About the Author

Christine Cooper-Rompato is Professor of English and an affiliated member of Religious Studies at Utah State University. She is the author of The Gift of Tongues: Women's Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages, also published by Penn State University Press.

Reviews

“An engaging, well-researched study.”—A. L. Kaufman Choice

“[T]his book, with its focus on medieval numeracy, as an overlooked counterpart to medieval literacy, fills a significant gap within scholarship. It adds to our understanding of the complexity and ingenuity of medieval sermons, and it sheds new light on the multivalent understandings of number possessed by audiences.”—Sandy Gale Medieval Sermon Studies

“[T]his study can be accessed by experts and novices alike, and it effectively illuminates how sermons used numbers and arithmetic to make a spiritual point.”—Justin S. Kirkland Religious Studies Review

“Spiritual Calculations adds greatly to our appreciation and understanding of medieval sermons and sheds light on how receptive audiences must have been to what was a highly sophisticated rhetorical form. Numbers are pervasive in sermons, and preachers employed them in a variety of ways, but they are in some ways so pervasive that their potential rhetorical effectiveness goes unnoticed. Cooper-Rompato’s study therefore makes an original and rich contribution to our greater understanding of how preachers ‘educated audiences’ in a ‘hybrid form of numerate practice’ and why they sought to do so.”—Holly Johnson, author of The Grammar of Good Friday: Macaronic Sermons of Late Medieval England

“Spiritual Calculations provides a great deal of evidence that will be useful to other scholars exploring how practical numeracy shapes religious texts.”—Edwin D. Craun Speculum