"Though the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have long been recognized as watershed moments of scientific discovery in Western Europe, recent work in "historical epistemology" has underscored the complexity and unevenness of the transition from older to newer forms of knowing and acting upon the world. Building on these insights, the essays that make up Arts of Calculation extend our understanding of how people come to count - how numbers create forms of agency, objects of inquiry, and kinds of cultural authority. This multidisciplinary collection traces a convergence of numerical thought across disciplinary and national boundaries."--Jacket.