Picturing Number in the Central Middle Ages.

Abstract

Numeracy was as highly valued as literacy in the schools of Latin-speaking Europe around the year 1000, and the skills inculcated by masters, engendering specific modes of seeing and imagining, had demonstrable impact on contemporary visual culture. The trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic—continued to be taught as the foundation of learning, but the quadrivium, the four disciplines of number—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—received new emphasis. Two of the era’s greatest intellects, Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II; c.940–1003) and Abbo of Fleury (c.944–1004), gained renown for their mathematical prowess and charismatic teaching. They educated a generation of Europe's powerful elites—including Emperor Otto III—and a host of anonymous clerics, monks, and priests. In the closed economy of the central middle ages, these men were also the primary patrons, makers, and viewers of objects. Works of the time, like the Pericope Book of Henry II, reveal new qualities when examined through the lens of number. This project is located at the cathedral school of Reims and the monastery school of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (Fleury)—where Gerbert and Abbo were masters, epicenters of a pan-European network of exchange linking monastic, episcopal, and lay institutions. Numeric knowledge was drawn from late antique and early medieval tracts by such figures as Boethius, Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, and Bede. Manuscript copies of these works produced and used at Reims and Fleury c.1000 give evidence of active engagement with their content, visual as well as verbal. Diagrammatic images earlier devised to explicate numeric concepts were now adapted and artfully elaborated for classroom use. This is evident in important introductions to the quadrivial disciplines prepared by Abbo (Explanatio in Calculo Victorii), Abbo’s student Byrhtferth of Ramsey (Enchiridion), and Gerbert (Isagoge geometriae). Accompanying images to these tracts are witness to contemporary notions of materiality, sight, and the limits of representation. Students of arithmetic became freshly attuned to placement and order. Computistic study developed an active, agile, and "curious" eye, while the practice of geometry exercised the intellectual eye, sharpening it, according to Gerbert, "for contemplating spiritual things and truths."PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116774/1/mcnameme_1.pd