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“By the Numbers” Review – Matt Zilic

Posted on by Matt Zilic

[HIST635: Early Modern England] By the Numbers Review

Matt Zilic

4/30/2026

In By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation in Early Modern England (2024), Jessica Marie Otis examines how numbers became central to the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English men and women understood faith, society, and governance. This transformation, which she describes as something that “completely reconfigured the way English men and women understood the world around them” (2), can be broadly understood as the transition from Roman numerals and other older systems of calculation to the widespread adoption of Arabic numerals. While Otis ultimately traces how Arabic numerals became dominant, she emphasizes that it is necessary to examine numbers “through the lens of early modern English culture—and, crucially, [to] defamiliarize the Arabic numeral numeracy we so often take for granted” (13).

Jessica Otis is a dual-trained scholar with degrees in both mathematics and history. She earned her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2013 and now focuses on the cultural history of early modern England. As a digital historian, she has also worked to make historical scholarship more accessible to wider audiences. Her “Death by Numbers” project reflects this commitment to digital history and public scholarship.

By the Numbers effectively combines both her mathematical and historical training, though the book leans more heavily toward cultural and social history. It is divided into two parts: part one “establishes the variety of early modern English number symbols,” while part two “consists of three case studies that place numbers in conversation with broader developments in English history” (11).

The first two chapters provide an overview of the broader cultural shift in numeracy as older systems such as Roman numerals and tally sticks gradually became less central. Chapter 1 examines the symbolic numerical systems used by early modern English men and women, dividing them into three categories: performative, object-based, and written (14). Otis makes an important distinction regarding the adoption of Arabic numerals: it was not a sudden or wholesale transformation, but rather a gradual process as trust in the system developed over time. A mixture of Roman and Arabic numerals was common, as shown in Thomas Hassall’s account book, which used both systems until 1636 (38). Although the use of Arabic numerals increased significantly after the Restoration, Otis notes that they did not become standard until the eighteenth century (41). She also reminds readers that numbers carried political and cultural meanings. One telling example is Oliver Cromwell’s insistence that tally sticks be written in English rather than Latin in order “to make them more widely legible” (24).

Trust in numbers plays a central role in Chapter 2. Otis argues that “symbolic systems were differentiated from each other by their material characteristics, which helped form the basis for people’s trust judgments” (43). Arabic numerals were especially vulnerable to mistrust because they could be easily altered or misread due to poor handwriting. Even early adopters often continued to use Roman numerals for sensitive financial information. While Otis does not present a single definitive reason for the triumph of Arabic numerals, she concludes that “the advantages of the system’s versatility outweighed the potential security risk” (62).

Chapter 3 focuses on the teaching of mathematics outside England’s elite, Latin-based schools, particularly among “those merchants, craftsmen, and other account-keepers” (63). It was this group of “middling men” who drove the expansion of numeracy and created a strong market for mathematical textbooks as literacy rates increased. This point is especially important because it highlights the close relationship between literacy and numeracy.

Chapter 4 examines how early modern English people perceived and quantified time. Otis identifies an increasingly personal relationship with time during the seventeenth century, as calendars entered the household through almanacs and “encouraged people to place themselves at the center of their own personal calendars” (90). She contrasts this with older religious calendars, where feast days such as the Feast of Saint Thomas functioned as both sacred observances and chronological markers, “a date in itself, but also the twenty-first day of December” (89). This chapter also engages strongly with historiography, particularly the work of historians such as Keith Wrightson and Mark Hailwood.

In Chapter 5, Otis explores how early modern England quantified risk. She traces the development of the concept of “odds” and shows how people increasingly understood uncertainty in terms of chances and probability. This “probabilistic mode of thought” (115) was closely tied to gambling, and the chapter features significant discussion of religious responses to games of chance. One especially engaging example is the dispute between the Puritan preachers James Balmford and Thomas Gataker over the morality of gambling. God’s providence, a theme that runs throughout the book but becomes especially prominent in the later chapters, often stood in tension with gambling practices.

This chapter also explores the rise of insurance schemes, particularly for maritime cargo. Otis shows how insurance expanded rapidly in both England and continental Europe, but rather than viewing insurance strictly as protection against loss, she frames it as a form of structured betting. The most fascinating examples come from the eighteenth century, when “it was possible to purchase insurance on the likelihood of births, marriages, cuckoldry, highway robbery, the fall of a besieged city, and even death by drinking gin” (103–131). These policies may remind modern readers of prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi.

The final chapter connects mathematics to both religious and secular life through parish registers, which “became the foundation for…more general seventeenth-century attempts to use demographic data for social analysis” (141). Here, Otis examines the quantification of the English people themselves. She argues that by the end of the seventeenth century, bureaucrats had increasingly divorced demographic data “from any particular political agenda,” transforming censuses from tools of government administration into broader methods for understanding populations and society (141).

Otis draws from an extensive range of primary sources throughout the book, including mathematics textbooks, account books, insurance records, almanacs, parish registers, and mortality bills. These are supported by an impressive body of secondary scholarship, reflected in nearly forty pages of bibliography.

One of the most compelling ways Otis engages with her sources is through marginalia, which she calls “the surest indicator of the symbolic system used for calculation” (59). In the context of mistrust toward Arabic numerals, marginal notes reveal how readers actually performed calculations. Beyond mathematics, marginalia also helps track the ownership and use of specific books across generations. Otis uses these annotations to show how textbooks passed “through the hands of at least half a dozen annotators” (69). She argues that such books remained in use for decades, particularly among female students, who “had less access to institution-based education and were more likely to be taught arithmetic at home” (69). This evidence is further supported by graphs in the appendices, particularly a table contrasting the total number of arithmetic textbooks with the number containing annotations.

Another source the book uses particularlywell is the London Bills of Mortality, which quantified disease and death. Of all numerical records, these were among the most publicly accessible: “they could be purchased for a penny apiece, or families could purchase an annual subscription for 4s.” Interest in local mortality was driven by more than curiosity—it was also a practical tool for risk assessment. During plague outbreaks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Otis shows that people used the bills to decide whether they should leave the city. The diary of Samuel Pepys is especially useful in illustrating this behavior.

By the Number is an engaging and illuminating study of a subject that has received comparatively little attention. One area where the book could have gone further is in comparing England to mainland Europe. A lingering question is the extent to which this numerical transformation was uniquely English or part of a broader continental development occurring at roughly the same time. Nevertheless, Otis’s extensive research and clear writing make the book both compelling and accessible. It is a work that will appeal to both academic and general readers interested in the histories of religion, knowledge, and early modern society.

Free Review: “Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London” by Laura Gowing

Posted on by Matt Zilic

Published in 2021, Laura Gowing’s Ingenious Trade explores the world of female domestic crafts during seventeenth-century London. An accomplished scholar, Gowing is a Fellow of the British Academy and a professor of early modern England at King’s College London. Her research specifically examines female bodies, sexuality, crime, and she specializes in London as a geographic focus. 

Using an extensive search through Mayor’s Court records, tax lists, and “other administrative records,” (8) Gowing reconstructs the model of female apprenticeship and labor through a lens that contrasts with most of the historiography of female labor in seventeenth-century London. As she writes: “Histories of women’s work customarily frame it as under-recognized, informal, flexible and unregulated,” (8). Contrasted with Mansell’s Female Servants, who argues that female servile labor was often fluid and contingent, Gowing argues that female apprenticeships were different; apprenticeship contracted women to one another with “legally significant” expectations for both parties. She finds that not only were women employing another but also that the mistress was fundamental to the training of the apprentice (136). This initial point leads to two arguments that form the backbone of her book. 

First and foremost, that female apprentices entered skilled positions through the same means as their male counterparts. And were in fact substantial contributors to London’s ever-growing economy. This is especially true in the textile trade, which Gowing spends the majority of her book covering. Second, and a point that she admittedly does not spent as much time discussing as I would have thought, that apprenticeships were a phenomena that transcended socio-economic boundaries. She states that female apprenticeships were “a well-established route to independent work, practised in parishes and towns around the country as well as in guilds…and drawing girls from the poorest to the gentry..” (1). 

Family and connections play a large role in Gowing’s overall arguments as well. Several times the families of both apprentice and mistress become heavily involved in the business negotiations of contracting a girl’s labor. This could often take a dubious turn as seen through the court case of Mary Jones, whose mistress her family sued alleging a failure to train their daughter. Gowing writes signed on as an apprentice for Frances Carey and her husband, only to be left mostly untrained and instead used by the couple for tedious labor of keeping their failing shop. Apprentices also feature as the guilty party, as in the case of Ann Gray, whose unpaid debts and breach of trust by selling goods on credit landed her in debtor’s prison. In both cases, the families of both apprentices and mistresses become known through mentions in court records. The returns of premiums by masters to the girls’ families serves as one piece of evidence that seventeenth-century London was a highly litigious society.

Chapter 1 focuses on the Royal Exchange before the Great Fire destroyed most of it. Uniquely for this chapter, Gowing reconstructs the Exchange through spatial arrangements of shops and its networks. The upper levels where female shops typically were, Gowing highlights as a place that apprentices would have been learning their trade daily. Chapters 2 and 3 focus less on space and more on the girls as apprenteices and the women who trained and mentored them. It is here that Gowing identifies the late 17th century as a massive watershed moment in England (and Europe overall), as the number of female apprentices began to grow. Chapter 4 covers the skills that girls learned.  Meanwhile the most humanizing chapter arguably comes in the fifth section, which covers discipline and how masters played a role in conforming girls to society. She writes that part of the training for an apprentice was to “fashion themselves into  the likeness of masters and mistresses,” (183). While both boys and girls were disciplined to conform to patriarchal authority, the discipline they were to receive could vary, as well as what set in motion their discipline as well. Resistance plays a large role in this chapter too, and serves as a means for her to reinforce the agency of a group that is otherwise largely ignored in the records. The final chapter of substance covers how women received the “freedom” (the right to trade within the City). The freedom was an important function since it acted as both a gateway into a male-dominated merchant class, and it also was the very thing that limited them. Gowing highlights the importance of marriage among released apprentices and many times throughout the book, states that girls married soon after their apprenticeship ended and never again applied the trade. Gowing writes that “Living with and woring round those rules reminded women of the legal weight of marriage as well as the potential for using custom and petitioning to negotiate it,” (242). 

Like many social histories that have been written, Gowing balances the agency of these women with the constraints that would have been placed on them for their gender. While apprenticeship did indeed give young girls training for independent work and adulthood like it did for young boys, social limitations more often than not constricted what independent work they could take up. This work typically came in the form of the booming textile trade. Most of the girls who were trained as apprentices in this book worked in some fashion of the textile trade. Gowing agues that “Women’s work in the textile trades trades of early modern London was critical to the expansion of those trade in the service of new patterns of consumptions, which included quicker, cheaper fashion, often bought off the peg, with numerous ready-made accessories, alongside more disposable household goods,” (3). 

An unsung aspect of this book is Gowing’s methodology. As is the case in several books we have read this semester, Stoyle’s Murderous Midsummer comes to mind, there are inherent biases and silences within the very sources she uses. For example, the paperwork of apprenticeship oftened concealed the part that women played in training girls. The documentation often recorded the married mistress under the name of their husband rather than their own name. But despite the “minimal historical and contemporary discussion,” Gowing’s findings through legal testimonies and these previously mentioned documents reveal “an established set of specialized skills and shared understandings of what, and how, young women learned,” (137-138).

“Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England” Review — Matthew Zilic

Posted on by Matt Zilic

Just north of London on April 21, 1610, two men of the English-Welsh gentry, John Egerton and Edward Morgan, fought a duel that lead to the death of Egerton and a protracted legal battle which ultimately saw Morgan receiving clemency by James I. In what serves as an impressively written microhistory and case study of this single duel, Lloyd Bowen’s 2021 Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England analyzes what he calls “the most fully documented duel in early modern England,” (1). Despite the wealth of primary sources that center around the duel and its aftermath, he also writes that it is largely ignored by historians (195), which can perhaps be indicative of how understudied the field of duelling in early modern England has been. 

Through the use of primarily court documents, Bowen is able to argue that the duel was almost certainly not a spontaneous event, but instead the result of a feud that stretched back years, beginning in 1606 during an inheritance dispute over the estate of Talacre. In a carefully written narrative fashion, Bowen interweaves the duel itself with the messy legal aftermath; the coroner’s inquest and the King’s Bench and Star Chamber hearings. He also ties the context of the families’ dispute to the duel in 1610. Bowen’s main aim is to challenge and dismiss the notion that violence had disappeared among the social elite by the seventeenth century. The book is part of a broader historiographic trend that eschews the Whiggish notions of violence declining in the early modern period due to an increase in civility and government control. Bowen additionally argues to a lesser degree that the culture of the northern Marches of Wales were more accepting of duels to a martial culture. As he states: “Indeed, an argument can be made that there was something of a provincial culture of duelling to be found here [in northern Wales] in this period,” (73). Widening the scope as well, Anatomy places the Highgate Duel in a European context that saw a general rise in elite violence influenced by French and Italian models. 

Anatomy is constructed both thematically and chronologically. Bowen first introduces the two kin-groups: the Egertons of Cheshire and the Morgans of Flintshire, with their shared Mostyn family connections. He then reconstructs the Talacre inheritance quarral of 1606–08 (chapters 2–3), showing how each side raised legal actions and exchanged challenge letters. This section is full of colorful depictions of legal back-and-forths and highlight the legal scope of the book. An example can be found in Bowen’s description of a common strategy to flood the courts with litigations in order to “exhaust the money, patience, and resources of one’s opponent by delay, manipulation and a multiplicity of suits,” (42). Chapter 4 surveys duelling in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain to provide context (noting, for example, that duels occurred throughout society). Chapters 5–7 zoom in on the Highgate encounter and its immediate aftermath. Finally, chapters 8–9 cover the King’s Bench trial and political intrigue, including the Morgans’ alliances at court. Chapter 8 sees Edward receive his conviction for murder and also his pardon from the king. The text is supplemented by very helpful appendices (a timeline of the conflict, jury lists).

The social class that these families belong to is something that Bowen thinks is worth examination. One might think that as members of the landed gentry, they would have an ample amount of secondary material written on them, which is not the case. In his introduction, Bowen identifies a gap in the historiography, in which both the older and newer trends in history have forgotten the “lesser gentry,” particularly those who lived further from London. As residents of Cheshire and Flintshire, the Egertons and Morgans have fallen into that gap forgotten by historians. Religion additionally plays a role, albeit not one as large as one may think. During the Talacre trial and in previous trials, the Protestant Egertons lobbied that the Catholic Morgans had failed to maintain peace in the region, despite the family patriarch Edward Morgan I being a JP. However, Bowen interestingly points out that religion had little to do with the duel itself, if anything. The Catholic Morgan family were able to ally themselves with a Protestant family at court in the Howards, meanwhile the Protestant Egertons “gained little traction with the reform-minded Lord Chancellor Ellesmere,” (196).

The critiques for the book are few and hard to find due to the limited scope and overall fluid structure. Starting small, a personal nitpick I had with the book was Bowen’s apparent refusal to use Oxford commas. Delving to a deeper level, however, there are some assumptions about the character of these men that are made which are perhaps too grandiose or general. This is true particularly when it concerns the victor of the duel, Edward Morgan. By all accounts he appears to be a violent and insecure individual. One only needs to read the challenge letter that he sent to John Egerton in 1608 (54). However, Bowen does seem quick to dismiss him as a one-sided villain, when he was likely a complex individual who we will never know the full character of. Bowen himself admits that one of the unfortunate downsides of chasing these sources is the inability to know all. He states that “On the other hand, these legal sources are slippery, ambiguous and often difficult to work with. In dealing with the civil courts, for example, the record is inherently adversarial and partisan and was, in some senses, designed to produce contradictory narratives,” (13).  In the end, Edward Morgan removed himself from his inheritance as eldest son and instead became a coal entrepreneur, a sign that the duel and the trial had likely greatly changed him one way or the other. 

Anatomy is a highly intelligent work that I would recommend to anyone interested in early modern English social history. Bowen’s meticullous use of court records and its vivid reconstruction of a single duel combine to illuminate larger themes of gentry honor, violence, and a broader European movement.

‘Female Servants in Early Modern England’ Book Review — Matthew Zilic

Posted on by Matt Zilic

Making a splash with her first book, Charmian Mansell’s 2024 study Female Servants in Early Modern England sets out with a clear objective in mind: to explore the experiences of female service workers during the period. In doing so, she asks questions about their identities, their roles, and how they fit into their communities at large. In order to accomplish her goal, Mansell makes use of a sizeable body of primary sources in what she calls a “‘needle in a haystack’ method of research” (297), which almost exclusively originate from the church records of five dioceses — Bath & Wells, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, and Winchester. These locations were chosen due to a higher volume of surviving records compared to much of England. When speaking on the body of her sources, Mansell writes that “Church court depositions are links of a broken chain” (29); while male deponents’ biographical information can often be reliably found in court records, few, if any, comparable records exist for women. In her research, she pored over nearly 9,000 cases from 1532–1649, involving over 15,000 litigants and 27,000 witnesses. Critically for this book, she draws on the testimonies of over a thousand female servants who were identified, some more than once (14).

As a scholar who identifies with social and economic history, Mansell’s findings deal heavily with these two aspects. Using the aforementioned sources, her chief argument is that the industry of female servitude (and servitude more generally) was neither static nor stable. Instead, it was a fluid and flexible system in which female autonomy was perhaps greater than scholars in the field have given women credit for. While still acknowledging the patriarchal structures of society, she states that “The world in which these women lived was undoubtedly one in which men ruled, just not in the way that we thought” (297). Her arguments, backed by a blending of qualitative and quantitative analyses, are both persuasive and thoughtfully developed. The data takes the forms of tables that record things such as female movement around towns and the distribution of ages among servants. Chapter 5 for instance, features a table detailing the length of residence in parishes, and from this chapter, she is able to discern mobility as it correlates to age amongst servants. 

The book, perhaps more than any other that we have read this semester, interacts heavily with the historiography (or sometimes the lack thereof). Her arguments directly challenge long-held notions of family and servitude during the early modern period. For instance, as this is a gender study, the concept of patriarchy features prominently throughout. Mansell notes that female servants are scarcely studied outside the context of their masters’ households. She argues that while women’s history has stretched far and wide in search of female autonomy, the history of service has lagged behind. Just as service itself was flexible, there appears to have been flexibility within the household patriarchal order. She notes that some households indeed had no patriarchal figure; houses headed by a father or husband were but one type of household (10).

Female Servants is organized into three parts and nine chapters. Part I discusses who female servants were and how they were recorded in church records. As she claims, it offers “a more detailed reconstruction of female servant lives for this period than has been attempted before, showing service to be contingent, fluid, and flexible,” (19). Part II focuses on patterns of labor by examining female servants’ mobility, employment conditions, contractual freedom, and the types of work they performed. It shows how mobility shaped their integration and belonging, questions how freely women entered service contracts, and challenges the idea that female service was simply domestic labor. Finally, Part III examines female service spatially, socially, and temporally. It shows how itinerant women built community ties beyond the household, maintained connections across distance and time, and remained shaped by service long after it ended. Overall, it argues that early modern service was not static or purely domestic, but “finely graded, fluid, and often contingent,” (19).

Mansell also comments on the economic influence that female servants had on early modern England. According to the Statute of Artificers of 1563, servants were expected to enter into annual contracts with their masters. However, Mansell demonstrates that this was not the case in many instances. Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of the servant Philippa Hooper, who stood as a witness to the affair of her mistress. Despite heavy regulation of service, it would seem that Philippa, and many others like her, were making agreements to serve in short-term daily or weekly contracts. This aligns with Mansell’s broader argument about the greater degree of autonomy female servants experienced. However, it is also important to note that service being flexible did not always equate to total freedom; servants were still legally at the whim of their masters or mistresses. Another way in which the working lives of women are framed by Mansell is through her discussion of mobility. According to Chapter 4, women were the more mobile sex, and of this number of migrant women, over half were servants (128). This analysis aligns with the work women sought in towns and cities. It is in this chapter that perhaps one of her most compelling interventions takes place. While London attracts much of the historiographical attention for migrant laborers (deservedly so), she notes that “other urban centres offered labour opportunities for young people” (130).

Overall, Mansell’s arguments hold up well and offer another example of crafting bottom-up history from primary sources. Rather than portraying women as purely defined by their service, Mansell humanizes female servants, much as Dyer in Peasants or Kaufman in A People’s Reformation did in their respective studies. That said, one shortcoming I identified (unless I missed it) was a general lack of placement of the book within a broader political context. The last seven years covered in this study, for example, encompass the tumultuous period of the English Civil War, yet it receives only one mention in the entire book. This may almost certainly be due to political events not appearing prominently in the trial testimonies; still, I could not help but feel there was an opportunity for Mansell to further her argument by situating female servants within these broader upheavals. This aside, Female Servants is compelling and well written in its detective-like research approach and leaves the door open for further scholarship on both female and male servitude during the period.