Did the "Oxford Calculators" actually try to apply mathematical analysis to qualities such as sin, charity, and grace?

Question

In Pythagoras' Trousers, Margaret Wertheim states

"[W]e should note that the [Oxford Calculators] also attempted to apply mathematical analysis to qualities such as sin, charity, and grace." (54)

Her source for this claim is Lindberg's The Beginnings of Western Science (first edition). The page she cites states

"We must remember that Aristotle and his medieval followers regarded motion as one of four kinds of change and that their analysis of change was not meant to focus on local motion, but rather to be applicable to all four classes of change. We also need to recognize that there is nothing obviously mathematical about most kinds of change. When we observe sickness yielding to health, virtue replacing vice, and peace emerging from war, no numbers or geometrical magnitudes leap out at us." (294)

He doesn't state the Oxford Calculators actually attempted to apply math to these concepts.

Can anyone confirm if they did/provide a source for the claim?

Answer 1

See Oxford Calculators and e.g. William Heytesbury : Speculative Physics.

See also Walter Burley's treatise De intensione et remissione formarum (1496) [I'm not able to find a modern edition).

See Alessandro Conti (editor), A Companion to Walter Burley : Late Medieval Logician and Metaphysician (2013, Brill), page 256-on:

the problem of latitude in the generation of composite bodies out of elements. In his De generatione commentary Burley [claims] that there is a latitude characterizing an adequacy of qualities of elements that also by their proper latitude admit of more or less, and Burley then states that in an intermediary form of a composite body (mixtum), forms like hotness or coldness, which are dispositions of the elements, are divisible and can vary between the limits of maximum and minimum degree.

Burley ... in his *Tractatus primus [...] maintains that qualities of elements need not to be only in maximum degree, but that they may also have other degrees without changing their nature. Furthermore, he claims that contrary forms like coldness and hotness or blackness and whiteness belong to the same species specialissima.

And see the so-called Merton theorem, proved by Nicole Oresme.

For a modern edition, see Marshall Clagett (editor), Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry Qualities and Motions (1968, University of Wisconsin Press).