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By the Numbers focuses the transformation of popular numerical practices in early modern England. It explores the material culture of popular numeracy, including how and why people began to use Arabic numerals, and analyzes how the print revolution changed the nature of English arithmetical education. It also demonstrates several of the ways that ordinary men and women began to use numbers and quantification to explain abstract phenomena in their everyday lives.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
This interesting history...highlights how the transition was initiated to a numerate population and a more data driven society, which we know all too well these days.
