Was zählt. Ordnungsangebote, Gebrauchsformen und Erfahrungsmodalitäten des “numerus” im Mittelalter herausgegeben von Moritz Wedell (review)

Stemming from research conducted in the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft group “Bild Schrift Zahl” this volume contains 15 contributions and was shaped in part by the international conference, “What counts. The Presence and Medial Functions of Numbers in the Middle Ages,” which took place in Berlin in 2006. The collection’s overarching goal, as explained in editor Moritz Wedell’s introduction, is to unite the heretofore three distinct modes of inquiry mentioned in its title in order to uncover the “Vieldimensionalität des vormodernen numerischen Wissens (und die Typen seiner Vernetzung)” (5). This unified approach to the study of numerus in the Middle Ages is its essential contribution to the field. Before proceeding, I must disclose that while the philosophy of mathematics interests me, I am no medieval researcher. Given my lack of period expertise, I would nevertheless claim that this ample volume offers a variety of contributions that would be useful for a broad range of scholars, and it is from this perspective that I will attempt to offer a meaningful review.

The volume has two consistent methodological points of departure that the contributions follow with varying consistency. The first is an insistence on practical, historical evidence. The second is a focus on intermediality, an approach that opens up the collection to a wider audience. The historical mode of analysis supplies the primary evidence for each study of “numerus” across a broad range of media and sources. The contributions investigate the weaving interrelationships of numbers across texts, images, speech, gestures, music, architecture, and sculpture. Wedell’s own contribution tracks the cultural significance and multivalent meanings of bodily gestures for iconic numbers as these appear in statues, diagrams, and texts, and in this manner it matches the ambition of the entire project. His contribution culminates in an interpretation of the mosaic Virgil and the Muses in which Virgil’s hand gesture for the number 83, also an apotropaic gesture, refers to the 83^rd word in the verse fragment also pictured in the mosaic. These clues ultimately point to The Aeneid and the conditions of its composition and transmission. In Wedell’s own words: “Die Zahlgeste für 83, ikonographisch überkodiert als apotropäische Gebärde, wird in einem Bild als Autorengeste zur Sicherung eines Intextes inszeniert, der seinerseits auf ein historisches literarisches Werk verweist, dessen endgültige Gestalt seinerzeit nicht ausgefochten war” (56).

It is equally important to mention this volume’s insistence on situating its analyses within cultural and historical evidence. Wedell’s aforementioned interpretation hinges on differences in signification that depended upon the practice of gesturing with the left or right hand. Had he relied on the textual computatio romana that described these gestures, instead of the additional bodily evidence for these gestures in practice, he would have misread Virgil’s gesture as 9800 instead of 83.

The volume is divided into five sections. The first section (“Grammatisch-diagrammatische Ordnungsentwürfe”) investigates the function of graphic depictions of numerals beyond their instrumental use as numbers in calculation. Robert Stockhammer pursues the changing role of graphic numerals in grammar and argues that in order to understand the “Auswanderung der Zahlen aus dem alphanumerischen Code” one must start in the antique province of “Grammathematik” from which they emigrated (69, 73). Kathrin Müller looks at the dependence of Boethius’s number theory on visual depictions. The graphics display certain concepts better than and prior to written descriptions thereof, such that these visual aids are both formulae and descriptions at the same time. This section would interest any non-period scholar who focuses on the materiality of language.

The second section (“Die problematische Aneignung kosmischer Ordnungen in Zeit, Raum und Klang”) seeks to narrate the untold stories of how exactly the order of numbers developed into a model of cosmic order in time, space, and sound. Precisely these processes had been ignored. Through her...