Making Mathematical Culture

Richard Oosterhoff is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow at CRASSH where he is researching a monograph on the 'untutored mind' in Early Modern Europe. Richard completed his PhD in 2013 at the University of Notre Dame, and has since worked on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe in the areas of science, the book, and religion. His articles have appeared in the Journal for the History of Ideas, Intellectual History Review, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and History of Universities.

• Acknowledgements List of Illustrations 1: Introduction 2: A Mathematical Turn 3: Copia in the Classroom 4: Inventing the Printed Textbook 5: The Senses of Mixed Mathematics 6: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 7: Epilogue Appendix Bibliography

Oosterhoff's book is a first-rate scholarly work. Through his sharp and intelligent scrutiny of the dense (and prolific) printed Latin oeuvres generated by Lefèvre and other members of the Fabrist circle, the author reveals a fascinating and transformative late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century pedagogical era in which mathematics was not only considered for its practical purposes but also contemplated for "regulating the soul as it realizes its larger goals of knowledge" (49). This book is certainly as important to Renaissance Paris as Andrew Warwick's Masters of Theory (2003) is to Victorian Cambridge. I highly recommend the book to early modern intellectual scholars who desire a broader understanding of French humanism and to historians of science seeking earlier origins of the mathematical way in natural philosophy.