How was the practice of arithmetic developed and spread during the transition between the Middle Ages and the Modern Period? We know a lot about the evolution of mathematical theory and its diffusion in Latin, but little about the way in which arithmetic knowledge spread in the vernaculars in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Translation and adaptation of arithmetic treatises and manuals provided access to mathematical knowledge for new groups of people, shaped the practices of reckoning, and opened new ways of teaching arithmetic skills to persons without higher education. These efforts also endowed European vernaculars with new linguistic forms of abstraction and thus enhanced their potential to serve as a tool in the modern scientific revolution.
ARITHMETIC will study handwritten German arithmetic treatises from their first appearance around 1400 until the time when printed reckoning-books became easily available at the beginning of the 16th century. These texts have not been studied before, although they are important witnesses of the vernacularization of mathematical knowledge, of the interdependence of vernacular and Latin pragmatic literacy and of the links between mathematics, sciences, and commerce.
German mathematical manuscripts of the Late Middle Ages have hardly been studied yet, neither from a historical nor from a philological perspective: But the first handwritten German mathematical treatises already appeared around 1400. These treatises are not just proof that a vernacular mathematical tradition emerged early, they can also inform us on aspects relevant for several fields of research.
The Project wants to answer the following main questions:
• How does mathematical knowledge emerge, circulate, and change in a vernacular European context and what role do advancements in trade, other sciences, and social changes play?
• How did a mathematical and didactical jargon develop in the vernacular out of a Latin tradition?
• How does the underlying orality of instructive/pragmatic texts shape these treatises?
• What can we learn from the manuscripts as carriers of embodied knowledge in terms of material, agents (writer/recipient), and their movements across Europe?
• How can we adapt current digital methods to edit these heterogenous texts and make them accessible for further research?
The project will uncover 150 years of vernacular intellectual history and the development of scientific thinking. It will explain as well as introduce almost unknown sources to an interdisciplinary audience. It will add to and change our current understanding of a Late Medieval and Early Modern knowledge society by incorporating vernacular and therefore non-academic mathematical treatises as sources of research. Due to the availability of the Latin source material, we will be able to describe the formation process of a specialized mathematical jargon syntactically, semantically and on a lexical level. This study will help researchers to analyze other emerging jargons (trade, religion, other sciences), will contribute to the understanding of German as a language of science, and can be applied to other vernaculars as well. Lastly, this project will set a new standard in editorial practice, especially for complex and heterogenous research corpora, which will result in the creation of a transferable editorial model.
