Visible and Invisible Numeracies: A Public Lecture by Peter Stallybrass

It has been a great privilege to host Peter Stallybrass (Annenberg Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of English) as a guest scholar of TabulaRasa in Naples from February 9th to 14th. A preeminent scholar in literary and cultural theory, Stallybrass is widely recognized as the co-author, with Allon White, of the seminal work The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986). He is also a foundational figure in the history of material texts and material culture; in 1993, he established the University of Pennsylvania’s Workshop in the History of Material Texts, an influential forum that continues to meet weekly, bringing together academics, librarians, writers, and artists interested in the evolution of cultural technologies.

At L’Orientale, besides engaging with us in most valuable discussions about the project’s ongoing work and perspectives, Peter gave a brilliant public lecture entitled “Visible and Invisible Numeracies: Accounting as a Material Practice”. His presentation examined the vast corpus of manuscript account books surviving from Early Modern Europe, produced by a diverse array of actors ranging from state governments and patricians to merchants and artisans. While these records typically formalize the final results of calculations, they seldom disclose the specific methodologies used to reach them.

Focusing on a series of English account books documenting courtly festivities and theatrical performances, Stallybrass explored how complex arithmetic was often conducted without the use of pen and paper. He demonstrated that numerate practitioners who could not write nonetheless performed sophisticated computations, leaving behind subtle traces in the form of dots and slashes in the margins or at the foot of pages. Paradoxically, these marks of “illiterate” numeracy were often meticulously preserved by the highly literate officials responsible for the books’ calligraphy. The lecture successfully traced the ways in which these volumes simultaneously recorded and effaced the very processes of their own creation.

Chaired by Prof. C. Maria Laudando, the event took place on Thursday, February 12, 2026, at 10:15 AM in the Antisala degli Specchi at Palazzo Corigliano (Piazza San Domenico Maggiore 12, Napoli). Organized within the framework of the TabulaRasa project, the lecture was part of the activities of the Centro per lo studio e l’edizione dei testi (CESET). Admission was free and open to the public.

The event was attended by an audience comprising English studies scholars, historians of mathematics, comparative literature scholars, statisticians, archaeologists, philologists, researchers, students, and professors. This gathering promoted a lively and constructive dialogue between different but deeply connected fields of knowledge.

We are delighted to have shared such different and yet closely related ideas, visions, and research. This is the essence of TabulaRasa!

About the Lecture

Thousands of manuscript account books survive from throughout Early Modern Europe from governments, patricians, merchants and artisans. The great majority show the results of calculations without showing how those calculations were actually made. Stallybrass focused upon a single set of English account books, recording the expenses for festivities and plays performed at court, to explore how calculations could be made without the use of pen and paper by experts in numeracy who could not write. The traces of these “illiterate” calculations can sometimes be found in the margins or at the bottom of a page in the form of dots and slashes. But even these traces were the records of highly literate officials who were proficient in calligraphy. In his talk, Peter Stallybrass analyzes the steps by which these account books both record and erase the ways in which the calculations were actually made.

About the Speaker

Peter Stallybrass is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and directed the History of Material Texts seminar for 26 years. Peter has been the Samuel Wannamaker Fellow at the Globe Theatre in London, the Moses Aaron Dropsie Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (with Allon White), Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (with Ann Rosalind Jones, which won the James Russell Lowell Prize by the MLA for the outstanding book in Modern Languages), and Benjamin Franklin, Printer and Writer (with James Green). His essay with Heather Wolfe on “The Material Culture of Record-Keeping in Early Modern England” won the Archival History Article Award from the Society of American Archivists and he is working with Heather and Ray Schrire on “Dots and Slashes in Early Modern Account Books.” He is at present completing a book on the bible as a material text.

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