Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America: Circles in the Sand

Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America: Circles in the Sand

Edwards, Jess

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Book 5

Literary CriticismCartography

ISBN10: 041532341X
ISBN13: 9780415323413
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Nov 24 2005
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.86
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.36 Depth: 9.44
Language: English

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.

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