Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe

Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Philip Beeley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000207471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers’ marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for exploring the nature of mathematical reading and the ways in which mathematics was disseminated and assimilated across different social milieus in the early centuries of print culture. Other evidence is important, too, as the case studies collected in the volume document. Scholarly correspondence can help us understand the motives and difficulties in producing new printed texts, library catalogues can illuminate collection practices, while manuscripts can teach us more about textual traditions. By defining and illuminating the distinctive world of early modern mathematical reading, the volume seeks to close the gap between the history of mathematics as a history of texts and history of mathematics as part of the broader history of human culture.

Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe

Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Philip Beeley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000207471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book

Book Description
Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers’ marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for exploring the nature of mathematical reading and the ways in which mathematics was disseminated and assimilated across different social milieus in the early centuries of print culture. Other evidence is important, too, as the case studies collected in the volume document. Scholarly correspondence can help us understand the motives and difficulties in producing new printed texts, library catalogues can illuminate collection practices, while manuscripts can teach us more about textual traditions. By defining and illuminating the distinctive world of early modern mathematical reading, the volume seeks to close the gap between the history of mathematics as a history of texts and history of mathematics as part of the broader history of human culture.

Mathematical Practitioners and the Transformation of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Mathematical Practitioners and the Transformation of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Lesley B. Cormack
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319494309
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This book argues that we can only understand transformations of nature studies in the Scientific Revolution if we take seriously the interaction between practitioners (those who know by doing) and scholars (those who know by thinking). These are not in opposition, however. Theory and practice are end points on a continuum, with some participants interested only in the practical, others only in the theoretical, and most in the murky intellectual and material world in between. It is this borderland where influence, appropriation, and collaboration have the potential to lead to new methods, new subjects of enquiry, and new social structures of natural philosophy and science. The case for connection between theory and practice can be most persuasively drawn in the area of mathematics, which is the focus of this book. Practical mathematics was a growing field in early modern Europe and these essays are organised into three parts which contribute to the debate about the role of mathematical practice in the Scientific Revolution. First, they demonstrate the variability of the identity of practical mathematicians, and of the practices involved in their activities in early modern Europe. Second, readers are invited to consider what practical mathematics looked like and that although practical mathematical knowledge was transmitted and circulated in a wide variety of ways, participants were able to recognize them all as practical mathematics. Third, the authors show how differences and nuances in practical mathematics typically depended on the different contexts in which it was practiced: social, cultural, political, and economic particularities matter. Historians of science, especially those interested in the Scientific Revolution period and the history of mathematics will find this book and its ground-breaking approach of particular interest.

Commonplace Reading and Writing in Early Modern England and Beyond

Commonplace Reading and Writing in Early Modern England and Beyond PDF Author: Hao Tianhu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003813550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Approaching from bibliographical, literary, cultural, and intercultural perspectives, this book establishes the importance of Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden, a largely unexplored manuscript commonplace book to early modern English literature and culture in general. Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden is a seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book known primarily for its Shakespearean connections, which extracts works by dozens of early modern English authors, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Milton. This book sheds light on the broader significance of Hesperides that refashions our full knowledge of early modern authorship and plagiarism, composition, reading practice, and canon formation. Following two introductory chapters are three topical chapters, which respectively discuss plagiarism and early modern English writing, early modern English reading practice, and early modern English canon formation. The final chapter further expands the field to ancient China, comparing commonplace books with Chinese leishu, exploring Matteo Ricci’s cross-cultural commonplace writing, and re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in light of Ricci’s On Friendship. The solid book will serve as a must read for scholars and students of early modern English literature, manuscript study, commonplace books, history of the book, and intercultural study.

Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England

Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England PDF Author: Hannah August
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000563111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama’s most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.

Early Modern Universities

Early Modern Universities PDF Author: Anja-Silvia Goeing
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900444405X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Education contains twenty essays by experts on early modern academic networks. Using a variety of approaches to universities, schools, and academies throughout Europe and in Central America, the book suggests pathways for future research.

Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England

Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England PDF Author: Callan Davies
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000833925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating—the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Elizabethanne A. Boran
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004336656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe investigates how, when, where and why Newton’s Principia was interpreted by readers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England and Ireland. University textbooks and popular simplified vernacular texts created new audiences for early modern science.

The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England

The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England PDF Author: Arthur F. Marotti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390683
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This study examines the transmission and compilation of poetic texts through manuscripts from the late-Elizabethan era through the mid-seventeenth century, paying attention to the distinctive material, social, and literary features of these documents. The study has two main focuses: the first, the particular social environments in which texts were compiled and, second, the presence within this system of a large body of (usually anonymous) rare or unique poems. Manuscripts from aristocratic, academic, and urban professional environments are examined in separate chapters that highlight particular collections. Two chapters consider the social networking within the university and London that facilitated the transmission within these environments and between them. Although the topic is addressed throughout the study, the place of rare or unique poems in manuscript collections is at the center of the final three chapters. The book as a whole argues that scholars need to pay more attention to the social life of texts in the period and to little-known or unknown rare or unique poems that represent a field of writing broader than that defined in a literary history based mainly on the products of print culture.

Mathematics and the Craft of Thought in the Anglo-Dutch Renaissance

Mathematics and the Craft of Thought in the Anglo-Dutch Renaissance PDF Author: Eleanor Chan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000461807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The development of a coherent, cohesive visual system of mathematics brought about a seminal shift in approaches towards abstract thinking in western Europe. Vernacular translations of Euclid’s Elements made these new and developing approaches available to a far broader readership than had previously been possible. Scholarship has explored the way that the language of mathematics leaked into the literary cultures of England and the Low Countries, but until now the role of visual metaphors of making and shaping in the establishment of mathematics as a practical tool has gone unexplored. Mathematics and the Craft of Thought sheds light on the remarkable culture shift surrounding the vernacular language translations of Euclid, and the geometrical imaginary that they sought to create. It shows how the visual language of early modern European geometry was constructed by borrowing and quoting from contemporary visual culture. The verbal and visual language of this form of mathematics, far from being simply immaterial, was designed to tantalize with material connotations. This book argues that, in a very real sense, practical geometry in this period was built out of craft metaphors.

Underground Mathematics

Underground Mathematics PDF Author: Thomas Morel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009267302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
History of the development of practical mathematics in early modern Europe through the practice of mining.