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Numeracy in Early Modern England. The Prothero Lecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Keith Thomas
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Extract

In Recent years historians of the early modern period have given much attention to the subject of literacy, its growth, its determinants and its consequences. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England saw the widespread dissemination of the printed book and a substantial increase in the proportion of the population able to use the written word. It is possible to exaggerate the historical importance of these developments, but there is no denying that they give the early modern period much of its distinctive flavour.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 37 , December 1987 , pp. 103 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1987

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144 This is a strikingly consistent feature of all the listings I have analysed.

145 Renshaw, Walter C., ‘Witnesses from Ecclesiastical Deposition Books, 1580–1640’, Sussex Archaelogical Collections, lvi (1914)Google Scholar.

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147 Worsop, Discoverie of Sundrie Errours, sig. I2V.

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134 Locke, , Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, , 207 (II. xvi. 6.)Google Scholar.

155 Hardcastle, Thomas, Christian Geography and Arithmetick (1674), 59Google Scholar.

156 Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Hull, , ii. 397. Cf. Kersey, John, The Elements of that Mathematical Art commonly called Algebra (1673), sig. b2Google Scholar; Shapiro, Barbara J., Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J., 1983), 32–Google Scholar

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158 Child, , New Discourses of Trade, 4–5Google Scholar; Philosophical Transactions, xvi (for 1686 and 1687) (1688), 152Google Scholar; The Political and Commercial Works of… Charles D’Avenant, ed. SirWhitworth, Charles (5 vols., 1771), i. 135Google Scholar.

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