“A Magazine of all perfection”: Mathematics in the Early Modern Satire Histrio-Mastix – Chrisoganus as a Stereotype

Chrisoganus exhibits key character traits that may resonate with a modern audience: He seems absent-minded, clever, and reclusive; and he is set in opposition to more fun activities such as the plays and songs and dance that are favored by the other gentlemen. He is enthralled by the pleasure of truth-seeking, and he tries to engage his audience; but they have a hard time following his mathematical argumentation (or, it becomes too boring for them). In the plot of the play, Chrisoganus functions as the all-knowing scholar who, as Plato argued in The Republic, should lead society because he knows best. And indeed, Chrisoganus does know what is best for the state, because later in the play he is the one who realises the fragility of peace and tries to talk sense into the citizens. However, here his absent-mindedness gets the better of him. Although he is right and knows best, no one listens and war breaks out. He thus ends up becoming the prime example of how knowledge is useless if it cannot be communicated in the right way to the relevant audience.

As we have shown, Early Modern plays such as Histrio-Mastix provide us with a marvelous lens that reveals aspects of how the public perceived the mathematician and his subject. Such information about public stereotypes is rarely communicated in scholarly works from the period, so we have to seek it out in indirect ways through different corpora of text. The central premise for this analysis can be expressed as a question: What can we say about the public perception of mathematics if this or that piece of literature was recognisable, relevant, and funny to its audience? The few mathematical characters that can be found in Early Modern plays seem to have certain common characteristics that we also recognise in present-day popular representations in films, television series, and theatre: Mathematicians were presented as more passive than other types of scientific practitioners; more stuck in their own minds; not too successful with the opposite sex; easily distracted by their work—and yet, as mentioned above, privy to privileged knowledge.

Figure 10. Stereotyped presentations of mathematicians are longstanding, indeed. In the famous
engraving by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), “Melancholia I” (1514), the withdrawn melancholic is surrounded
by mathematical objects, such as geometrical solids on the ground, a drawing compass in his hand, and a
numerical magic square on the wall. The Met 43.106.1, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943. Public domain. For
further examples of comic—and even more ancient— stereotypes of mathematicians and philosophers,
instructors might explore plays such as Aristophanes’ The Clouds (423 BCE) with their students.