A curious letter can be found in the final pages of Champfleury, Geofroy Tory's 1529 illustrated treatise on the graphic proportion of the Roman alphabet. Tory concludes his book with a series of ornamental typefaces and foreign alphabets. The final shop for tiffany letter of Tory's Arabic alphabet is not an Arabic letter at all but a quasi- circular figure (more of an oval) that Tory labels nulla in the accompanying text.7 It appears opposite, in the bottom left hand corner of figure 1.
Reading this alphabet in the Arabic order as Tory advises, right to left, top to bottom, places the ovoid figure at the alphabet's end. The letter might represent the Arabic letter hâ', third from the end in modern Arabic. However, nulla is one of the Latin words for nothing, which suggests that the circular symbol also represents the Renaissance symbol for zero. Tory grounds his argument about the proportion of Roman lettering on the perfection of the circular letter "O," but nowhere in his text does a comparison between the letter "O" and the number zero arise. The only evidence of zero's presence and its resemblance to "O" lies hidden in the back of Tory's book in a non- shop for tiffany bangles Western alphabet.
Embedding the Latin word for nothing and the circular zero in an Arabic alphabet in a Renaissance printed book collapses three categories relatively new to Renaissance Europe-printing, imported language, and arithmetic-into one space. There is also evidence suggesting that Renaissance typesetters used the letter O to represent zero: the Italian mathematician Picinelli, writing in the late seventeenth century, described zero as a figure that functioned "either shop for tiffany bracelets arithmetically or grammatically."8 The conflation of the imported Arabic figure zero and the Roman letter O in Renaissance printed books and poetry emphasizes the cipher's physicality and paradoxical productivity. The Rape of Lucrece draws on this convergence by depicting the aftermath and legacy of rape as a proliferation of spoken, written, and embodied Os.
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