The Language of Practical Mathematics in Renaissance Italy

This volume presents the first linguistic and philological analysis, and edition (with English translation) of a fifteenth-century vernacular manuscript from Renaissance Italy, written by an author from the city of Cremona, in northern Italy. The text is a libro d’abbaco, used to teach practical business mathematics to young boys. The vernacular language of these texts has been largely neglected. The libri d’abbaco, however, reveal much about the native language of the ordinary people and the language of banking, and artisan sectors in the major Italian cities of the time. This textbook serves as a starting point to reflect upon some key linguistic, cultural, and intellectual developments in fifteenth-century Lombardy. It provides a thorough comparative-historical analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the work, together with a detailed scrutiny of the lexicon, including specialist vocabulary and distinctively dialectal terms.

The volume broadens the understanding and mode of engagement with vernacular technical registers and early pedagogical works, and aims to throw light on the little-explored question of the language of the vernacular libri d’abbaco, in ways of interest to linguists, philologists, textual scholars, and historians.