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rushthatspeaksFor 0 read zero. The pun is intentional.
This is an analysis of the philosophical and cultural changes surrounding the introduction of the concept of zero into Renaissance Italy, done from a comparative lit standpoint. If you think this is a book that Thrud dropped into my lap one day on her way back from the university, you are entirely correct.
It is a fascinating book, in that it is crammed full of interesting information and ideas, one half of which are impeccably supported and beautifully cited and really well phrased and the other half of which--
this will require some explanation, and I'm going to digress into my adolescent reading habits to do that. When I was a teenager, I started reading a lot of things from the New Age/esoterica section of the library, partly as a form of adolescent rebellion and partly because of the random-cool-things factor and partly because I kept stumbling across things in other books I was reading that led me in that direction. I was voracious and indiscriminate for a while-- I mean I was reading Erich von Daniken-- and I swallowed a lot of it whole because I was twelve, in the way that twelve-year-olds believe things without believing them. (This was the huge reading phase just before I discovered lesbian feminist theory.) And then, after a while, I started developing qualms. And the qualms grew to massive cynicism. I have always been the sort of person who reads everything mentioned in the bibliography of a book I really like, and I started reading older and more obscure books, shifted from New Age stuff to Renaissance magic and earlier, primary sources when I could find them. A lot of stuff on witchcraft trials. It freaked my parents out as they were okay with a kid who read fantasy but I was bringing home the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.
By late high school, I had learned a great deal about some very obscure subjects. Everything I had learned boiled down to one thing, which is I think one of the truest lessons that can be learned from reading a lot in that field, and which I not only deduced on my own but had confirmed in fictional form in those years by two authors I trust, Umberto Eco and John Crowley. Here is a main truth behind the vast majority of esoterica, both ancient and modern: if you look for a pattern in anything, you will find it. If it comes into your head that you believe in a certain correspondence of signs, a conspiracy theory, the existence of a pattern behind all this-- if you figure out a pattern and hold hard to it-- you will find evidence for it no matter where you look, evidence that convinces you when you have put it in a form you like. This is true no matter what the pattern is, whether it's the Bavarian Illuminati or that the number ten is stalking you. Humans see patterns. It is a thing we are built for. And every occultist wants to tell you that they have the true key to reality (I'll be kind: some say they have one of many), and that the thing they believe is the pattern that underlies it all, and if you understand this pattern of theirs you can do magic.
Half of this book, that I read tonight, is very good scholarship. The other half is the natural tendency of a person who has very good ideas to seek the patterns behind those ideas in everything, and insist that there are no coincidences, there are no mistakes, every piece of evidence that sounds like evidence is evidence. In short it is, and I use this term very advisedly about this particular book, magical thinking. There are some kinds of magical thinking that I think are actively encouraged by postmodernist critical methods-- I wish it were not possible to get through a comp lit program without any comparative linguistics, as the cross-linguistic pun as an actual signifier of actual significance usually crumbles before the entire concept of 'false cognate'.
In short, half of this book is totally batshit.
I recommend it highly because of both halves. This is because one is genuinely informative and the other, well, the fantasy writers among you? I cannot think of a better way to come up with interesting and useful ideas for writing fantasy than to spend a good deal of time with someone who is doing this sort of well-written magical thinking at you. Take just one of the postulates as true, and the worldbuilding and the way that magic works design themselves. Something like this is, for me, like reading a text actually titled Useful Things For Your Work In Progress (of course, my work in progress has bits in Renaissance Italy, your mileage may vary). It's very pleasant and I wish there were more of it out there.
Now, as far as the actually informative.
The book covers the transition between Roman numerals and the current Arabic system, and explains very convincingly how this transition, and specifically the introduction of zero to denote nothingness, was part of and partly caused a general change in mindset that led directly to double-entry bookkeeping, letters of credit, and great advances in cryptography, and, indirectly, to, you know, modernity in general. The change in mindset is the change between a system in which there is a cultural assumption that things have some inherent meaning and one in which the meaning of a thing is defined by shared context.
Let me unpack that the way the author does. You have a coin. It's made of gold. The gold is defined as valuable-- that's not really an inherent meaning, but everybody acts as though it is, and talks a lot about the purity, virtue, medicinal properties etc. of gold and how it is innately a noble metal. When the process of mass coin-production comes in, which in Italy is in the mid-sixteenth century, dukes and kings and so on start putting their faces and seals on the coin. Now its value is backed by the authority in power and its worth is defined at least partly by them.
Put that face and seal on a piece of paper and write that it's a hundred gold ducats. If the authority in power backs that up, it is. This is the cultural trick behind paper money, which should be familiar to everybody. So what's important is not the gold, but what's written on it, and where the writing is-- whether it's somewhere officially approved of. The value of the writing is based on where it is. It's not valuable if it's not either on something considered to have intrinsic value or somewhere that someone says has value, and the value of the writing is that it confers value on the thing it's written on. But how do you know if someone has actually said this thing has value? How do you know if the writing has actual backing? It might have a lot of value. It might have none at all. It's entirely dependent on the social context agreed between the people who back the writing, which you the individual person may or may not be aware of.
Now take a Roman numeral. It's made up of other numerals, in that iii is three of i is three of the number one, but you notice how each i is still a one when you pick it apart and write them separately. Arabic numerals don't do that. 1 through 9 are not made of each other. Roman numerals do not necessarily have place-order or definite form; you can write xiv as xiiii and in medieval Europe you could actually write it ivx. Arabic numerals don't do that either. 9 is nine, as long as there isn't a zero after it, because then it's ninety. It's dependent on place-order. The value of 9 depends on where the writing is. And on the social context of everyone knowing that, which they do have to be told. So 9 has no intrinsic value, although everyone thought ix did. 9 might have a lot of value. It might have none at all. Does the person you're talking to know the system? And zero, of course, is nothing. Except that it's something, because the system won't work without it. You have to have a sign for nothing, which has no inherent value. The concept of inherent value has been divorced from Arabic numerals.
Now take the onset of printing. The unit of the medieval word is the syllable. Syllables have to stay together; they're connected by elaborate ligatures. They're thought of as an inherent thing. The unit of the typeset word is the letter, and also the blank die, which makes the space between words. The blank die is kind of like a zero: it's nothing, but the system doesn't work without it. So you have the concept of a denotation of nothing in this typesetting you're setting up, and you know that the value of coinage is based on what everybody says, the value of numerals is based on what everybody says, there is no intrinsic value there-- why shouldn't the value of the letter or the word be contextually determined too?
And sure enough, within about a century after the introduction of printing you get the great Renaissance books of cryptography, with their letter-into-letter and letter-into-number substitutions, always in the Arabic numeral system; and also the invention of the sign for the square root of negative one, a denotation which has no real-world equivalent; and also the suggestion that letters could be used in equations to denote unknowns. This really does indicate a major shift in the way people think about signs and symbols, the way people use writing to express things. It's a much more modern way of thinking. This is when math becomes a language and when people studying codes start to notice things like letter pattern-frequency in words. This is one of the things that breaks the Aristotelian universe.
As the author points out, this is real alchemy, too: lo, we have said this paper is gold, and it is. We have said this codeword is really this other word, and it is. We say 90 is ninety, and it is. There's so much power in all this contextual definition that we don't even need the real gold anymore.
Of course, she runs mad with it. I don't blame her; the liberation of signs from things is indeed a very powerful occurrence. She goes on and on about words that pun in Italian and English and Latin, and never thinks that indeed a word could have an inherent value, i.e. it refers to a thing, and another word refers to another thing, and the two things are not related. She's an Oxfordian, bless her heart, because she's fond of the people who run cryptographic analyses of The Tempest and she thinks of the author as only another shifting signifier, not an historical fact. (Though I did like her pointing out, randomly, in passing, that in the song that's going on during the casket-choosing scene in The Merchant of Venice all the significant lines rhyme with -ed, with lead, which is of course the correct answer: "Tell me where is fancy bred? / Or in the heart or in the head..." Cute.) She has an entire chapter on Petrarch focused on the concept that his handwriting is somehow using zeros in specific precise locations instead of the letter o, which I can only describe as sounding remarkably like those people who come up to you on street corners to explain that if you play Sesame Street songs backwards you get the Rolling Stones. She is incapable of seeing a painting as not being a signifier of the absence of the painter, which I find very funny, and she seems to see the actual metal lead as a symbol of fertility and I have no idea where she got that one.
I kept waiting for her to actually go into Tarot or astrology. The thing is, there would have been sensible ways to do it, because this book helps make the appearance of Tarot at about that time period make sense to me, a collection of signs suggestive of hidden inherent meanings via the previous system of correspondences but actually defined entirely by context; and cryptography has canonical links to astrology. But I also rather expected her to break out in oracles, it seemed likely. Thankfully, she didn't, though I rather question her commitment to the metaphor of alchemy as it was very useful in a couple of places and then overextended.
I discover upon Googling that she has evidently given up writing academic books and turns out to have a successful career writing historical romance and YA. I had not heard of her and may now look into it. Semiotics is losing something, I think, but as I said, this is a mindset that could produce great fantasy novels.
Or terrible ones. Depending on whether the magical thinking did as it is sometimes wont, and broke like a fever, or not. Having a system that Explains Everything down to the last little detail can be a good thing in a novel (though I wouldn't tell the reader all about it, unless you want them to find your world innately predictable). In the world in general, it can give you some problems, one of which is the writing of bad novels when you try to make your books conform to a system that doesn't seem realistic to other people. So I'll try a historical-- her system is only meant to explain the entire Renaissance, anyhow, not the universe in general, but I expect a historical novel of hers would be set there, so we'll see what she makes of it.
This is an analysis of the philosophical and cultural changes surrounding the introduction of the concept of zero into Renaissance Italy, done from a comparative lit standpoint. If you think this is a book that Thrud dropped into my lap one day on her way back from the university, you are entirely correct.
It is a fascinating book, in that it is crammed full of interesting information and ideas, one half of which are impeccably supported and beautifully cited and really well phrased and the other half of which--
this will require some explanation, and I'm going to digress into my adolescent reading habits to do that. When I was a teenager, I started reading a lot of things from the New Age/esoterica section of the library, partly as a form of adolescent rebellion and partly because of the random-cool-things factor and partly because I kept stumbling across things in other books I was reading that led me in that direction. I was voracious and indiscriminate for a while-- I mean I was reading Erich von Daniken-- and I swallowed a lot of it whole because I was twelve, in the way that twelve-year-olds believe things without believing them. (This was the huge reading phase just before I discovered lesbian feminist theory.) And then, after a while, I started developing qualms. And the qualms grew to massive cynicism. I have always been the sort of person who reads everything mentioned in the bibliography of a book I really like, and I started reading older and more obscure books, shifted from New Age stuff to Renaissance magic and earlier, primary sources when I could find them. A lot of stuff on witchcraft trials. It freaked my parents out as they were okay with a kid who read fantasy but I was bringing home the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.
By late high school, I had learned a great deal about some very obscure subjects. Everything I had learned boiled down to one thing, which is I think one of the truest lessons that can be learned from reading a lot in that field, and which I not only deduced on my own but had confirmed in fictional form in those years by two authors I trust, Umberto Eco and John Crowley. Here is a main truth behind the vast majority of esoterica, both ancient and modern: if you look for a pattern in anything, you will find it. If it comes into your head that you believe in a certain correspondence of signs, a conspiracy theory, the existence of a pattern behind all this-- if you figure out a pattern and hold hard to it-- you will find evidence for it no matter where you look, evidence that convinces you when you have put it in a form you like. This is true no matter what the pattern is, whether it's the Bavarian Illuminati or that the number ten is stalking you. Humans see patterns. It is a thing we are built for. And every occultist wants to tell you that they have the true key to reality (I'll be kind: some say they have one of many), and that the thing they believe is the pattern that underlies it all, and if you understand this pattern of theirs you can do magic.
Half of this book, that I read tonight, is very good scholarship. The other half is the natural tendency of a person who has very good ideas to seek the patterns behind those ideas in everything, and insist that there are no coincidences, there are no mistakes, every piece of evidence that sounds like evidence is evidence. In short it is, and I use this term very advisedly about this particular book, magical thinking. There are some kinds of magical thinking that I think are actively encouraged by postmodernist critical methods-- I wish it were not possible to get through a comp lit program without any comparative linguistics, as the cross-linguistic pun as an actual signifier of actual significance usually crumbles before the entire concept of 'false cognate'.
In short, half of this book is totally batshit.
I recommend it highly because of both halves. This is because one is genuinely informative and the other, well, the fantasy writers among you? I cannot think of a better way to come up with interesting and useful ideas for writing fantasy than to spend a good deal of time with someone who is doing this sort of well-written magical thinking at you. Take just one of the postulates as true, and the worldbuilding and the way that magic works design themselves. Something like this is, for me, like reading a text actually titled Useful Things For Your Work In Progress (of course, my work in progress has bits in Renaissance Italy, your mileage may vary). It's very pleasant and I wish there were more of it out there.
Now, as far as the actually informative.
The book covers the transition between Roman numerals and the current Arabic system, and explains very convincingly how this transition, and specifically the introduction of zero to denote nothingness, was part of and partly caused a general change in mindset that led directly to double-entry bookkeeping, letters of credit, and great advances in cryptography, and, indirectly, to, you know, modernity in general. The change in mindset is the change between a system in which there is a cultural assumption that things have some inherent meaning and one in which the meaning of a thing is defined by shared context.
Let me unpack that the way the author does. You have a coin. It's made of gold. The gold is defined as valuable-- that's not really an inherent meaning, but everybody acts as though it is, and talks a lot about the purity, virtue, medicinal properties etc. of gold and how it is innately a noble metal. When the process of mass coin-production comes in, which in Italy is in the mid-sixteenth century, dukes and kings and so on start putting their faces and seals on the coin. Now its value is backed by the authority in power and its worth is defined at least partly by them.
Put that face and seal on a piece of paper and write that it's a hundred gold ducats. If the authority in power backs that up, it is. This is the cultural trick behind paper money, which should be familiar to everybody. So what's important is not the gold, but what's written on it, and where the writing is-- whether it's somewhere officially approved of. The value of the writing is based on where it is. It's not valuable if it's not either on something considered to have intrinsic value or somewhere that someone says has value, and the value of the writing is that it confers value on the thing it's written on. But how do you know if someone has actually said this thing has value? How do you know if the writing has actual backing? It might have a lot of value. It might have none at all. It's entirely dependent on the social context agreed between the people who back the writing, which you the individual person may or may not be aware of.
Now take a Roman numeral. It's made up of other numerals, in that iii is three of i is three of the number one, but you notice how each i is still a one when you pick it apart and write them separately. Arabic numerals don't do that. 1 through 9 are not made of each other. Roman numerals do not necessarily have place-order or definite form; you can write xiv as xiiii and in medieval Europe you could actually write it ivx. Arabic numerals don't do that either. 9 is nine, as long as there isn't a zero after it, because then it's ninety. It's dependent on place-order. The value of 9 depends on where the writing is. And on the social context of everyone knowing that, which they do have to be told. So 9 has no intrinsic value, although everyone thought ix did. 9 might have a lot of value. It might have none at all. Does the person you're talking to know the system? And zero, of course, is nothing. Except that it's something, because the system won't work without it. You have to have a sign for nothing, which has no inherent value. The concept of inherent value has been divorced from Arabic numerals.
Now take the onset of printing. The unit of the medieval word is the syllable. Syllables have to stay together; they're connected by elaborate ligatures. They're thought of as an inherent thing. The unit of the typeset word is the letter, and also the blank die, which makes the space between words. The blank die is kind of like a zero: it's nothing, but the system doesn't work without it. So you have the concept of a denotation of nothing in this typesetting you're setting up, and you know that the value of coinage is based on what everybody says, the value of numerals is based on what everybody says, there is no intrinsic value there-- why shouldn't the value of the letter or the word be contextually determined too?
And sure enough, within about a century after the introduction of printing you get the great Renaissance books of cryptography, with their letter-into-letter and letter-into-number substitutions, always in the Arabic numeral system; and also the invention of the sign for the square root of negative one, a denotation which has no real-world equivalent; and also the suggestion that letters could be used in equations to denote unknowns. This really does indicate a major shift in the way people think about signs and symbols, the way people use writing to express things. It's a much more modern way of thinking. This is when math becomes a language and when people studying codes start to notice things like letter pattern-frequency in words. This is one of the things that breaks the Aristotelian universe.
As the author points out, this is real alchemy, too: lo, we have said this paper is gold, and it is. We have said this codeword is really this other word, and it is. We say 90 is ninety, and it is. There's so much power in all this contextual definition that we don't even need the real gold anymore.
Of course, she runs mad with it. I don't blame her; the liberation of signs from things is indeed a very powerful occurrence. She goes on and on about words that pun in Italian and English and Latin, and never thinks that indeed a word could have an inherent value, i.e. it refers to a thing, and another word refers to another thing, and the two things are not related. She's an Oxfordian, bless her heart, because she's fond of the people who run cryptographic analyses of The Tempest and she thinks of the author as only another shifting signifier, not an historical fact. (Though I did like her pointing out, randomly, in passing, that in the song that's going on during the casket-choosing scene in The Merchant of Venice all the significant lines rhyme with -ed, with lead, which is of course the correct answer: "Tell me where is fancy bred? / Or in the heart or in the head..." Cute.) She has an entire chapter on Petrarch focused on the concept that his handwriting is somehow using zeros in specific precise locations instead of the letter o, which I can only describe as sounding remarkably like those people who come up to you on street corners to explain that if you play Sesame Street songs backwards you get the Rolling Stones. She is incapable of seeing a painting as not being a signifier of the absence of the painter, which I find very funny, and she seems to see the actual metal lead as a symbol of fertility and I have no idea where she got that one.
I kept waiting for her to actually go into Tarot or astrology. The thing is, there would have been sensible ways to do it, because this book helps make the appearance of Tarot at about that time period make sense to me, a collection of signs suggestive of hidden inherent meanings via the previous system of correspondences but actually defined entirely by context; and cryptography has canonical links to astrology. But I also rather expected her to break out in oracles, it seemed likely. Thankfully, she didn't, though I rather question her commitment to the metaphor of alchemy as it was very useful in a couple of places and then overextended.
I discover upon Googling that she has evidently given up writing academic books and turns out to have a successful career writing historical romance and YA. I had not heard of her and may now look into it. Semiotics is losing something, I think, but as I said, this is a mindset that could produce great fantasy novels.
Or terrible ones. Depending on whether the magical thinking did as it is sometimes wont, and broke like a fever, or not. Having a system that Explains Everything down to the last little detail can be a good thing in a novel (though I wouldn't tell the reader all about it, unless you want them to find your world innately predictable). In the world in general, it can give you some problems, one of which is the writing of bad novels when you try to make your books conform to a system that doesn't seem realistic to other people. So I'll try a historical-- her system is only meant to explain the entire Renaissance, anyhow, not the universe in general, but I expect a historical novel of hers would be set there, so we'll see what she makes of it.
