Art of Calculation
Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe
Published on 28. May 2004
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-312-29531-8 (ISBN)
Description
The essays in this volume focus primarily on 16th and 17th century Europe and are broadly interdisciplinary. They answer questions such as: what kinds of cultural work do numbers do?; What roles does calculation play in colonial, imperial, and/or national projects or ideologies?; What are the relationships between aesthetic practices and bureaucratic modes of calculation (such as accounting, census taking, and demography)?; What kinds of agencies and subjectivities do numbers and numbering enable and foreclose?; How do different kinds of economic strategies (eg exchange, gift, capital, debt, interest) affect representational strategies and vice versa?; What cultural dynamics inform spatial measurements, such as cartagraphy?; and what do analyses of counting practices tell us about the production of knowledge more generally?
Reviews / Votes
'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, ESCalateMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York, NY
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 215 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
433 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-312-29531-8 (9780312295318)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
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.
Content
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, Honnetete, 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: Anton 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