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Manuscript Additions to the Edinburgh University Copy of Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica
Author(s) -
LEE GEOFFREY A.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
abacus
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.632
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1467-6281
pISSN - 0001-3072
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6281.1989.tb00226.x
Subject(s) - magic (telescope) , relation (database) , classics , bookkeeping , prologue , literature , the renaissance , fifteenth , history , philosophy , art , art history , accounting , physics , quantum mechanics , database , computer science , business
The copy of Luca Pacioli's Summa (1494) now owned by the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, exhibits at the end fifty‐nine pages of manuscript additions, dating from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. There is evidence that this material was written in the main by Filippo Calandri, who published the first printed textbook of arithmetic in Florence in 1491/2. The author has deciphered most of the MS from photocopies. The material has no reference to bookkeeping or accounting, but is a curious and interesting product of the Renaissance Italian mind. Much of it appears to be notes for a book on mensuration, probably by Calandri, and incorporating some matter from his Arithmetica. The MS also includes many astrological calculations, and a series of Latin aphorisms with a prologue, besides (in another hand) a few magic charms or spells. The MS material is described and analysed, and the relation of its parts to one another, to Calandri and to Pacioli, is explored.