ABSTRACT
The humanist cultures of Italy and Northern Europe may have been civic, but they promulgated both an explicit neo-Platonism and the idealism implicit in Aristotle. Robert Boyle struggles, in Steven Shapin’s account, to reconcile this spatial model of epistemic value with a simultaneous humanist impulse to attack sequestered scholarship. The humanist notion of the golden mean is a highly portable one and is often not specifically related to mathematics. Where George Sandys’s Ovid laments the historical advent of geometric surveying as symptomatic of the fall from a golden age of commonality, an equally common narrative celebrates its historical birth in Egypt, traditionally the nursery of civilized human arts. Any criticism paying attention to the determining influence of genre would quite properly warn us about the formulaic nature of poetic satires on human vanity, and by extension about their dubious relevance to the everyday currency of early modern geometry.
