Geometrical imagery in the work of Martianus Capella
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Martianus Capella's work De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii from late antiquity is not interesting only in the literary sense, but also serves as a remarkable testimony to the contemporary understanding of mathematics through the eyes of a non-mathematician. The seven liberal arts are introduced successively in the work. The individual arts come forward in a personified form and describe their content. Geometry and Arithmetic are among the arts, and they will be the topic of this talk. The entire story takes place at the wedding feast of the god Mars and his bride Philology, who receives the seven arts as a wedding gift. Each of the seven liberal arts is first described in terms of its appearance, attributes, and the impression they make on the Celestials. The first part of this talk will focus on the literary description of the personified Geometry and Arithmetic. The next part will focus on the content that each of them explain to the Celestials. Attention will be paid to how little geometry, in today's sense, is described by Geometry and what is the reason for that. On the other hand, geometry was essential for the ancient arithmetic, and therefore infiltrated a bit the presentation of Arithmetic. Special attention will be given to the mistakes that Martianus Capella made in his interpretations, and that affected the level of his didactic work. Capella used his sources to the maximum. The most important for him were the works of Euclid and Nicomachus of Gerasa. However, as it turns out after careful analysis, Capella often misunderstood his sources, and his work therefore contains many scholarly misrepresentations and errors. |
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