By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England - Softcover

Otis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0197608787 ISBN 13: 9780197608784

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0197608787
• ISBN 13: 9780197608784
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280