La retórica de las matemáticas en los tratados aritmético-algebraicos del Renacimiento

Abstract

1456

The deep movement of transformation and renewal of the social, economic and cultural orders befallen in the late Middle Ages, as well as the economic dynamism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the eagerness of wealth from of the bourgeois class contributes, along with a rapid urban expansion and an increase of continental commercial relationships, the urgent need to learn arithmetic in order to carry out successfully the new accounting. Consequently, in order to satisfy those social needs and for the sake of arrive to the greater number of readers, during the Renaissance were published, first in Spanish, many works devoted to the calculations. The publication of these arithmetic-algebraic treatises –whose purpose was essentially practical– in the five-hundred century brought with it, not only the democratization of the calculation, but also, from a linguistic viewpoint, dignified the use of the vernacular languages as transmitters of knowledge expressed traditionally in Latin to a minority elite and favored the construction of a type of speech whose rhetoric we analyze in this paper. In short, our aim is bring to light, through extracted fragments of the most significant sixteenth century treatises that containing arithmetic and algebra, the stylistic and informative characteristics of this specialised vocabulary. Motivated by humanist pedagogical theory and to instruct (docere), highlighted in the corpus studied the use of many examples, citations and allusions to authorities, instructions and warnings, among other rhetorical resources which we consider key to the establishment and dissemination of these disciplines in the Iberian Peninsula just like the configuration of the mathematical technolect in Spanish.

Keywords

Scientific Language, Rethoric, Mathematics, Renaissance.