Describes the development and the ultimate demise of the practice of mathematics in sixteenth century Antwerp. Against the background of the violent history of the Religious Wars the story of the practice of mathematics in Antwerp is told through the lives of two protagonists Michiel Coignet and Peeter Heyns. The book touches on all aspects of practical mathematics from teaching and instrument making to the practice of building fortifications of the practice of navigation.​

This volume contains twenty-four essays, which, in their subjects and methodology, pay tribute to the scholarship of Walter S. Melion. The contributions are grouped under three categories: “Devotion,” “Art and Image Theory,” and “Vision and Contemplation.” The Devotion section addresses votive practices, theological theory and polemic literature. The Art and Image Theory section focuses on Jesuit image theory, the reflexive dimension of works, and artists’ reflections on the function of images. Finally, the Vision and Contemplation section discusses the ‘early modern eye’ as a tool for thoughtful, prolonged looking to ascertain visual wit, deception, self-assessment and friendship, sacred and profane allegories.

This book offers an analysis of the ground breaking mathematical work of Gregorio a San Vicente and his student and shows that the Flemish Jesuit Mathematics School had profound influence on mathematics in the seventeenth century.

Twelve contributors offer new perspectives on the efficacy of the handpress book industry to support the Catholic strategy of the Spanish Low Countries.

A revelatory history of Antwerp—from its rise to a world city to its fall in the Spanish Fury—by the New York Times Notable author of The Edge of the World. Before Amsterdam, there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp. In the Age of Exploration, Antwerp was sensational like nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York. It was somewhere anything could happen or at least be believed: killer bankers, easy kisses, a market in secrets and every kind of heresy. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules—religious, sexual, intellectual. And it was a place of change—a single man cornered all the money in the city and reinvented ideas of what money meant. Another gave the city a new shape purely out of his own ambition. Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition needed Antwerp for their escape, thanks to the remarkable woman at the head of the grandest banking family in Europe. Thomas More opened Utopia there, Erasmus puzzled over money and exchanges, William Tyndale sheltered there and smuggled out his Bible in English until he was killed. Pieter Bruegel painted the town as The Tower of Babel. But when Antwerp rebelled with the Dutch against the Spanish and lost, all that glory was buried and its true history rewritten. The city that unsettled so many now became conformist. Mutinous troops burned the city records, trying to erase its true history. In Europe’s Babylon, Michael Pye sets out to rediscover the city that was lost and bring its wilder days to life using every kind of clue: novels, paintings, songs, schoolbooks, letters and the archives of Venice, London and the Medici. He builds a picture of a city haunted by fire, plague, and violence, but one that was learning how to be a power in its own right as it emerged from feudalism. An astounding and original narrative that illuminates this glamorous and bloody era of history and reveals how this fascinating city played its role in making the world modern.

This book provides a unique perspective on the history of European algebra up to the advent of Viète and Descartes. The standard version of this history is written on the basis of a narrow and misleading source basis: the Latin translations of al-Khwārizmī, Fibonacci's Liber abbaci, Luca Pacioli's Summa, Cardano's Ars magna -- with neither Fibonacci nor Pacioli being read in detail. The existence of the Italian abacus and German cossic algebra is at most taken note of but they are not read, leading to the idea that Viète's and Descartes' use of genuine symbolism (not only abbreviations), many unknowns, and abstract coefficients seem to be miraculous leaps. This book traces the meandering development of all these techniques along with the mostly ignored but very important parenthesis function, by means of detailed readings of all pertinent sources, including the abacus and cossic algebra and French algebra from Chuquet to Gosselin. It argues for a necessary distinction between abbreviating glyphs and genuine symbols serving within a symbolic syntax, which allows it to trace the emergence of symbolic calculation. Characterization of the mathematical practice of the environment within which Viète and Descartes moved allows for an explanation of how these two figures did not even need to invent abstract coefficients but rather received them as a gift.

In Shakespeare's England, credit was synonymous with reputation, and reputation developed in the interplay of language, conduct, and social interpretation. As a consequence, artful language and social hermeneutics became practical, profitable skills. Since most people both used credit and extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference—of producing and reading evidence—were everywhere. Like poetry or drama, credit was constructed: fashioned out of the interplay of artifice and interpretation. The rhetorical dimension of economic relations produced social fictions on a range of scales: from transitory performances facilitating local transactions to the long-term project of maintaining creditworthiness to the generalized social indeterminacy that arose from the interplay of performance and interpretation. Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction.