Overview

This beautiful manuscript, produced at the Abbey of Lorsch in the first half of the ninth century, served as a kind of computistical "Swiss Army knife" of the early Middle Ages. It encompasses astrology, timekeeping, medicine, historiography, and calendrical science. Drawing heavily on the works of the Northumbrian scholar-monk Bede the Venerable, it included some of his most influential scientific treatises, among them De temporum ratione (On the Reckoning of Time).

The opening chapter of De temporum ratione explains in careful detail how to count to one million using hand gestures. Beyond this textual description, however, the manuscript also preserves a visual diagram on folio 118v. It is the earliest known illustration of the finger-counting system.

The Images

In this manuscript from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in the Vatican City, an entire page is dedicated to illustrating Bede’s description of the finger-counting system. The diagram depicts all thirty-six gestures for numbers from 1 to 9,000, arranged in a 6 × 6 grid: the top three rows show gestures performed with the left hand, while the bottom three rows show those performed with the right.

The following page is blank, suggesting it was intended to house the remaining gestures — those for the tens and hundreds of thousands, conventionally represented through half-length human figures enclosed within roundels — but was never completed.

This layout, featuring a hand grid followed by busts within roundels, was fairly common in medieval finger-counting diagrams. Like this manuscript, MS 27 from the Biblioteca Antoniana in Padua is similarly unfinished, preserving only the 6 × 6 grid and leaving subsequent pages empty. Examples of the complete structure survive in MS D III 19 from the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino, MS 189 from the Biblioteca Statale del Monumento Nazionale di Montecassino, and BPL 191 BD from the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Leiden.

Careful Corrections and Telling Lapses

Despite the elegance of their minimalist execution, the drawings are not fully accurate illustrations of Bede's finger-numeration system. Several ambiguities appear throughout the sequence, alongside a few anatomical errors.

While there is an apparent effort to distinguish between commonly confused gestures — such as those for 1 and 7, or 2 and 8 — other confusions persist, as between 1,000 and 7,000, or 2,000 and 8,000.