By the Numbers

Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England

Jessica Marie Otis (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

278 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-760877-7 (ISBN)

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During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English numerical practices underwent a complex transformation with wide-ranging impacts on English society. At the beginning of the early modern period, English men and women believed that God had made humans universally numerate, although numbers were not central to their everyday lives. Over the next two centuries, rising literacy rates and the increasing availability of printed books revolutionized modes of arithmetical practice and education. Ordinary English people began to use numbers and quantification to explain abstract phenomena as diverse as the relativity of time, the probability of chance events, and the constitution of human populations. These changes reflected their participation in broader early modern European cultural and intellectual developments such as the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. By the eighteenth century, English men and women still believed they lived in a world made by God, but it was also a world made--and made understandable--by numbers.

Jessica Marie Otis is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Acknowledgments
A Note on Style, Dating, Money, and References
Introduction "Number, Weight and Measure": Numeracy in Early Modern England
Chapter 1 "The Dyuers Wittes of Man": The Multiplicity and Materiality of Numbers
Chapter 2 "Finding Out False Reckonings": Trust and the Function of Numbers
Chapter 3 "Set Them To the Cyphering Schoole": Reading, Writing, and Arithmetical Education
Chapter 4 "According To Our Computation Here": Quantifying Time
Chapter 5 "It is Odds of Many To One": Quantifying Chance and Risk
Chapter 6 "Davids Arithmetic": Quantifying the People
Epilogue "Heau'ns Great Arithmetician": Living in a Numerical World
Appendix Marginalia in Arithmetic Textbooks
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	03.04.2024
Zusatzinfo	12 black and white halftones
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	235 x 156 mm
Gewicht	526 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-760877-9 / 0197608779
ISBN-13	978-0-19-760877-7 / 9780197608777
Zustand	Neuware