: The Case of Fontenelle; J.B.Shank
PART III: ECONOMIES OF NUMBER
Reflections of Bureaucratic Modes of Measurement in Medieval Natural Philosophy; J.Kaye
Accounting for Generosity: Antón de Montoro's Poetic Invoicing; B.Liu
The Commodification of Honor in Early Modern Spain: Francisco de Quevedo's 'To gold'; A.Sokol
PART IV: TRANSCULTURAL EQUATIONS
Crooked Figures: Hindu-Arabic Notation in Shakespeare's Henry V; E.Ostashevsky
Hebrew and the Quatification of the Spoken Word; M.Saatjian
Binary as Transcultural Technology: Liebnitz's Courting of the Kangxi Emperor; R.Batchelor
Authors
DAVID GLIMP is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. He is the author of Making Populations: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England.
MICHELLE R. WARREN is Associate Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Miami. The author of History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (1100-1300), coeditor of Postcolonial Moves, Medieval to Modern (Palgrave Macmillan), she is currently working on the French colonial epic.
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