By the Numbers with Jessica Otis

April 25 at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 4pm GMT

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England by Jessica Otis.

“During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English numerical practices underwent a complex transformation with wide-ranging impacts on English society. At the beginning of the early modern period, English men and women believed that God had made humans universally numerate, although numbers were not central to their everyday lives. Over the next two centuries, rising literacy rates and the increasing availability of printed books revolutionized modes of arithmetical practice and education. Ordinary English people began to use numbers and quantification to explain abstract phenomena as diverse as the relativity of time, the probability of chance events, and the constitution of human populations. These changes reflected their participation in broader early modern European cultural and intellectual developments such as the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. By the eighteenth century, English men and women still believed they lived in a world made by God, but it was also a world made—and made understandable—by numbers.”

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Jessica Marie Otis is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.  Her research explores how people adopt and adapt to new information technologies, as well as the ways those technologies can transform previous understandings of both the natural world and human history.  Recent and current digital history projects include World History Commons, an OER for teaching World History; DataScribe, an Omeka S module for transcribing structured data; Mathematical Humanists, a workshop series teaching mathematical concepts that underpin common DH methods; and Death by Numbers, examining the early modern London Bills of Mortality.  Her book By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England is now available through Oxford University Press.

Ted McCormick is Professor of History and Fellow in the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009) and Human Empire: Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500-1800(Cambridge, 2022), each of which won the John Ben Snow Prize.