ABSTRACT
By the term ‘numerology’, as it is used in modern literary criticism, is meant (1) the structural exploitation in the literary artifact of symbolic numbers and (2) any kind of arithmetical patterning. Sometimes both forms appear in the same work; sometimes only the one or the other. The tradition with which the present book is concerned originates with the Pythagorean and Platonic belief that the cosmos was definable in terms of number, and that its structure was both mathematical and musical. Plato’s view of the cosmos as it appears in the Timaeus is essentially Pythagorean in origin. Renaissance numerology, Pythagorean-Platonic and Biblical in origin, also reveals a preoccupation with astronomical, temporal, and calendrical numbers. So common are they in sixteenth-century literary structures, indeed, that one must attribute their efflorescence, at least in part, to the contemporary obsession with time and mutability.
