Abstract Summary
As is well known in the history of mathematics, the path to the invention of calculus in late seventeenth-century Europe passed through Buonaventura Cavalieri’s geometry of “indivisibles,” the infinitesimally small slices into which he proposed dividing geometric figures in order to compute the total area contained within their boundaries. The ontological status of these indivisibles was, however, a vexed issue, and the problem of how to deal with the infinitely small would remain a source of much contention for centuries -- as is suggested by Bishop Berkeley’s withering description of Newtonian “fluxions” as the “ghosts of departed quantities.” Tracing the path from Cavalieri’s indivisibles through Leibniz’s infinitesimals, my paper will suggest that early modern attempts to render calculable the minutiae of space and motion have a wide cultural resonance, one that becomes especially visible in literary and metaphysical experimentations with sequences and progressions, in such diverse writers as Gaspara da Stampa, Shakespeare, and Milton.
