Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (Toronto Italian Studies) - Softcover

Saiber, Arielle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1487541953 ISBN 13: 9781487541958

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Arielle Saiber is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487541953
• ISBN 13: 9781487541958
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280