The Journal of the Northern Renaissance, a peer-reviewed open access journal jointly funded by Bilkent, Edinburgh and Oxford universities and edited by Asst. Prof. Patrick Hart (ELIT), has brought out a new special issue, dedicated to “Numbers in Early Modern Writing.” Guest edited by Dr. Katherine Hunt (Queen’s College, Oxford) and Rebecca Tomlin (Birkbeck, University of London), the issue investigates how Renaissance developments in mathematics were presented and represented in written—and especially printed—texts, and how such novel concepts as the cipher, unity and equivalence, fractions and the spatial aspects of written numbers were given significance beyond arithmetic in poetry, on the stage and in prose. Including papers on such topics as fencing and swordplay manuals, early modern cryptography and the poetry of John Donne and William Shakespeare, the special issue reveals the richness, sophistication and strangeness of early modern numerical culture. You can find the issue at
http://www.northernrenaissance.org