Yale Bulletin and Calendar

January 11, 2008|Volume 36, Number 14

This is a detail from a 16th-century book of astronomical and astrological treatises that is on view in the Beinecke Library exhibit.

Exhibit reveals the ways in which mathematics was practiced in England 400-500 years ago

In 1604, explorer and navigator George Waymouth set out to win the King of England’s favor — and support for a new voyage to the American coast — by presenting the monarch with a manuscript of Waymouth’s elaborate illustrations of the mathematical instruments then in use on the battlefields of Europe, in navigation at sea and in the houses of practitioners of the new science

That manuscript, titled “Jewell of Artes,” now bound in royal arms, is one of the works featured in a new exhibition that opens this month at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Titled “The Reckoner’s Art: Reading and Writing Mathematics in Early Modern England,” the show documents how mathematics was read, written, learned, practiced and used in 16th- and 17th-century England. It will be on view Jan. 16-April 16.

The first mathematical textbook written in English was published by Robert Record in 1542. By the end of the 17th century, young boys and girls of the gentry practiced arithmetical word problems in the same notebooks in which they practiced their handwriting. Amateurs like Samuel Pepys or Robert Burton took up the study of mathematics as a hobby, reading books and using instruments like compasses and quadrants, maps and charts. The shelves of a London bookseller might be stuffed with works on arithmetic and geometry, mathematical puzzles, the making of mathematical instruments, and the uses of mathematics in astronomy, cartography, gunnery, navigation or accounting.

Mathematics was used on the battlefield by gunners, engineers and surveyors; at sea, by navigators and pilots; in property management, by estate owners and cartographers; and in trade, by merchants and clerks deciphering the complexities of currencies, weights and volumes. By the early 18th century, mathematician and scientist Isaac Newton had become an English national hero, prompting Alexander Pope to write his couplet that “God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”

Mathematics was also an important part of daily life. The 1604 Book of Common Prayer, for example, included a calendar for the reading of the psalms, a table outlining the “golden number” with which the reader could “finde Easter for ever” and a 39-year “almanacke” for the dating of the Church holidays, which also recorded the number of lunar days as well as the hour of sunrise and sunset. Popular almanacs and calendars recorded the dates of court and university sessions, of yearly events, and of the rising and setting of the moon, ensuring that business transactions could be predicted and conducted.

In addition to “Jewell of Artes” (which, incidentally, won Waymouth funding for his next and final voyage to America), the Beinecke Library exhibition features materials that document the hours, sums, debts and numbers by which the readers and owners of almanacs and other works jotted, counted, noted and organized their daily lives. These include account books and ledgers documenting the business of estates and trades; templates for the instruction of clerks on the correct format of receipts and bills; and notebooks or commonplace books in which readers scribbled important transactions on margins or on pages between copied excerpts from classical authors or English poets.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is located at 121 Wall St. It is open for exhibition viewing 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday; and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. For further information, call (203) 432-2977 or visit the website at www.library.yale.edu/beinecke.

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