Anne’s Reviews > The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 > Status Update

I'm amused the epilogue was on maps and I could barely keep my eyes open for it (it was my geographer friend who foisted it on me!).

"In the past seven centuries bookkeeping has done more to
shape the perceptions of more bright minds than any single innovation in philosophy or science. While a few people pondered the
words of Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant, millions of others
of yeasty and industrious inclination wrote entries in neat books
and then rationalized the world to fit their books" [p. 221]

And the speculation I found the most eye-popping, "The Venetian style [double entry accounting]...encouraged us in our often useful and sometimes pernicious practice of dividing everything into black or white, good or evil, useful or useless, part of the problem or part of the solution - either this or that" [p. 200].

Cont.. "Double-entry bookkeeping was and is a means of soaking up and holding in suspension and then arranging and making sense out of masses of data that previously had been spilled and lost. It played an important role in enabling Renaissance Europeans and their successors in commerce, industry, and government to launch and maintain control over their corporations and bureaucracies" [p. 220].

Why yes, the author did save the best for last. Hahahaha! I know, I know accounting/bookkeeping is hardly considered "the best" when put up against music, art, etc. so let me just quote this bit, "Double-entry bookkeeping did not change the world.... It was not even essential for capitalism. But our tastes affect the development of our cultures and our societies less than our practices do" [p. 219-220].

Just gonna put this here... even if it's evocative for me alone (go 1990s! go this book! Go the two together!!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F9Dx...

"Until the last generations of the first Christian millennium,
Europeans performed liturgical music from memory. The variety
of texts and performances must have been great, considering faulty recall, regional differences, and individual tastes" [p. 141]

Cue the introduction to Gregorian chant and my need to take a break to dig up some of that 90s music with Gregorian chants (WTF were we doing in the 1990s??) LOL

"We know next to nothing about what peasants, the great majority, thought of the clock, but we can be sure that the urbanites held the time machine in high esteem. Every big city and many smaller ones taxed themselves severly in order to have at least one clock... It may be that no complicated machine in the entire history of technology before the 17th century spread so rapidly as the clock" [p. 84] Same. I <3 clocks

I enoyed the entirety of chapter 2 which detailed how it was all about qualitativeness (rather than quantitaveness) of space, time, etc. in the early midieval times.

When talking about some map it was a, "nonquantificational, non geometrical attempt to supply information about what was near and what was far... more like an expressionist portrait rather than an identification photo" [p. 40]. Fun!

Sure, I could be reading one of those other books already on my currently reading shelf but why? When there's a whole bunch of medieval developments I apprently need to read about.

And the term polyphony, how have I, an enjoyer of electronic music, never heard that term before?