The Story of 0

This work unfolds the ides of "nothing" out of a Titian painting of Danae and the shower of gold. The philological and pictorial argument links, across several languages, such seemingly disparate concepts as money, coins, mothers, subjects, courtiers, prostitutes, ciphers, codes and the codex form. The book is a cultural history of the "cipher" zero as code and as nothing as the absence of value and the place-holder constructing value. It traces the wide-ranging implications of "nothing" in both mathematics and literature. Along the way it makes points about the orthography and editing of early modern texts, and about the material affinities of these texts with painting and minting.