The Language of Practical Mathematics in Renaissance Italy: A Fifteenth Century Vernacular Didactic Treatise

This volume presents the first linguistic and philological analysis, and edition (with English translation) of a fifteenth-century vernacular manuscript from Renaissance Italy, written by an author from the city of Cremona, in northern Italy. The text is a libro d'abbaco, used to teach practical business mathematics to young boys. The vernacular language of these texts has been largely neglected. The libri d'abbaco, however, reveal much about the native language of the ordinary people and the language of banking, and artisan sectors in the major Italian cities of the time. This textbook serves as a starting point to reflect upon some key linguistic, cultural, and intellectual developments in fifteenth-century Lombardy. It provides a thorough comparative-historical analysis of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the work, together with a detailed scrutiny of the lexicon, including specialist vocabulary and distinctively dialectal terms.The volume broadens the understanding and mode of engagement with vernacular technical registers and early pedagogical works, and aims to throw light on the little-explored question of the language of the vernacular libri d'abbaco, in ways of interest to linguists, philologists, textual scholars, and historians.

About the Author

Valentina Ferrari is a historical linguist and in particular a historian of the origins of Italian vernaculars. She is currently Research Fellow on a project focusing on the linguistic history of vernacular mathematics in Renaissance Italy: Vernacular Mathematics in the Italian Dialects: A History , funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She is based in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. She has published on a variety of topics on lexical, syntactic, and textual aspects of medieval Latin and Romance documents from Italy. She holds a PhD in linguistics from the Scuola Normale Superiore.

Martin Maiden is a Romance linguist with particular interests in Italian and Romanian. Since 1996 he has been Professor of the Romance Languages at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of Academia Europaea, and a corresponding member of Italy's Accademia della Crusca. He has been president of the Società internazionale di linguistica e filologia italiana and the Società di linguistica italiana. He is currently President of the Société de linguistique romane. He is the author of A Linguistic History of Italian (1995) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Italian Language (2026).