Spiritual Calculations: Number and Numeracy in Late Medieval English Sermons, by Christine Cooper-Rompato

Having observed that number symbolism is pervasive in late antiquity, I have long suspected that the same should hold for most, if not all, other cultures in the early, middle, and late medieval periods. In Spiritual Calculations, Christine Cooper-Rompato unpacks a number of key sermons to show that this was, indeed, the case in late medieval England. Her monograph will be useful to specialists in the field who may be unfamiliar with the details of premodern Christian number symbolism. It is also a model for scholars working on symbolism (of all sorts, not just number) in other cultures and eras.The study focuses on what the author terms numerology, which, for her purposes, excludes prognostic techniques and instead centers on how cardinal numbers and numerical operations such as enumeration, subtraction, addition, multiplication, and factoring were used to teach moral and theological lessons. Chapter 1 provides a general overview of late medieval sermons, which through scholastic innovations were subdivided and enumerated. The very structure of a sermon could be numerologically resonant. The chapter also deals with the cultural legacy of Greco-Roman number symbolism, epitomized in Greek by Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose writings were known to the Latin West through Boethius's translation. Cooper-Rompato shows that numbers in sermons were connected with everyday practices of numeracy, setting the stage for the heart of the monograph: a set of three chapters that treat as many different authors.Chapter 2 focuses on an anonymous Franciscan who wrote a number of sermons (Warminster, Longleat House MS 4) and a dialogue titled Dives and Pauper, both dating to the first decade of the fifteenth century. Cooper-Rompato identifies a number of passages in both texts that show how the author used arithmetic and numerate practices to help readers comprehend the divine, and she connects these practices to each other and to other earlier texts, such as Boethius's Arithmetica (early sixth century); the Sapientia, a tenth-century play written in Latin by an unknown German playwright; and a contemporary text, the fifteenth-century York Play of Pentecost, also of unknown authorship.Chapter 3 concentrates on an anonymous ninety-five-sermon cycle called Jacob's Well, likely delivered in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and preserved in Salisbury Cathedral Library MS 103 (mid-fifteenth century). The number symbolism in these sermons, which interpret the encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob, is fruitfully compared by Cooper-Rompato to the late medieval Mactatio Abel by the Wakefield Master, the thirteenth-century Life of Saint James the Mutilated, and the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe. Particular to this chapter are thematic passages that demonstrate how number and numerate practices could help sermon recipients detect vices, cultivate virtues, and measure and gauge their own selves and sins.Chapter 4 looks at a collection of ninety-five sermons by Robert Rypon (1350–1421/22), a Benedictine from Durham Priory. The sermons—written in Latin and preserved in London, British Library, MS Harley 4894—engage in a variety of types of number symbolism, including antiquarian psephy/gematria and more contemporary practices. In two notable passages, Rypon extols the accumulation of good deeds by depicting it in terms of adding money on counting boards, which were used to convert pence to shillings and shillings to pounds.The texts discussed in these three chapters show that sermonizers were engaged with classical texts on number symbolism and with contemporary numeracy. The rich panoply of comparative material shows that the three authors were not anomalies. Number was part of the warp and weft of the symbolism of late medieval England. That insight is made quite plain in the final chapter, which sheds light on many passages in The Book of Margery Kempe. That chapter is misleadingly called a conclusion, not merely because it introduces new material, but because Cooper-Rompato deftly shows that her study is less a summation than a catalyst for new lines of research.In this study, the questions of audience and of medium are slow to emerge. The introduction refers to the text creators as either the sermonist or the author, which suggests an ambiguous or written medium, but the recipients are called the audience, suggesting an oral one (see esp. 8–9 and 39 "writer . . . audience"). Only later in the study (starting on 47) is the question of listeners or readers addressed, Cooper-Rompato noting that, for some texts, setting cannot be determined or that a sermon written in Latin might have, on the fly, been performed in English. More could have been developed on this front, especially concerning oral performance. Consider the scholastic innovation of enumerated sermon parts. Its effect is clearly visible in a manuscript. But what impact, if any, did it have on a delivered sermon? The question is significant because certain numbers and numeric patterns have greater power in a specific medium. For example, psephy/gematria, in which an author plays with the numerical values of the letters in a name, is more effective in written form. But explanations based on finger calculation or money changing might be more effective in the context of a delivered performance.For teasing out visual/aural differences, the appendix on methods of calculating and calculation is a nod in the right direction, but, in the spirit of the conclusion, it presents more questions than answers. For example, the section "Vernacular Numeracy" draws from ethnomathematical studies conducted in Liberia and Brazil, but the medieval English sources needed to corroborate or correct those models are missing. I am skeptical that Bede's account of Roman finger calculation was, even in his time, more than an academic curiosity, but I am also confident that no medieval society lacked finger counting. Passages such as Rypon's account of money boards are illuminating, and comparable descriptions of the material side of numbers are much desired. Cooper-Rompato attempts at every opportunity to bring these everyday practices to bear on her texts, but she sometimes must resort to speculation, as when discussing a medieval sermonist's comment that Augustine said that the world would not last beyond 8,000 years and that at that time 7,605 years had passed (29). Certainly, anyone in the audience would have mentally worked out 395 years, but what more, if anything, would they have done? Cooper-Rompato speculates that some audience members would have factored the number into 5 and 79 and subjected those numbers to further interpretation. This seems a stretch since the number 395, which would have dropped to 394 only a few months later, would have been treated as transient and not inherently symbolic.Even if such factoring was possible, not enough is made in the study about the fact that some acts of factoring (e.g., by 9, 10, or 100) are easier to perform than others (e.g., by 7) and that any author who wanted readers/listeners to perform this act would nudge them with a cue. For example, in several ancient number-based prognostic techniques, the reader would take one or more personal names, sum the value of the letters, then reduce that via modulo operation to a single digit. Most famous of these techniques is the little Pythagorean plinth (or Pythagoras to Telauges), a Greek text that was translated into medieval Latin and English. Words such as reductus were a cue to the modulo operation. So, when, after walking through the psephic value of the name of Jesus in Greek (known from Irenaeus if not before), Rypon says "888, qui numerus per 0 reductus figure diuinice resurrectionis concordat" (888, which number, reduced by 0, agrees with divine figure of the Resurrection of the Lord; 106, 158), I do not think, as Cooper-Rompato suggests, that the user is being asked to separate 888 into 800, 80, and 8 and then eliminate terminal zeros (is this operation attested elsewhere?) because that would produce three 8s, which would then need to be either added or otherwise processed before arriving at the singular figure diuinice 8. I think it better to understand that this passage represents Rypon's drawing from centuries-old texts that he no doubt knew and that by 0 reductus he means modulo 10 (I would not be surprised if the manuscript is defective here).No matter the specific points—in this area we can arrive at different but reasonable interpretations—the overall picture that Cooper-Rompato paints is compelling and convincing. Numbers were a key part of the symbolic world of late medieval England. Sermonists infused this holy numerology in their works, and no doubt parishioners brought with them to church a culture that made such symbolism natural and expected. Anyone interested in this topic will find Cooper-Rompato's book well argued, richly detailed, and eminently clear.