2025 Theses Doctoral

Holy Calculus: Early Modern Mathematics and Religion in Guarino Guarini's Writings and Architecture

Modabber, Angelica

This dissertation examines Guarino Guarini’s architecture in the context of religious upheaval and the cultural climate surrounding mathematics in the 17th century. It investigates how the so-called Scientific Revolution impacted Guarini’s ecclesiastical structures, both in their ideological content and in their construction process.

In doing so, this dissertation seeks to complicate the supposed binary between Catholicism and early modern natural philosophy by showing that the ecclesiastical designs appropriated the aesthetics of astronomical and mathematical advancements, borrowing the visual rhetoric of diagrams and scientific illustrations.

I will also argue that Guarini, a priest as well as an architect, adopted dissimulative discursive practices to wed transgressive innovations with orthodox thought and circumvented mathematically heretical methods through a process I call “mathematical dissimulation.”

Finally, I will situate his architecture in the context of the early modern eucharistic debates of the method of indivisibles, measurement relics, occasionalist philosophies, and the employment of meridian lines in heliometric churches.