On the History of Mathematics in Italy Before Political Unification

This paper focuses on eighteenth-century mathematical historiography and more generally on the long tradition that prepared the way for the striking development of studies on the history of mathematics, which took place in Italy after the Risorgimento and the political unification in 1860s. In the second half of the nineteenth century in Italy they increased so rapidly in number and quality, as to become a real school of mathematical historiography. This development was not, however, fortuitous: it grew out of a long tradition of biographical and bibliographical research dating from the Renaissance. Even before then, Italian scientist-scholars had contributed to the transmission and the history of science with translations, commentaries and editions of Greek and Arabic texts. "Vite de' matematici", written at the end of the sixteenth century by Bernardino Baldi is a vast collection of 201 biographies of mathematicians, most of which is still unpublished. In the seventeenth century in Italy the history of mathematics was developed in encyclopedic works by Giuseppe Biancani, Giambattista Riccioli and Claude François Milliet Deschales, aimed mainly at introducing the study of mathematics and giving organic biographies and bibliographical information. Critical history, however, originated only in the eighteenth century, sustained by the chronological and philological research of previous centuries. The history of mathematics in Italy was often developed in general works of the history of literature, which included science as well. Some of the most important mathematicians of that century engaged in it, in a modern point of view. Joseph-Louis Lagrange was deeply interested in minor works of the past and his mathematical essays and treatises contain many historical analyses. Gregorio Fontana edited and added appendices to the Italian translation of Charles' Bossut work. Pietro Cossali wrote a wide-ranging history of algebra in Italy which is fundamental for reconstructing its diffusion in Latin West. This paper concludes with a consideration of the work of Guglielmo Libri, the great liberal historian of mathematics, exiled to France. Libri's "Histoire des sciences mathématiques en Italie" (1838-1841, 4 vols) - exemplary of the general features of eighteenth-century historiography and culture, and replete with rare and unpublished documents - was an important contribution to the reconstruction of relevant periods and figures of Italian science, stimulating and influencing the studies that followed.