WRITING, GEOMETRY AND SPACE IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND AND AMERICA by Jess Edwards ( 9780415323413 )

Item Details

Title:

WRITING, GEOMETRY AND SPACE IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND AND AMERICA

By:

Jess Edwards

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£130.00

Our price:

£117.00

Discount:

10% off

You save:

£13.00

ISBN 10:

041532341X

ISBN 13:

9780415323413

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Publisher:

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD

Pub. date:

24 November, 2005

Series:

Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture v. 5

Pages:

176

Description:

Re-thinking the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, this book argues that the cultural currency of mathematics was as unstable in the period as that of England's controversial enclosures and plantations. It is useful to all those affected by the 'spatial turn' in early modern cultural studies.

Synopsis:

The early modern map has come to mark the threshold of modernity, cutting through the layered customs of Medieval parochialism with its clean, expansive geometries. Re-thinking the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, this book argues that the cultural currency of mathematics was as unstable in the period as that of England's controversial enclosures and plantations. Reviewing evidence from a wide range of literary and scientific; courtly and pragmatic texts, Edwards suggests that its unstable currency rendered mathematics necessarily rhetorical: subject to constant re-negotiation. Yet he also finds a powerful flexibility in this weakness. Mathematized texts from masques to maps negotiated a contemporary ambivalence between Calvinist asceticism and humanist engagement. Their authors promoted themselves as artful guides between virtue and profit; the study and the marketplace. This multi-disciplinary work will be of interest to all disciplines affected by the recent 'spatial turn' in early modern cultural studies, and particularly to students and researchers in literature, history and geography.

Illustrations:

11 black & white illustrations, 11 black & white halftones

Publication:

Imprint:

Routledge

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Returnable

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