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Measured Words
Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy
Arielle Saiber (Author)
9781487541958
Paperback / softback, published 1 June 2021
280 pages, 131 b&w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg
"Together with her lively writing style, Saiber’s erudition, based on close reading of primary sources and a remarkable command of secondary literatures, make Measured Words a pleasure to read. Scholars will return to this book for research leads and for chapters to assign to their graduate and undergraduate students." "The author connects to mathematics in many fascinating ways. In addition to the superb analysis of four case studies – Alberti, Paciolo, Tartaglia, and Della Porta, the reader is treated to an assortment of images that help visualize the connection each Renaissance man imagined. Highly recommended." "Boldly and magisterially, Saiber bridges the gap between literary studies, Renaissance philosophy, the sciences of computus (of numbers and proportions or geometry in theory and practice), and the history of printing and type design. With her remarkable stamina to explore rarely studied 'difficult' texts, and with her admirable command of older and more recent scholarly literature on her topic, Saiber thereby demonstrates for instance the intimate relationship between the advent of printing and the designer’s task of mathematical proportions of letters – and the ensuing interdependent relationships between form and text."
Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers of the time: Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta. Although these Renaissance humanists came from different social classes and practised the mathematical and literary arts at varying levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the literary arts and mathematics yielded extraordinary results, from Alberti’s treatise on cryptography and Pacioli’s design calculations for the Roman alphabet to Tartaglia’s poetic solutions of cubic equations and Della Porta’s dramatic applications of geometry. Through lively, cogent analysis of these and other related texts of the period, Measured Words presents, literally and figuratively, brilliant examples of what interdisciplinary work can offer us.
List of Figures Introduction: Well-Versed Mathematics Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Notes
Acknowledgments
The Four / Beautiful Minds / With Measured Words
Cryptographica: Leon Battista Alberti’s De componendis Cifris (1466)
Deciphering De Cifris / Writing in Code
The Calculated Alphabet: Luca Pacioli’s "degno alphabeto Anticho" (1509)
Prelude: Pacioli Portrait / The Nexus of the Divina proportione / Lettergons / Not All That Glitters Is Gold / Divine Characters
Word Problems: Niccolò Tartaglia’s "Quando chel cubo" (1546)
The Cubic Scandal / A Poetic Solution
Hidden Curves: Giambattista Della Porta’s Elementorum curvilineorum libri tres (1601/10)
The Vanishing Act / A Wave of the Hand
Bibliography
Index