ARITHMETIC

The ARITHMETIC project aims to show how arithmetic knowledge and the practice of 

The ARITHMETIC project aims to show how arithmetic knowledge and the practice of 

Arithmetic changed in the late Middle Ages in Europe. The mathematical language developed from a Latin tradition in a vernacular environment. The focus is on researching the development and dissemination of arithmetic practice at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. While we know a lot about the development of mathematical theory and its dissemination in Latin, we know little about how arithmetic knowledge spread in vernacular languages in the 15th and early 16th centuries. 

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.

The almost 140 treatises will be transcribed, digitally edited, and analyzed from a historic, literary, and linguistic perspective. An “Assertive Edition” relying on Semantic Enrichment will be one product of ARITHMETIC. A detailed linguistic analysis focusing on semantics, syntax, the vocabulary, and the transmission context will lead to the reconstruction of an arithmetic discourse, give information on the orality underlying didactic texts and allow tracing writers/compilers and users and their educational and social background. This research aims at a new understanding of how arithmetical knowledge and practices of calculation were transformed in Late Medieval Europe, and how an abstract and scientific language emerged in the German vernacular.

The manuscripts from our corpus contain texts that deal with the art of calculating on different levels and through different types of texts. There are, on the one hand, the theoretical texts like Sacrobosco’s »Algorism« or the introductions to the different »species« in the reckoning books that use hardly any examples and rely on a descriptive approach to the topic. On the other hand, we find highly practical texts that are explicitly interested in the »how-to« aspect of practical Arithmetic, explaining steps of calculations not only with words but also giving lengthy examples and sample calculations. What we find is a highly heterogeneous collection of texts that contains information on the development of late medieval mathematics and of a German mathematical jargon, but also on late medieval history and culture. 

With our team of philologists, historians, linguists, and digital humanities experts, we are currently conducting a truly interdisciplinary research project. We study the texts, the collections, their users, and the environments they were created in with the goal of learning more about the development of our knowledge-society, about the underlying processes of transmitting knowledge, and about the narrative processes that shape this transmission.