Combinatorics, Composition, Copia: Mersenne’s Permutations as Rhetoric of Abundance

Abstract

This article seeks to explain the meaning and function of Mersenne’s exhaustive lists of note permutations. As is true for all of Mersenne’s labors, the permutations are at their deepest level explicable in terms of his religious commitments—in this case, his faith in the ineffable plenitude of God’s creation. Yet, Mersenne also intended the permutations and the combinatorial procedures that generate them to serve as the foundation of a pedagogy of compositional invention. That pedagogy, this article proposes, is tacitly informed by the rhetorical notion of copia, most comprehensively theorized by Erasmus in his influential De copia.