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- Title
The Earliest English Printed Arithmetic Books.
- Authors
Williams, Travis D.
- Abstract
The earliest known English-language printed arithmetic primer, from 1526, is generally unknown to scholarship. The complete copy of the second earliest such primer, printed in 1536 or 1537, entered a public archive in 2005. The reintroduction of these books to scholarly scrutiny unsettles previous conclusions about the origins of vernacular mathematical printing in England and moves it forward by a decade. Basic though the contents of the earliest primers may be, these texts represent an important moment in the history of a discipline that currently enjoys vigorous attention from scholars who seek to reincorporate mathematics into the cultural, rhetorical, political, and economic landscapes of the early modern world. A fresh assessment of the evidence is therefore appropriate. This article describes the earliest printed English arithmetic primers and clarifies the relationships among them. Since the English arithmetic tradition was originally derivative of Continental sources, which resulted in composite texts, it also describes the likely source texts of the English tradition. Lastly, it presents a hypothetical reconstruction of the creation of the earliest English texts out of their Continental sources. The cumulative effect of these descriptions and reconstructions demonstrates a coherence to the earliest phases of mathematical printing in England and a complexity behind the creation of these seemingly ephemeral and shoddily-printed texts.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; ARITHMETIC; MATHEMATICS education; MATHEMATICS printing; PRINTING
- Publication
Library, 2012, Vol 13, Issue 2, p164
- ISSN
0024-2160
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/library/13.2.164