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Tony Brown
A Contemporary
Theory
of Mathematics
Education
Research
A Contemporary Theory of Mathematics Education
Research
Tony Brown
A Contemporary Theory of
Mathematics Education
Research
Tony Brown
Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-55099-8 ISBN 978-3-030-55100-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55100-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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Preface
This book addresses the domain, purpose and functioning of research in mathemat-
ics education. What is mathematics teaching? How do we improve mathematics
teaching? Why do we want to improve mathematics teaching? What do we under-
stand by improvement? Mathematics education research addresses many such ques-
tions. And although research and the scientific theories it produces may never reveal
the truth, theories have proved very useful in guiding us around an infinite land-
scape, even if ultimately each scientific model or theory reveals the limits of its own
functionality, style or endurance. But more generally, any story we tell about what
mathematics is, or what a learner is, or what we are trying to do, will eventually
become out of kilter with the times. New demands on “people” and new demands
on “mathematics” change what both of them are and how they respond to each
other. Research has as much to do with working out where we could go as it is with
assessing where we are now. The current state of affairs can be depicted in many
ways, where alternative mappings of our pasts and presents open alternative trajec-
tories into the future. This provokes a more general question that motivates this
book: What can theories do? How do we situate our theories in relation to other
theories, past and present? Do new theories replace old ones or sit alongside them?
Many contributions to theory in mathematics education comprise individual journal
articles or chapters in edited collections.1 Theories depend on the questions that we
ask and the world views that we presuppose and typically theories, especially social
theories are time-dependent, and need persistent updating. So in presenting “a con-
temporary theory of mathematics education research” the intention is to unsettle
some of the common presumptions of mathematics education research in generating
new ways of looking rather than to suppose any final resolution might be reached.
But in unsettling, the hope is that new ways of understanding the interface between
humans and mathematics will be suggested and stimulate life thereafter.
1
As examples, Springer has published theory-oriented chapters by over 100 authors in the follow-
ing edited collections alone: Sriraman and English (2010); Bikner-Ahsbahs et al. (2016); and
Ernest (2019b).
v
vi Preface
How then do we understand renewal in mathematics education practice? When I

started my career some 40 years ago, student-centred approaches to mathematics,
including problem solving, investigations and project work, seemed to be on the
ascendance in curriculum reform agenda in parts of England, certainly in London
where I was working as a secondary school teacher at the time. School mathematics
had often received a bad press in terms of children’s attitudes towards the subject
and many adults still claim unfortunate experiences in their own schooling. Teachers
at the time were keen to find ways of making mathematics intrinsically more inter-
esting for a wider body of students. The quest to centre education on personal devel-
opment underpinned my aspirations in entering teaching where education was to be
seen primarily in terms of valuing each child as an individual rather than merely
meeting required standards across a given group. Many London schools were fol-
lowing an individualised learning scheme fostering such aspirations. Nationally, the
Association of Teachers of Mathematics also pursued more investigational
approaches. This move to new models of practice in England paralleled and possi-
bly pre-dated the so-called “math wars” in the United States between traditional
methods and the constructivist philosophies that ultimately had more international
traction in both practice and research. A sustained British government backlash
throughout the 1990s, however, resulted in prescribed national curriculums for both
teachers and students in England in which student-centred approaches became more
tightly structured around legal specifications of curriculum content and preferred
but “non-statutory” methods of delivery. Under a banner of “back to basics” succes-
sive policies initiated much closer definition and scrutiny of classroom practice
towards achieving wider inclusion. Reasons cited for this backlash included right
wing politicians claiming that given difficulties with teacher supply, keenly felt in
secondary mathematics at the time, the average teacher could not teach to such
high-minded ideals. It argued that there was no point having a preferred form of
teaching if teachers could not be trained to teach in this way, better to tell the teach-
ers what to do in line with a centralised definition of expectations, rather than let left
wing academics in teacher education colleges lead them astray into so-called “pro-
gressive” methods. Teacher education in England thus became more prescriptive
and school-based with increased reference to the new curriculum frameworks, per-
haps at the expense of aspirations for more autonomous teacher functionality.
Schooling around the world, meanwhile, became increasingly shaped and judged by
its perceived capacity to deliver success in terms of international competitiveness
linked to economic agenda, often as indicated through performance in comparative
tests. The shift of policy seemed to be reflected in England’s rankings. It moved
upwards from 18th to seventh position on the skills-focused TIMSS in 2007, whilst
dropping from eighth to 25th on the (possibly) more problem focused PISA in 2006.
Hooray, except the government then complained about the dip in PISA that had now
become the more prominent instrument. Priorities do not always pull in the same
direction and often change. In mathematics education, choices do sometimes need
to be made between promoting exam success, supporting future professional func-
tionality, enjoyment for the subject, advanced mathematical behaviour, inclusion for
a broad range of pupils, etc. and there are differing ways of promoting and m easuring
Preface vii
each of those alternative priorities. Research in the field increasingly finds its terms
of reference set according to assessment driven requirements and researchers have
become complicit in promoting particular conceptions of teaching and in construct-
ing the field as an ideological battleground, for example, in commissioned research
where briefs can presuppose improvements of some kind. Such complicity, com-
bined with the relative insularity of the field, has deflected many mathematics edu-
cation researchers from investigating other world visions that might define us and
serve us in different ways.
There is, however, need to pause to consider how we are drawn into our diverse
motivations. For example, is high performance according to a scientific measure
like PISA or TIMSS necessarily a good thing for a country? Insofar as such com-
parative instruments aspire to a standardisation of school mathematical priorities
there is a risk that countries are served differently, and not necessarily according to
their specific needs. A casual glance at TIMSS test items reveals a very specific
version of mathematics, centred on basic skills, short closed questions, in bland
“real life” situations. The format is echoed in school tests and a host of materials
widely available to parents designed to prepare children for such tests. But to rep-
resent mathematics as universal, spanning nations and generations, in such a singu-
lar fashion comes at a price. The resultant conceptions of school mathematics now
define and police everyday practice. At a major mathematics education interna-
tional conference a Mexican delegate spoke of how the exercises made her country
subservient to American priorities for school mathematics. An Ethiopian educator
depicted a situation in which teachers and students were obliged to engage with
pedagogical formations largely unrecognisable in his country situation. Meanwhile,
a Finnish commentator indicated that her country’s high performance still required
re-evaluation of their national practices in terms of the newly dominant interna-
tional discourse and its stated priorities. But cutting across those sorts of issues we
may ask if widespread success in such measures has any bearing in a country’s
ability to produce top-level mathematicians. Or conversely, if the aspirations of
TIMSS are so bland, is wider inclusiveness necessarily a good indicator of wider
basic functionality in the subject in any useful way? Many mathematics education
researchers would concur on the limitations of these comparative instruments, but
still they remain recurrent points of reference in so many reports on mathematics
education research, including my own, including this one, as an attempt to reach
out to mutually recognisable themes. And my use of such consensual issues weak-
ens my individual voice in its attempted compromise in the name of a short cut to
communication. We know that these shared points of reference are limited but we
still carry on using them and allow them to orientate, format and exchange our
evaluative efforts even though we secretly acknowledge their wobbly foundations.
This need to chip away at our own false premises is a key ingredient of this book’s
discussion. But sometimes these false or alternative premises are imposed on us
through official agencies more concerned with wider policy-driven social manage-
ment than with more precise research-led ideals. In short, mathematics in schools
is governed by ideologies that have varying shelf-lives, domains of relevance and
underlying motivations.
viii Preface
A reviewer of the proposal for this book was keen to capture the “take away”
message that lay beyond the analysis I had presented, and I am similarly keen to
establish this message from the outset. Here goes: People and mathematics are in
persistent co-evolution and any account of their mutual interaction requires a flex-
ibility of language, where the operation of that very flexibility is often the instru-
ment of change. That is, our understanding of what it is to be a person is persistently
changing, as is our understanding of what we want mathematics to do, but where
certain aspects of mathematics, unlike other disciplines, remain remarkably stable.
Research must comprise the analysis of these understandings targeted at develop-
ing actions through which the mutual evolution can be better understood and acti-
vated according to newly defined priorities. Similarly, teacher education is
presented as a challenge for student teachers to research their own process of
becoming a teacher through critically analysing their own engagement with math-
ematics and their early attempts to teach it. We all need to adopt a critical attitude
towards our past assumptions or contemporary officialdom that constrain our
thinking into specific pathways. In this book, the attempt is to see research as the
motor with which to achieve this. Mathematics is not just out there waiting to be
found – the very content of mathematics is a function of human processing that is
necessarily governed by historical processes, human priorities and power relations,
but where these processes, priorities and relations will be persistently in motion
and potential conflict.
The reviewer also asked, in recognising my normal home base of social theory:
“is it possible to discuss the implications about classroom instruction based on this
work? That is, is it possible to base on this work to at least discuss about the way
to teach mathematics in classroom for maximizing students’ learning opportuni-
ties?” I do propose to do that as I have in earlier work. This is a reasonable request.
Lots of people spend lots of their time in their formative years in mathematics
classrooms and it is an obvious forum in which to consider the issues being
addressed in this book. I have discussed classroom work with children in my earlier
work (e.g. Brown 2001). In this present book, my main point of intervention is with
student teachers. I see this challenge in terms of how teachers might re-think their
participation in their lessons tomorrow rather than assuming that structural changes
are necessary before one can begin new forms of practice. We cannot await per-
fectly prepared children, in a perfect classroom, with a perfect curriculum, in a
perfect future. It is possible to rethink teacher/student/mathematical relationships
in any current setting. The main instrument proposed comprises student teachers
carrying out analysis of their own emerging teaching practice and in relation to
their own attempts at mathematical tasks. Yet the book also discusses the many cur-
riculum and institutional constraints that operate on classroom practice in
mathematics.
I will loosen any assumption that we are only in the business of supporting
classes of students. “Classes” are very much a time-dependent educational con-
struct, normal, perhaps, for most young people presently. Yet, this has been the case
for much less than a century, only since contemporary social organisation has
required such arrangements for a lot of young people, where they experience their
Preface ix
mathematical learning as a collective experience. The reviewer’s concern for “maxi-

mising students’ learning opportunities” will always be according to a particular
agenda where consensus, even among researchers, is typically evasive. Priorities do
not always pull in the same direction. We must not remain trapped in old models as
a stopgap simply because we have not learned to replace them. In this respect, I dif-
fer from the reviewer’s preferences in that I want to step back and spend more time
on deciding how we reach the metrics by which we decide gradations. I am on the
side of trying to explore alternative productive ways of looking, understanding how
theory might work, rather than moving too quickly to decisions about preferred
courses of action. I am more concerned with how a social scientist would make
sense of mathematics education research than I am with deciding what teachers
should do next. There’s enough of the latter already. But at the same time I am talk-
ing to the mathematics educators that I have encountered over the years rather than
to the theorists who would disown my simplistic use of their work. The book
attempts to work more generally at the human/mathematics interface in terms of
more widespread participation but where the terms of that participation are left open
as part of the pedagogic encounter.
So often in my reading of mathematics education research, conclusions have
pushed for more active participation by students in mathematics rather than mere
compliance with contemporary norms. Yet the apparent reality in schools has often
been towards ever more corporate models of practice governed by a competitive
neo-liberal ethos, where structural priorities trump autonomous action by teachers,
preferred pedagogical routes or test performance trumps mathematical exploration
by students. Research typically has very little impact on conceptions of policy and
a very weak or indirect impact on actual practice. The voice of the policy maker
saying this must be done will often be stronger than that of a mathematics education
researcher suggesting productive courses of action. Also, outlets for mathematics
education research are usually insistent that the mathematical elements of any
research are pinpointed within any wider depiction of the educational context. But
the negotiation of this wider context by researchers, teachers and children inevitably
shapes the mathematics that is encountered. As the author of this book, I am also
very conscious that my own personal perspectives have evolved through that of
being school pupil, university mathematics student, trainee teacher, schoolteacher,
teacher educator, researcher, professor and author. My personal assessments of
research and its relevance are a function of the stage I have reached in my career and
affect my views more than actual changes in historical circumstances. Perhaps
young teachers typically aspire to more emancipatory approaches with their indi-
vidual classes of children, whilst mid-career teacher educators and researchers are
more attentive to models of practice that can be shared across communities. The
insertion of one’s own delusional personal history into an account of supposed
wider trends always requires the pursuit of multiple perspectives built through suc-
cessive new demands and frequently changed minds. This book comprises my
attempt to speak from the present, to take the chance on asserting a new theory
acknowledging the essential collectivism built into any point of view, as seen from
my personal pathway as I currently understand it.
x Preface
A Singular Journey into Mathematics Education
The remainder of this preface will set out some of the moments that have resulted in
the perspectives presented above and in the chapters to follow. The material for this,
my tenth book, is drawn from my work in mathematics education produced since
the 2011 publication of two books, Becoming a mathematics teacher, a write up of
two empirically based primary mathematics teacher education projects funded by
the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and Mathematics education and
subjectivity. The intervening period however has also been devoted to a teacher
education project that I led culminating in two books without a specific mathemati-
cal theme entitled Teacher education in England (Brown 2018) and Research on
becoming an English teacher (Brown et al. 2019). This current book will be an
attempt to make cumulative sense of my complete body of work in mathematics
over my career, an attempt at an articulation of a unifying theme, a composite argu-
ment, or even a “take away message”. The autobiographical dimension to this pref-
ace situates the current work into a longer-term professional trajectory with view to
offering some explanation of how I have ended up where I am today and why I think
some of the things that I do.
I was fortunate in my early career to encounter two influential figures in the for-
mation of Britain’s Association of Teachers of Mathematics, Dick Tahta and Bill
Brookes, who were responsible for my relatively counter-culture engagement with
mathematics education research from the outset. Following my first degree in math-
ematics and economics, I studied secondary mathematics education, with Dick in
Exeter (1978–79) for my initial teacher education, and later in my PhD with Bill in
Southampton (1985–87). I was also fortunate that my first two jobs also provided
havens of “progressive” experimentation; 3 years teaching secondary level mathe-
matics (11–19-year-olds) at Holland Park School in central London, followed by a
similar period as a primary level teacher educator with the organisation Voluntary
Services Overseas in the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica.
Freed from the regulative structures that shape early teacher practice in many
countries today, I found myself asking questions that do not quite fit with the way
in which school education is often approached in the current climate. It was Dick
who was rather troubled by the idea that teaching had become characterised as
providing explanations to prescribed questions. He preferred rather that teaching
would be about the displacement of perspectives with the teacher responding to a
child’s question by providing another question in return. I have pursued this
approach doggedly over the years to the irritation of my students, many of whom
have given up any hope of receiving a straight answer from me to their questions.
Further, Dick argued that children were rarely wrong in what they said, they were
simply addressing a different question, rather than the one supposed to be in the
teacher’s alien language.
I was left to work things out for myself with the occasional book nudged my way
but with an accompanying expectation that I found my own books as well. For
example, Dick passed me an essay by Roland Barthes called “Writers, teachers and
intellectuals”, a paper not included on many training year reading lists, even in the
Preface xi
heady late 1970s. In this article, written shortly after the student uprisings in Paris
in 1968, I encountered my first reference to Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalytical prac-
titioner and theorist influenced by Sigmund Freud and the philosopher Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Lacan was to later become my main intellectual influence
for over 30 years. This iconic quote from Barthes’ essay appeared in the final chap-
ters of my training year dissertation, in my PhD, in my first book and in several
other places since, including in a tribute I read at Dick’s funeral.
Just as psychoanalysis, with the work of Lacan, is in the process of extending the Freudian
topic into a topology of the subject… so likewise we need to substitute for the magisterial
space (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below,
the flock, the sheep, the herd) – a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither
teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place. One would then be able to see that
what must be made reversible are not social “roles” (is there any point squabbling for
“authority”, for the right to speak?) but the regions of speech. Where is speech? In locu-
tion? In listening? In the returns of the one and the other? The problem is not to abolish
the distinction in functions (teacher/student…) but to protect the instability and, as it
were, the giddying whirl of positions of speech. In the teaching space, nobody should
anywhere be in his place (I am comforted by this constant displacement: Were I to find my
place, I would not even go on pretending to teach, I would give up). (Barthes 1977,
pp. 205–206)
Three years teaching secondary level at Holland Park School in central London
followed, where it was true that children often did not stay in their place for very
long. This wholly exciting urban environment in the Notting Hill area of London
where over 70 nationalities and as many languages were represented in the school
defied the production of clear formulae for teacher success. My task as a teacher
was to make things happen, and to go with the flow, not to follow a prescribed route,
even if that were possible. Often, this was not comfortable, but it could be exhilarat-
ing to enable children to choose their own routes through mathematics in an envi-
ronment that encouraged that. And those years did serve as an anchor to my future
understandings of what it is to be a teacher. Inner city schools offer resistance to the
best intentioned teaching approaches. There are immediate challenges that do not
allow teachers to wait for an ideal state of affairs before proper teaching can begin.
Moreover, the school itself went through multiple changes of identity in response to
evolving ideas of how educational policies should be shaped and prioritised. London
schools, for example, have been more recently successfully responsive to demands
for better exam results to the possible demise of earlier more “progressive”
approaches tolerated by the city’s earlier left-wing administration.
I spent three subsequent years in Dominica, a small rain-forested island of
29 miles by 16, but with several mountains higher than any of those in my native
England. I was working with teachers training on the job mainly in remote rural
primary schools (5–11-year-olds) some without electricity or running water. The
teachers were straight from their own schooling, where many of these teachers had
not secured their own 16+ high school success in mathematics. Many of the lessons
that I observed entailed a verbose teacher preaching to the flock. My teacher educa-
tion strategy entailed persuading the teachers to experiment with giving more
opportunity for the children themselves to structure their own learning and by
xii Preface
t alking with each other. For the teacher the challenge was to say fewer words but for
those fewer words to be selected more carefully with view to having higher impact.
In an island of just 70,000 people, I was given unusual responsibilities for someone
in his mid-twenties, including the writing of the national primary school mathemat-
ics curriculum, an activity that enabled me to build a grasp of children’s early math-
ematical development, but also to think of ways in which a curriculum could be
presented to make problem solving more prominent. More importantly for my later
work, it extended my range of interest in mathematics learning to span the whole of
childhood through to university level study. On the island, with no TV or internet, at
best my daily news comprised 10 minutes of crackles from the BBC World Service
radio. I was untroubled by and largely unaware of the popular concerns of the day.
I commenced my PhD centred on these experiences following a meeting with
Bill Brookes during a break between my second and third years in the Caribbean.
Bill’s introductory directions had advised seven or so books including Wittgenstein’s
(1983) Philosophical investigations, Ricoeur’s (1981) Hermeneutics and human
sciences, Polanyi’s (1978) Personal knowledge, Schütz’s (1962) Problem of social
reality, Collingwood’s (1982) Autobiography and oddly, Raymond William’s (1983)
glossary Keywords. Each taking up valuable luggage space in advance of a further
year’s isolation where my sole phone call comprising 5 minutes of conversation
with Bill cost me a few days’ wages. But there was nothing in that reading with any
sort of mathematical theme. If there was any sort of unifying theme it would be to
do with how we conceptualise communication and knowledge through the medium
of language. It was Bill, following the famous Oxford historian R. G. Collingwood,
who alerted me to the idea that explanations are not so much statements of fact but
more generally a function of the question that had been asked, or the audience to
whom the answer is addressed. The questions that we ask, reveal the perspective
that we are taking and the world view associated with that perspective. The ques-
tions we answer may well reveal who it is that we are talking to and what we hope
to achieve in doing this. That is, our answers reveal the demands to which we are
responding. On an island, where the tiny college library had recently been blown
away by a devastating hurricane in 1979, my reading for the year was highly focused
on these difficult books which defied easy synthesis to someone educated in math-
ematics and economics. Yet they each provided interesting and challenging ways of
thinking about humans interacting in language, here specifically, young Dominican
children engaged in experimental mathematics. Beyond my everyday duties as a
teacher educator the empirical work focused on a group of seven teachers who I was
supervising, seeking to better manage their use of language in lessons featuring
investigational mathematics. The subsequent PhD, completed after further field-
work in London schools, was not an engagement with contemporary research
debates but a discussion of how children and teachers shared mathematics as seen
through alternative theoretical filters. At my first (unsuccessful) interview for an
academic job at London University as my PhD approached completion it was
pointed out that an FLM “research” paper that I had submitted to the panel had no
reference list (Brown 1987a). The two spells with Dick and Bill had been remark-
ably devoid of any reference to mathematics education research prevalent at the
Preface xiii
time. I was also painfully aware that the references list in my PhD thesis did not
reach the bottom of the second page with very few mentions of work specifically in
the field of mathematics education (Brown 1987b). A reviewer of the current manu-
script despaired in a similar way.
I had returned to England at a time when there was a strong preference to recruit
teacher educators with recent school teaching experience, where my 3 years in
Dominica counted as distance from the classroom rather than relevant experience.
For that reason, I returned to school teaching after completing my PhD. I decided to
work at a middle school (9–13-year-olds) in the Isle of Wight (23 miles by 13) as a
mathematics specialist to retain and develop my connection to both primary and
secondary education. Through this period, I applied for many academic jobs with-
out success. Despite my academic and school experience shortfalls, on my fortieth
application for a teacher education post, I finally secured my first academic post in
Manchester a couple of years later (1988), mainly involved in the education of pri-
mary teachers. Manchester has always been a rich environment for intellectual dis-
cussion and it was especially exciting for teachers and teacher educators wanting to
consider new ways of understanding their work. Weekly meetings of the Teaching
and Learning Enquiry Group continued for 9 years and centred on discussions of
mathematics teaching practice, with relatively little attention to the wider work of
mathematics education research.
My belated temptation to reach out to the mathematics education research com-
munity in the early 1990s required a little more awareness of other people’s work.
At the time, mathematics education research was firmly centred in debates concern-
ing what was called constructivism. To enter serious debate on social aspects of
mathematics education research and get published one had to position one’s ideas in
relation to the discussions taking place under that name. The early days of my more
formal research engagement and my first attendance at the conference on the
Psychology of Mathematics Education in Lisbon in 1994 were dominated by a
debate between radical constructivism, referenced to the individualist developmen-
tal psychology of Piaget,2 and Social Constructivism,3 which increasingly identified
with Vygotsky and perhaps a more sociological perspective. The apparent options
for a young researcher like myself at the time was either to take sides in these alter-
native routes4 or, given my counter-culture tendencies, to show that both were pro-
viding partial perspectives that would surely reach their shelf life in due course. I
had misgivings from the start as the American dominated international research
landscape, where many researchers pushed for constructivist-oriented “reform” ref-
erenced to the math-wars centred more on problem solving approaches, seemed not
to have noticed the Piagetian child-centred philosophies that had been the norm in
English primary schools for a couple of decades. Here, children’s minds followed
natural paths of development as individuals, where that development determined
2
e.g. von Glasersfeld (1991, 1995); Steffe and Kieran (1994).
3
e.g. Cobb and Bowers (1999); Lerman (2000).
4
Confrey (1991) provided an influential comparison of the two trajectories around that time.
xiv Preface
what they could do. But at the time of my earlier teaching in London in the early
1980s, a Marxist tradition had emerged to resist the apparent truths of Piaget’s
notion of a naturally developing child that had underpinned this child-centred peda-
gogy. Valerie Walkerdine was a prominent figure in this movement, introducing
poststructuralism to the fringes of a British mathematics education research com-
munity unaccustomed to such philosophical orientations, nor to existential critiques
of Piaget’s psychology. Valerie kindly joined the “Teaching and Learning Enquiry
Group” for two separate days after we had spent some time reading her book, The
mastery of reason. The following paragraph from that book gives a flavour of her
highly controversial opposition to the styles of child-centred teaching then so preva-
lent in English primary schools.
modern scientific accounts, like Piaget’s, can be understood as implicated in the production
of our modern form of government – the democratic government of reason. Foucault goes
beyond the idea of ideologies as relatively autonomous, as sign systems, to discourses
which produce a truth, which claim to be an account of “the real”… For me the importance
of this work lies in the way in which actual social practices may be discursively regulated
by the production of “truths”, “knowledges” about children, for example, which claim to
tell the truth about child development … creating a normalising vision of a “natural child”.
(Walkerdine 1988, p. 5)
The underlying claim here is that there is no such thing as “natural development” – a
rather shocking notion for teachers schooled in the work of Piaget. The label masks
something altogether more complicated in a world not defined by such clear sign-
posts. Walkerdine was following Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory where the words
that label things (i.e. the word-thing couple) are rather less secure than is often sup-
posed. The landscape is not defined by a set of agreed things with given labels, or
not for very long anyway. For Lacan, the individual’s understanding of who she is,
is encapsulated in her response to an ever-shifting symbolic network. This symbolic
network directs and controls their acts, but without knowing what it wants. The
network comprises the discourses that I inhabit, try out for size, explore myself
through, in which I see myself reflected, etc., and ultimately learn “who I am” in an
infinitely contingent manner. Lacan, writing in the late 1960s, was explicitly critical
of his contemporary Piaget: “The Piagetic error … lies in the notion of what is
called the egocentric discourse of the child, defined as the stage at which he lacks
what this Alpine psychology calls reciprocity. … The child, … does not speak for
himself, … – they don’t speak to a particular person, they just speak to nobody in
particular” (Lacan 1986, p. 208). Lacan’s analysis sees our actions as always
responding to some perceived demand in the social network, but that we never fully
reconcile the conflicts between the multitude of apparent demands that we encounter.
The Piaget/Vygotsky debate between those of different persuasions was never
likely to settle and contemporary protagonists occupy similar sorts of territory,
albeit asking a variety of incommensurate questions that defy the achievement of
consensus (e.g. Roth 2010). A specific departure from the dominance of the
Psychology of Mathematics Education conference was the emergence of
Mathematics Education and Society predicated on a less individualised conception
of mathematical development. Rather, social systems made demands on their
Preface xv
c itizens that shaped them according to conventional expectations, but where radical
politics might be able to resist the oppressive dimensions of such expectations. And
that bumpy environment provided the backdrop to the emergence of my own ideas.
The re-ascendance of Vygotsky’s social theory in the noughties within the banter
of mathematics education research derived from the earlier debate described above
to become an alternative mainstream in mathematics education research. Debates
surrounding this trend provided a common theme within a group that I co-founded
with Julian Williams and Yvette Solomon in Manchester in more recent years;
Mathematics Education and Contemporary Theory. This conference emerged out of
a small group reading Badiou’s Logics of Worlds over an 18-month period shortly
after it was published. Three conferences in Manchester were held over the period
2011–2016 and guest edited the proceedings for two special issues of the journal
Educational Studies in Mathematics (Brown and Walshaw 2012; Brown et al. 2016).
Our community had emerged from earlier collaborations on four edited collections,
which included multiple chapters by over 20 authors from the group (Walshaw
2004, 2010; DeFreitas and Nolan 2008; Brown 2008; Black et al. 2009). Primarily
through discussion and the advance circulation of papers each of the invitational
conferences with about 45 delegates from multiple countries each time asserted, or
at least explored, conceptions of theory in the development of mathematics educa-
tion research. The production of the special issues comprised a key activity associ-
ated with the conference, where delegates were invited to submit papers for
consideration. The papers in the Special Issues sought to explore the frontiers and
possible futures of mathematics education research through considering how alter-
native theoretical lenses enabled new possibilities in apprehending practice. They
offered theoretical, narrative, empirical and practical applications of alternative
concepts to and around the field of mathematics education to that end, the confer-
ences and Special Issues contained essays that made a case for theory. A recurrent
issue in processing the papers for publication was the need to insist on an explicitly
mathematical dimension in socially oriented discussion.
A common debate centred on how the supposed trajectory from Vygotsky men-
tioned earlier could be understood. Prominent members of the group Radford,
Williams, Solomon and Roth identified with Vygotsky and referenced their work to
that trajectory. For example, Roth and Lee (2007) discuss Vygotsky’s neglected
legacy, Williams (2015) mediated between Bourdieu and neo-Vygotskian perspec-
tives. In contrast, Bibby (2010) argued that Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal
Development was not the neutral place one might imagine, an individual might not
always respond well to being included in the clan. My own work (e.g. Brown 2016)
and that of my colleague Alexandre Pais (2015, 2016) resisted the nodal power
given to Vygotsky and Piaget suggesting they had a normalising effect on the dis-
course of mathematics education research since their work widely underpinned its
ideologies and supposed terrain. Meanwhile, Llewellyn (2018) followed
Walkerdine’s use of Foucault to argue against the normalising effect of mathematics
curriculum. Similarly, Nolan (2016) followed Bourdieu in seeing school practices
as producing and reproducing “opinions” or notions of “the good mathematics
teacher”, thereby shaping identity and agency in “becoming” a teacher within
xvi Preface
institutional structures. De Freitas and Walshaw (2016) have discussed a range of

alternative theoretical frameworks in mathematics education research, including
Vygotsky, Foucault and Lacan.
My own involvement in the conferences sometimes pursued a discussion centred
on my own book Mathematics education and subjectivity (Brown 2011) and is con-
tinued in this present book. I had initiated some dialogue primarily by writing an
ESM article (Brown 2008b) that provided a critical analysis of an ESM special issue
on semiotics edited by Saenz Ludlow and Presmeg (2006), where many papers drew
on Piagetian and Vygotskian psychological models. Presmeg and Radford (2008)
responded to my article in the same journal. My subsequent book provoked lengthy
responses in ESM from both Wolff-Michael Roth (2012) and Alexandre Pais (2015,
2016). In turn I was given the opportunity to respond in the same journal to Roth’s
Vygotskian critique of my work (Brown 2012), further developed in this book as
Chapter Eight. It would be inaccurate to say that the debate was resolved but this
present book provides my further contribution to an on-going discussion, although
I restrict my discussion of Vygotsky in other parts of this book to allow space for my
own preferred styles of analysis.
For a long time my principal guide has been Slavoj Žižek, who is absolutely
contemporary. I have read more than 40 of his books over a 30-year period but I
cannot read them as fast as he writes them. They are all less than two metres from
the computer on which I write. I have sought in this current book of mine to make
some very limited reference to a major book that he published just 3 months ago.
Despite it being my major lockdown project, I have not yet grasped his extensive
references to “unorientable” topological spaces like mobius strips, cross-caps and
Klein bottles as alternatives to our rectilinear or “statified” obsessions in making
sense of temporal flow. I have seen him speak many times and once spent an entire
day driving him around the north of England. He autographed the dashboard of my
car. I have a Žižek T-shirt. He has provided my main route into Lacan and Hegel,
and it was fun. Meanwhile, I have also attended several lectures by his friend, Alain
Badiou, formerly chair of Philosophy at the prestigious École normale supérieure in
Paris, who also features prominently in this book. I have a definite attraction to lis-
tening to major philosophers providing concrete examples from the world that we
live in right now even if I can’t quite pull off the minimal distance that Žižek advo-
cates in the introduction to the recent book that I have mentioned. And he has pub-
lished another book since then.
Manchester, UK Tony Brown

Contents
1 Introduction�� 1
1.1 Chapter Outline�� 8
2 Reason to Believe in Mathematics�� 11
2.1 Introduction�� 11
2.2 The Location of Mathematics �� 12
2.3 What’s the Point?�� 13
2.4 The Production of Mathematics�� 16
2.5 Rationality and Belief �� 18
2.6 The Incomplete Production of Mathematical Reality Through
Commodification�� 20
3 The Social Packaging of Mathematical Learning in Schools�� 25
3.1 Curriculum as Acquisition�� 27
3.2 The Production of School Mathematical Concepts�� 30
4 The Ideology of Mastering the Curriculum (with Peter Pawlik)�� 35
4.1 Mastery Teaching�� 36
4.2 Teaching for Mastery: The Master of Us All�� 37
4.3 Ideology of the Mastery Curriculum�� 38
4.4 Lacan’s Schemata of the Four Discourses�� 39
4.4.1 University Discourse�� 40
4.4.2 Master Discourse�� 41
4.4.3 Hysteric Discourse�� 42
4.4.4 Analytic Discourse�� 43
4.5 Emily’s Negotiation of the Mastery Curriculum�� 43
5 The Social Administration of Mathematics Subject Knowledge
Through Teacher Education �� 49
5.2 The Discursive Shaping of Research in Mathematics
Education�� 51
5.3 International Changes in Teacher Education�� 52
xvii
xviii Contents
5.4 Changes to Mathematics Teacher Education in England�� 53

5.5 An Empirical Study�� 55
5.6 General Findings�� 58
5.7 Student Teacher Experience of School Mathematics: Some
Data �� 60
5.7.1 Secondary Student Mathematics Teachers
and University Tutors�� 60
5.7.2 Primary Mathematics Student Teachers and
University Tutors�� 63
5.8 Discussion of Data�� 65
5.8.1 Performance-Driven Assessment Affects the Nature
of Subject Knowledge�� 66
5.8.2 School-Based Training Can Nurture Narrow
Administrative Conceptions of Teaching�� 66
5.8.3 Practice-Centred Learning Can Improve Participation
in Schools�� 67
5.8.4 The Enforcement of a Centralised Curriculum
Supports a Collective Vision of Learning �� 67
5.8.5 Research Is Directly Focused on Developing Practice �� 68
5.9 Conclusion�� 68
6 The Point of My Own Teaching�� 73
6.1 Spatial Apprehension�� 74
6.2 Apprehension of Planetary Movement �� 82
6.3 Lockdown Mathematics�� 87
7 Rethinking Objectivity and Subjectivity�� 91
7.2 Setting and Aims�� 94
7.3 Identification �� 95
7.4 Subjectivity �� 96
7.5 Objectivity: Counting as One�� 99
7.6 The Ontology of Mathematical Objects�� 102
8 Subjectivity and Cultural Adjustment: A Response
to Socio-Culturalism�� 107
8.2 On Vygotsky �� 110
8.3 On Lacan�� 112
8.3.1 Lacan, Žižek and Badiou�� 112
8.3.2 The Place of Subjectivity: The Case of the
Mathematics Education Researcher�� 113
8.3.3 Language Games and Renewal �� 115
8.3.4 Corporeality and the Real �� 116
Contents xix
8.3.5 Discourse, Relationality and Subjectivity�� 119

8.3.6 Subjectivity, Relationality and Personality �� 121
8.4 Conclusion�� 123
9 The Evolution of Mathematics�� 127
9.1 The Becoming of Mathematics�� 129
References �� 137
Index�� 147
About the Author
Tony Brown is Professor of Mathematics Education at Manchester Metropolitan

University. His research mainly considers mathematics education and teacher edu-
cation through the lens of contemporary social theory. Tony has written nine previ-
ous books and many journal articles in these areas. He completed three projects for
the Economic and Social Research Council on the theme of Primary Mathematics
Teacher Education. Tony co-organised the three conferences on Mathematics
Education and Contemporary Theory, held at MMU and co-edited special issues of
Educational Studies in Mathematics from the material that arose.
Tony has also had a long-standing interest in professionally oriented research,
typically carried out by senior professionals working on doctoral studies analysing
their own practice. His own students have researched areas as diverse as mathemat-
ics education, teacher education, science education, emergency medicine, police
training, emotion in special needs education, educational links with industry,
English education, race and ethnicity, popular music education, global education in
development contexts, early years education, school leadership, and digital media.
Seven of these doctoral projects have led to books.
Originally from London, Tony attended the Universities of Kent at Canterbury
and Exeter before returning to central London where he taught mathematics for
3 years at Holland Park School. The next 3 years were spent as a Mathematics
Teacher Educator for Volunteer Services Overseas in Dominica in the Caribbean. In
1987, he completed his PhD at Southampton University, which focused on language
usage in mathematics classrooms, based on data collected in Dominica and London.
After a spell as the Mathematics Coordinator in a middle school on the Isle of
Wight, Tony moved to Manchester Metropolitan University (then polytechnic) in
1989 to spend some more years in teacher education. He became a Professor at
MMU in 2000. During 2003 and 2004, Tony was based at the University of Waikato
where he was the first Professor of Mathematics Education in New Zealand. Since
then he has been back at MMU writing, teaching and carving out a miserable exis-
tence of unsuccessfully applying for research grants.
xxi
Chapter 1
Introduction
Mathematical ideas have become very familiar to us as compulsory elements of

most people’s education but more generally within everyday life. The acquisition of
mathematical ideas and processes is often experienced as a formal demand to ensure
that the acquisition of certain mathematical ideas in prescribed forms has taken
place, with suitable checks and balances to measure this acquisition. But the origi-
nal desires for including mathematical ideas in our everyday lives appear to have
been rewritten to meet specific contemporary caricatures of mathematics and the
supposed world that it now serves. In recent years, some of these caricatures have
ostensibly been produced to facilitate the obsessive “audit culture” that emerged in
the 1990s where everything needed to be measured and compared (Strathern 2000).
Consequentially, the formal task of teaching has been increasingly recast as the
“delivery” of so many commodities according to preferred metrics. But what is the
collateral concealed in the forms of mathematics crafted as commodities in this
way? What is delivered, as might arrive in a supermarket delivery van, and what
damage is done by the plastic wrapping that we barely noticed until our seas filled
with plastic and we feared that it was a potential vector for Covid-19? That is, what
is embedded in the materials and practices through which people encounter what is
called “mathematics” today? The dominant commodity forms in mathematics edu-
cation govern both our practices and our analyses of those practices and risk dis-
placing mathematics as a living response to everyday challenges. Our very
construction of mathematics is the flip side of our construction of ourselves, where
these dual constructions are both compatible with certain modes of practice pre-
ferred by the models of governance to which we are subject. Mathematical ideas
then are not so much tangible entities to behold but rather specific manifestations of
human experience that require a specific mode of human to experience them.
The consideration of wider theoretical resources that might be used within math-
ematics education research is in some ways prompted by the way in which the field
of mathematics education relates awkwardly to its two constituent terms.
Mathematics and education wave tenuously to each other from disparate conceptual
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to 1
Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
T. Brown, A Contemporary Theory of Mathematics Education Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55100-1_1
2 1 Introduction
domains. Mathematics is considered by many as a discipline beyond social dis-

courses. Underlying this understanding is a philosophical position that seems to
assert the objectivity of mathematics as a prized possession. This kind of grounding
has the effect of conceptualising mathematics as constituted by pre-existing pat-
terns that are stable and can be discovered. In this view, it is possible to know what
is true and what is not true since knowledge is objective and universal. In some
versions of this formulation, the reality of mathematics has the same qualities
regardless of observer and context. Philosophies of mathematics centred in positiv-
istic notions of mathematical truth, objectivity and stable meaning are not espe-
cially disposed to the familiar philosophical bases of education. Nor do they
resonate well with the more nuanced linguistic turn privileged in all three main-
stream philosophical traditions of the later part of the century: hermeneutics, ana-
lytic philosophy and postmodernism. Truth, insofar as it is entertained in these
philosophies, is processed through language where knowledge emerges through the
operation of discursive systems often without centres. As such, knowledge houses
tendencies that are not always in the business of portraying a world defined by con-
sensual harmony in which final answers might be available. Research, in these con-
temporary traditions, is more centred on generating alternative analytical filters
according to diverse priorities rather than supposing that a best solution could be
achieved. Here, mathematics is fitted to specific purposes, where analytical struc-
tures are imposed on life to make life different, rather than being discovered in life
that goes on much the same after the discovery.
Education is notionally a social science susceptible to interpretive analysis.
Social science brings to the fore the complexity of the social world and that van-
tage point prompts the notion that people are constantly making sense of their
worlds. Realities are local, specific and constructed, and, hence, values are an inte-
gral component in the meaning systems that people generate in social action. Truth,
then, is not absolute and certain but is socially and experientially based, embedded
in fluid social interactions. From this specific sensibility towards knowledge con-
struction comes the understanding that the social world can only be investigated
through a systematic analysis of socially meaningful action. Education, however,
frequently resists conceptual immersion in the broader social sciences and the ana-
lytical resources those sciences provide since, as both idea and practice, it finds
itself increasingly susceptible to external definitions and overt and covert regula-
tion. Curriculum decision-making is split and shared unevenly between various
groups that do not necessarily see eye to eye. Their differences result in disjunc-
tions (both real and potential) between mathematics education policy setting, cur-
riculum implementation by teachers and the conceptualisations of mathematics
education by researchers. The resolution of these conflicts has resulted in an
enforced homogenisation of pedagogical practices together with demands for
increased testing. Research then needs to decide which side it is on, whether it is
supportive of specific political agendas or resistant to those agendas, perhaps in
pursuit of more intellectual ambitions, but then who would such intellectual ambi-
tions serve? For example, is mathematics education research designed to support
institutionalised conceptions of mathematics predicated on prescribed targets, or is
1 Introduction 3
it about taking a more critical approach to such prescription with view to opening
new trajectories, such as seeing education in much broader terms, thereby chal-
lenging more the familiar framings that characterise the common sense of the day?
Any answer to such a question is far from clear-cut. Institutionalised conceptions
of mathematics are often created towards supporting agenda of inclusion, but that
very inclusion may temper the aspirations of those wanting to pursue a more indi-
vidual or eccentric path.
Restrictive conceptions of mathematics and of education, like these, mean that
the composite term “mathematics education” is held in place by a variety of cultur-
ally bound assumptions. Largely circumscribed by something bigger than itself,
mathematics education is constituted through dense webs of power. Traces of the
determining effects of power are apparent in any mathematics education community
of practice. A dilemma presents itself to those involved directly with those commu-
nities: Do we conceptualise our task in terms of initiating our students into existing
knowledges? Or, might our task be seen, more radically, as troubling the limits of
those knowledges, with a view towards keeping open the prospect of our students
accessing a truth that transcends the parameters of our own teaching since the world
that they are entering is one that we do not know ourselves? In other words, is it
possible for students to reach beyond the frameworks that their teachers offer to
produce a new future beyond our current vision? The latter option is not to be taken
lightly since it requires a major shift in conventional thinking and practice. How do
we fashion a new imaginary in which teachers forego a comprehensive understand-
ing of what their students should be able to achieve? Thus, a key question for math-
ematics education research can be framed in this way: Is it possible to embrace new
ontological possibilities for the learner and teacher beyond established states of
representation? The intention here would be to open another space for talking about
the field in a way that is responsive to the diverse demands it encounters and the
multiple contexts that shape its practices.
This book seeks to provide a theoretical account of how processes of learning
and teaching mathematics create us as particular types of human compatible with
prevalent ideologies. Not so much inclusivity for all in the study of mathematics
but rather compliance for all. The book speculates on why the mathematical work
that precedes each of us motivates us to understand ourselves in the way that we
do. But having understood ourselves in given ways, how do those self-conceptions
then motivate us to construct mathematics in our own actions and pass it on to new
generations? The book argues that caricatures, whether of humans or of mathe-
matical ideas, result from contingent aggregations of historically derived ele-
ments. In these caricatures, we fix ourselves as “humans” by “counting as one” a
certain set of elements (body parts, key locations, years of experience, grade point
averages, Facebook “likes”, consumer preferences, etc.). We fix mathematics in
much the same way (multiplication tables, iteration processes, graphs) and cross-
reference these reductions to each other to the potential exclusion of renewal seen
in more nuanced terms. That is, compliance for mathematics and for people in the
name of inclusivity according to current agenda with the chosen characteristics
sutures new ways of being.
4 1 Introduction
Mathematics as a field of human intellectual endeavour preceded all of us living

today. We have learned to believe that mathematics can do a lot of things for us and
we trust “it” with our lives. Many of us mundanely rely on it to keep its peace to
hold up bridges and buildings for centuries. Just a select few people rely on cutting-
edge mathematical innovations to enable sophisticated ventures like a short break to
the moon. Ultimately, “we believe that it is linked to the fantasy of control over a
calculable universe necessary to sustain our present social and political order”
(Walkerdine 1988, cover text). So, mathematics has become an inextricable part of
our lives, where strict boundaries between practical and intellectual manifestations
of mathematics are difficult to draw. These boundaries are yet harder to discern
since pedagogical interventions impose multiple understandings and levels of trust
in “real-life” models. It is sometimes unclear whether in these attendant pedagogi-
cal rituals we are aiming to keep mathematics alive in its responsiveness to new
challenges, or rather calcify old versions of life and the forms that it takes in the
name of wider circulation today for pedagogical accountability.
Against this supposed backdrop of mathematics always having been there in
ways that are familiar, we build an understanding of who we are. But how do we
encapsulate who we are against this backdrop, using the paraphernalia of that back-
drop as seemingly raw materials in constructing our story of who we are? Freud
(2002, p. 5) argues that:
An adult’s sense of self cannot have been the same from the beginning. It must have under-
gone a process of development. Pathology acquaints us with a great many conditions in
which the boundary between the ego and the external world becomes uncertain or the bor-
derlines are actually wrongly drawn. There are cases in which parts of a person’s body,
indeed parts of his mental life – perceptions, thoughts, feelings – seem alien, divorced from
the ego, and others in which he attributes to the external world what has clearly arisen in the
ego and ought to be recognised by it. Hence, even the sense of self is subject to distur-
bances, and the limits of the self are not constant.
That is, my sense of self is always rather speculative. Lacan’s iconic example of
what he calls the Imaginary is that a child looks into a mirror and says, “That’s
me”. But this identification is with an image, or caricature, rather than the real me.
What’s me, or not me? “The Imaginary is the transformation that takes place in the
subject at the formative mirror phase, when it assumes a discrete image, which
allows it to postulate a series of equivalences, samenesses, identities, between the
objects of the surrounding world” (Bhabha 1994, p. 77). The Lacanian subject is
known through the stories in which the subject appears, such as in a psychoana-
lytic encounter where an analysand depicts aspects of her life through a sequence
of spoken words. That is, the focus is on how life is organised as a conglomerate
of words or symbols or stories or narratives rather than on a supposition of an
actual (biological) life to be observed and classified according to key characteris-
tics. The signifier is privileged over signified. The story that is told somehow
replaces the life that it sought to describe.
The notion of “one life”, “one self” or “one individual”, however, is not always
quite so distinct. Research has described many examples of children accessing
mathematics through computers where the boundary dividing teacher and student is
obscured. For example, the teacher function in the educational use of software can
1 Introduction 5
be enacted in different ways with different degrees of human teacher input. It is easy
to generate many alternative contemporary examples where the nodal boundaries
(teacher, student, mathematics, human, machine) are rather less clear, such as
between where the human stops and the machine begins: children sharing an app on
an iPad; computers consummating a prearranged date to trade shares as predicted
market conditions move into place; Andy Warhol getting confused between the real
and the artificial; Lewis Hamilton and Felipe Massa who became renowned for
repeatedly driving their cars into each other and blaming the cars; Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s alter ego terminating one of his adversaries; the absence of cen-
trality in the World Wide Web; Stephen Hawking producing equations through his
electronic media; or Richard Dawkins and his genes each claiming primacy. The
talking and gesturing individual human described by Piaget as an immediately pres-
ent physical entity is rather less prominent in the landscape of contemporary society
with machines or pedagogical apparatus replacing so much of what had previously
been more direct human contributions. These machinic supplements to human
activity have earlier mathematical conceptions built into them, like bionic arms. The
assumption of a self in an assertion of saying “that’s me” comprises a collation of a
set of characteristics, attributes, organs, etc. that make up “me”, for now. This set of
characteristics is “counted as one” person. Yet there are different ways of constitut-
ing “me”, and different aspects of oneself create the characteristics that make “me”.
And in these constructions of myself I am using, knowingly or unknowingly, more
or fewer of the machine-like supplements that are available to “me”. My personal
boundaries lack clear definition. And I can never be sure how much “me” integrates
forces that I might not support in conscious awareness. Ian McEwan’s fictional
futuristic character Adam is a factory made entity who has so many human charac-
teristics that he is unsure whether he “feels” human or not (McEwan 2019).
Technological advances have resulted in the very infrastructure we inhabit
absorbing socialised mathematical framings from earlier era (Bastani 2019). For
example, the widespread personal ownership of smartphones has relocated and
redefined the very collectivism of encountering mathematics and the tangible mani-
festations or nodal points that locate and define mathematics in the popular imagi-
nary. Numeric algorithms are absorbed into sequences of button presses, swipes,
etc., whilst geometric objects are constructed and apprehended according to the
processes of digital apparatus, rather than with analogic rulers and compasses. But
these digital manipulations conceal design-stage choices in terms of how certain
ideas or procedures are incorporated and understood. Pedagogical choices or func-
tional routes have been made within the technology prior to the user pressing any
buttons at all. Similarly, the very physical and mental formation of humans them-
selves is a function of the textualised and mathematical ecology of which they are
part, and their choices feed into the big data that characterises new forms of normal-
ity. In some countries, smartphones provide an excellent means of governmental
surveillance, where it can even be decided if someone deserves a holiday.
School mathematics is increasingly viewed as part of the apparatus deployed in
responding to political demands for economic and technological development.
Schooling in general, and mathematics education, is increasingly shaped, funded
6 1 Introduction
and judged by its perceived capacity to deliver success in terms of the prescribed
quantitative measures by which so many governments reference their ambitions and
achievements. Good performance here has sometimes been taken as being indica-
tive of wider economic potential: the policy rhetoric suggests that the more we can
improve in those areas, the better for our future national well-being. Governments
of right and left have been seduced by the appeal of “raising standards” in a statisti-
cally defined world, in which standards become a fetish for intellectual life and
academic achievement. Measures of school performance developed in various inter-
national exercises now often define what education is for or what it should be, polic-
ing educational boundaries with ever-greater efficiency. These instruments have
transformed the content of what they purported to compare and similarly threaten to
transform the demands on teachers and pupils preparing to meet these newly defined
challenges. A key effect is a convergence of the metrics that produce normalcy,
equating compliance with specific patterns of achievement with being “good” or
“better”, or even “outstanding”. Policy thus legislates for a specific version of math-
ematics according to a centralised script, normalising what it is or should be to be a
mathematics student and what it is or should be to be a mathematics teacher.
But “improvement” or “maximising” and similar aspirational metaphors for the
passage of time can be understood in many ways. Academic motives and ethics for
working with children in school such as enjoyment of mathematics, mathematical
integrity and functionality in practical situations do not always pull in the same
direction as “improvement” or its metrics. A choice needs to be made as to the sort
of mathematical activity that is worth living, and what or who it is for or against.
Do we want to invest funds in centres of excellence in learning at the expense of
wider inclusion? Should mathematics be promoted at the risk of discriminating
against certain students or promoting dominant political agenda? Should mathe-
matical understanding be conflated with functional technology? We might even ask
whether functional mathematics or its pedagogy is inhibited by overly asserted
notions of certainty. Further, the advance of mathematics is not always desirable.
Often the economic drivers of research in mathematics are not decided by altruistic
purpose or ethical priorities. Missiles rely on research into sophisticated mathemat-
ical models and that can influence the priorities of government funding in mathe-
matics. Our access to scientific and mathematical phenomena is mediated by
multiple foregrounds and is affected by the way in which we apprehend their pur-
pose and accept the challenge of engaging with them as imaginations, possibilities,
obstructions, hopes, fears, stereotypes and preconceptions (Skovsmose 2016,
2019). Manchester residents Ernest Rutherford and Alan Turing each provided
operational levers to ending World War II through their work in mathematics.
Rutherford probably did not predict Hiroshima as an application of his work when
he split the atom. Turing’s work on breaking codes, however, is credited with short-
ening the war by 2 years, by weakening the Nazi naval siege of Britain. We might
also add that mathematics is implicated in the ongoing financial uncertainties
where confidence intervals have sometimes delivered their outliers. Bankers have
calculated their bonuses, but not the outcomes of their own actions amidst the seis-
mic sliding. Their sums seem not to work for other people. Ambitions to improve
the teaching of mathematics can serve multiple ends, not all worthy of our support.
1 Introduction 7
Barwell (2019) investigates how we might conceive of mathematics education in

ways that is supportive of the environment, maybe in designing technologies that
do not pollute. Ernest (2019a) reviews some of the wider issues relating to the eth-
ics of mathematics.
Contemporary politics is complicated by the disjunction of governmental poli-
tics and the real operation of the market, which forces the hand of states to adopt
certain forms of policy. We do not elect the people who are really in power. Thus,
market conditions can often displace educational principles in setting the terms of
educational practices. That is, it can be unclear how a researcher in mathematics
education might seek to conceptualise the challenge of researching the field with a
view to asserting some instrumental impact. Impacting on policy is not only unlikely,
as politicians do not always listen to or connect with mathematics education
researchers, but even if they were to be more attentive, the impact of any given
policy is highly uncertain. However, this macro perspective evades many research-
ers in mathematics education who focus on their own local situations, without any
specified ambition of scaling up for a wider population. The difficulty of scaling up
has been the theme of a recent ESM special issue (2019).
A major challenge then is to rethink the breadth of mathematics education in
resistance to reductive conceptions of mathematics and to critique mathematics
education conceived of and (re)created in support of current models of economic
production, technology and political administration, rather than, say, social welfare
or epistemic motivations. The political climate has reframed how funded research in
mathematics education is conceived, prescribed, evaluated and so conducted.
Market metaphors abound in the language of improvement, with terms like prog-
ress, advance, quality, effectiveness, industry, competitiveness, performance and
standards slipping easily off the tongue in much of the contemporary academic
discourse. Hence, much research is often predicated on improving school achieve-
ment in standardised terms rather than merely studying it and understanding it.
Proposals for funding typically must offer victory narratives, making promises of
how research outcomes will provide specific understandings of education and so
improve it. References to such discourses seem often to shape the activity of aspira-
tional individual researchers. The superlatives used in the construction of these nar-
ratives, however, can sometimes disguise the differences between the multiply
directed motivations of mathematics education researchers (e.g. for ethical prac-
tices, to understand more deeply, to disrupt or think differently) and the operational
motives that guide their actions (e.g. securing funding, getting published, recalibrat-
ing practice, working towards a PhD, helping their students, etc.). The requirement
that research should reach agreement with politicians and employers across nations
might be a further stretch.
The proposed reorientation of research activity focus is a key task for theory, and
theory development alone justifies its importance to the mathematics education
research community looking for fresh ways to understand its activity. The field of
mathematics education research is populated by people who are typically quite
good at mathematics, usually located in higher levels of education. Their efforts are
often predicated on raising standards in a competitive environment to ensure ade-
quate capability across the population but possibly rather less on wider inclusion
8 1 Introduction
across the spectrum of educational needs and aspirations. There are relatively few
mathematics specialists working at the primary level addressing needs at that stage
of education. Mathematics at the primary level is often tackled by more generalist
educators where the specificity and identity of mathematics education might be seen
very differently. Issues of inclusion in mathematics often need to be considered at a
structural level of putting appropriate curriculums in place rather than equipping
individual teachers with pertinent skills. For this reason, this book is less concerned
with operating in a functional way at any specific level of education such as teacher
agency but rather more concerned with understanding mathematics from a more
general educational perspective across the breadth of schooling where the adminis-
tration of that socially oriented schooling process impacts on the nature of mathe-
matics as we understand it and on how it is taught. The book asserts a new “social
theory” where both of those words remain in transition where the book’s purpose is
to articulate the mechanisms of that transition.
1.1 Chapter Outline
Chapter 2 provides a theoretical discussion of how we understand mathematical

knowledge. The theory presents rationality and belief as mutually formative dimen-
sions of mathematics, where each term is more politically and socially embedded
than sometimes depicted in the field of mathematics education research. The chap-
ter considers alternative modes of apprehending mathematical objects derived as
they are from this socially defined space. Two accounts of how a young child might
learn to point at mathematical entities are presented, where alternative interpreta-
tions of this act of pointing are linked to conceptions of sharing understandings.
This comparison then underpins a discussion of how mathematics is produced as
entities to be acquired according to certain shared ideological schema that also
shape who we are. The chapter’s central argument is that rational mathematical
thought necessarily rests on beliefs set within a play of ideological framings that
partition people in terms of their proxy interface with mathematics. The challenge
is then seen as being to loosen this administrative grip to allow individuals to release
their own powers to generate diversity in their shared mathematical insights rather
than being guided by conformity.
Chapter 3 considers some of the arbitrary curriculum or assessment criteria that
operate in the social construction of mathematics in educational institutions. The
advance of mathematics as an academic field is typically defined by the produc-
tion of new ideas, or concepts, which adjust progressively to new shared ways of
being. That is, mathematical concepts are created or invented to meet the diverse
demands of everyday life, and this very diversity can unsettle more standardised
accounts of what mathematics is supposed to be according to more official rheto-
ric. For example, the expansion of mathematics as a field often relies on research
grants selected to support economic priorities. In schools, economic factors influ-
ence the topics chosen for a curriculum. In some countries, there is a shortage of
specialist mathematics teachers that limit curriculum choices and restrict the
1.1 Chapter Outline 9
choice of viable teaching materials, educational targets or models of practice

advocated by research in mathematics education. Our evolving understandings of
who we are and of what we do shape our use of mathematical concepts and thus
our understandings of what they are. School mathematics has been reduced
according to ideological schema to produce its conceptual apparatus, pedagogical
forms and supposed practical applications. The resulting cartographic definition
of mathematics steers the production and then selection of learners according to
arbitrary curriculum or assessment criteria.
Chapter 4 provides a more explicitly Lacanian examination of how teachers
resolve the pressures of working to curriculum demands. Centred in the doctoral
studies of my Manchester colleague Peter Pawlik, the chapter considers how
recent international developments in mathematics teaching have been influenced
by what we see as the ideological notion of the mastery curriculum. Lacan’s four
fundamental discourses (master, university, hysteric and analytic) provide an ana-
lytical framework linking governance, institutionalised education and resistance.
A case study of a teacher is used to illustrate how this discursive patterning is
integrated into practice.
Chapter 5 describes some empirical research in both primary and secondary
university teacher education. It considers how practices of teacher education
impact on classroom practice by new teachers and thus shape the mathematics that
takes place. The theme is explored through an extended discussion of how the con-
duct of mathematical teaching and learning is restricted by regulative educational
policies that set the parameters of teacher education. Specifically, it considers the
example of how mathematics is discursively produced by student teachers within
an employment-based model of teacher education in England where there is a rela-
tively low level of university input. It is argued that teacher reflections on mathe-
matical learning and teaching within the course are patterned in line with formal
curriculum framings, assessment requirements and the local demands of their
placement school. Here, both teachers and students are subject to regulative dis-
courses that shape their actions, and, consequentially, this regulation influences the
forms of mathematical activity that can take place and be recognised as such, but
where this process restricts the presentational options for the mathematics in ques-
tion. It is shown how university sessions can alternatively provide a critical plat-
form from which to interrogate these restrictions and renegotiate them.
Chapter 6 provides an account of my own mathematics teaching with student
teachers and explains why I find teaching mathematics so exciting if it can be linked
to the generation of multiple perspectives to be shared rather than the reproduction
of a dominant view with prescribed pathways to this view. Some trainee teachers
report on shared experience in a spatial awareness exercise concerned with explor-
ing alternative apprehensions of geometric objects. Examples are provided of stu-
dent teachers encapsulating their perceptions. The diversity of responses reveals
alternative subjective positions each highlighting different qualities of the
apprehended object. I have sought to show through my own teaching how mathe-
matical challenges might be seen more in terms of students being supported in
developing accounts of and gaining confidence in their own perspectives rather
than meeting preset objectives.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
Quella donna era, dunque, Olimpia Marazzani.
A nissuno de’ nostri lettori sarà, per certo, caduto di memoria
l’omicidio perpetrato dal marchese Giovanni Anguissola su la persona
dello abate commendatizio di San Savino; cagione del delitto lo
avergli costui rifiutato in moglie e sottratto una giovine donna, ch’era
tenuta in conto di sua sorella.
Rammenterà parimenti il lettore come — qualche tempo prima di
tale tragedia — l’abate menasse segretamente quella fanciulla a
Castell’Arquato per affidarla alla contessa Sforza e come dappoi non
se ne sapesse più nulla.
Ora l’abate commendatizio di San Savino era il Giambattista
Marazzani e la sua pretesa sorella questa medesima Olimpia, che si
fregiava del suo istesso casato.
A donna Costanza di Santafiora egli non aveva taciuto il grave
motivo che lo consigliava ad allontanare Olimpia dal proprio fianco.
— In un segreto colloquio, le aggiunse ancora che l’amore
dell’Anguissola era un amore sacrilego, infame, e che s’ella gli avesse
prestato ogni suo appoggio per salvare quella disgraziata, non se ne
sarebbe mai dovuta pentire, poichè questa apparteneva, in qualche
modo, alla di lei stessa famiglia.
La contessa di Santafiora avrebbe desiderato saperne da vantaggio e
penetrare meglio addentro i misteri, che comprendeva nascosti in
quelle mezze rivelazioni; ma — obiettandole la inviolabilità del
confessionale — l’abate le mozzò le dimande sul labro.
Unica sua speranza egli diceva essere quella che la giovinetta
potesse invaghirsi di qualcun altro e andare prestamente a marito. —
Nè reputava la speranza troppo ardua a realizzarsi, dappoichè —
sebbene fosse parsa dar retta alle smancerie ed alle calorose
proteste dell’Anguissola — egli tenesse prove più che bastevoli a
farlo certo che non lo amava punto.
Olimpia, aggiungeva, essere una fanciulla bisbetica, mutevole, di
tempra ardente ed imperiosa, bisognevole di espandersi, vaga di
emozioni, di affetti. — Un nonnulla tornar forse bastevole a dare un
tutt’altro indirizzo alle apparenti aspirazioni del suo cuore.
Tale la pittura che l’abate aveva fatto della sua pretesa sirocchia in
sul punto di lasciarla nella rôcca di Castell’Arquato, ignaro allora di
non doverla rivedere mai più.
Nè la pittura potevasi tacciare di esagerazione. — Al contrario. — Il
colorito n’era piuttosto pallido e freddo, talchè — per conseguire una
tanto maggior somiglianza con l’originale — sarebbe convenuto
innalzarne le tinte ad una gamma assai più calda e smagliante;
sarebbe, in altri termini convenuto dire apertamente che Olimpia non
era solo capricciosa e versatile, ma incline addirittura alla
dissolutezza, di quella identica tempra, onde — a diciott’anni —
dovettero esser formate le Teodore, le Messaline, le Giulie.
Invanamente rattenute, le più perverse tendenze ribollivano
minacciose entro il suo vergine cuore, impazienti di sfogo — sino da’
suoi primi anni, gli istinti predominanti del male s’erano in lei
sviluppati con una spaventevole precocità. — Non l’età, tanto alla
sua superiore, dello abate di San Savino, non il suo sacro carattere di
sacerdote, non quello ancora più sacro di fratello, l’aveva impedita
da laide concupiscenze sopra di lui; dal fargli scellerate, infami
proposte, ch’egli inorridito respinse, cominciando da quell’ora a farla
oggetto della più oculata e assidua vigilanza.
Moralmente, Olimpia potevasi considerare come fanciulla devoluta,
predestinata alla colpa sin dal suo nascere e, se non era peranco
materialmente caduta, lo doveva solo alla vigilanza fraterna, che glie
ne aveva sempre fatto sfuggire le occasioni, ma, alla prima le si
offerisse, non c’era a dubitare che dovesse affrettarsi di profittarne.
E l’occasione non le mancò.
Saremo brevi.
Ne’ primi tempi, dacchè trovavasi refugiata in Castell’Arquato e poco
dopo che ebbe ricevuto il triste annunzio del tragico fine del suo
supposto fratello; Pierluigi Farnese — che, insieme a Pellegrino di
Leuthen, s’era recato ad esaminare le cave delle Ferriere — si
condusse, nel retrocederne, a visitare la sorella Costanza.
Fu allora ch’egli vide Olimpia per la prima volta e — trovandola di
suo gradimento — con la subitaneità di propositi ch’eragli tutta
peculiare, formò sopra di lei uno iniquo pensiero, identico a quello,
che adesso lo aveva sospinto nella stanza di Bianca.
Ed allora riuscì pienamente ne’ suoi progetti.
Per quel pudore, che sta alla vergine, qualunque ella sia, come il
profumo a’ fiori di primavera; Olimpia — sorpresa in cotal modo, nel
cuor della notte, senza una tutela, uno scampo — provò da principio
un moto istintivo di repugnanza e paura; ma, cedendo bentosto alla
propria natura ardente e sensuale, finì a lasciarsi agevolmente
convincere ed a sminuire la responsabilità e la colpa del suo violatore
col farsene complice quasi volontaria.
Era la opportunità già da sì lungo tempo avidamente sospirata, che
le si affacciava di un tratto, sotto forma inattesa, in modo affatto
imprevisto.
Ed ella l’afferrava con gioia.
Dieci giorni si trattenne Pierluigi a Castell’Arquato e furono per
Olimpia dieci giorni di paradisiaca felicità. — Immemore del passato,
noncurante dello avvenire, ella non viveva che per la inebriante
fruizione di quel fuggiasco presente; — respirava a pieni polmoni la
misteriosa atmosfera pregna di rischi, d’infamia e di soffocati rimorsi,
per mezzo a cui si svolgevano i suoi primi e colpevoli amori.
Negli eccessi, ne’ raffinamenti del male, cui talvolta sa spingersi
l’uomo, si riscontra una delle principali distinzioni fra la sua razza
ragionevole e quella dei bruti. — In questi l’istinto non presenta che
un unico plasma per ogni genere: la tigre è più feroce del lupo, il
lupo più rapace della volpe; ma non si dà tigre più feroce della tigre,
non lupo più rapace del lupo: l’istinto bestiale è un livello. — L’uomo,
per converso, trascende fino a’ più sconfinati estremi del mostruoso
e porge esempi di sì completi pervertimenti del senso morale, che la
ragione istessa non s’inchinerebbe ad ammettere possibili, se non
coatta dalla irrefragabile evidenza de’ fatti.
Le più strane e ributtanti anomalie dello spirito umano si rivelano
sovratutto nel senso voluttuario.
Si dànno esseri così profondamente corrotti e disformi, cui non
induce godimento e diletto chè la infrazione d’ogni più ovvia
disciplina, i quali — nel soppeditare un dovere, nel ledere una legge
di natura o di consuetudine — provano un piacere trionfante e
supremo.
Olimpia Marazzani era di codesta tempra.
Se l’uomo, che l’aveva vituperata e perduta, fosse stato un giovine
gentiluomo suo pari, padrone di sè e del proprio avvenire, che
l’indomani avesse potuto proporle una riparazione con l’offerta del
proprio nome e della propria mano; o che ella lo avrebbe
mortalmente aborrito, se non vi si fosse prestato; o, quando sì, che
lo avrebbe probabilmente preso in uggia il dì dopo, per correre in
busca di altri amori, di altri piaceri, di altre emozioni. — Il saperlo,
per contro, legato e per sempre ad altra donna, marito, padre e, per
conseguenza, nella impossibilità di redimerla, attalchè egli pure,
quando l’avvicinava, s’esponeva ad un rischio, sfidava la
reprobazione del mondo, gittava, a sua volta, un guanto in faccia alla
società; le infondeva una passione esclusiva, infiammata, violenta; le
figurava il suo seduttore come un arcangelo decaduto, ribelle al suo
Dio; come uno sfolgorante genio del male, che fulmina desolazione e
terrore ovunque passi e non dà gioie — gioie arcane, imperscrutate,
terribili — che ai pochi eletti dal suo sacrilego amore. — Ed ella se
ne sentiva rapita, affascinata ed insieme fieramente gelosa. — Non
avendo diritti da far valere sopra di lui, dove si fosse vista derelitta e
spregiata; non avendo speranze ch’egli potesse inalzarla sino al suo
fianco; altro di meglio non sapeva che tenerselo stretto entro l’abisso
nel quale erano insieme tracollati; se c’era fango nel fondo,
affondarvisi insieme.
Il solo pensiero che la sgomentasse era quello di rimanervi sola.
Questo ne spiegherà al lettore il contegno, quando — parecchi mesi
dopo il primo incontro con Pierluigi — ritornato egli a Castell’Arquato
per lo sposalizio di suo nipote Sforza Sforza di Santafiora, lo vide
adocchiare concupiscente la giovine della Staffa, al suo primo
ingredire nel castello, e farla oggetto di segreti colloqui col tedesco
di Leuthen.
Olimpia Marazzani era in preda ai morsi della gelosia.
Capitolo XIX.
Turpe mercato.
Quantunque la eccessiva stanchezza fisica e morale, che opprimeva

la nostra povera Bianca, l’avesse forzata — prima ancora che
annottasse — a gittarsi sul letto così vestita com’era ed a pigliarsi
alcuni momenti di sonno; questo era stato troppo breve, leggero ed
intermittente, perchè valesse a ritemprarle le forze estenuate. Ella ne
aveva tuttavia mestieri di molto e tranquillo e completo. Ed è però
che — a pena donna Costanza l’ebbe lasciata nuovamente sola —
non indugiò un istante a spogliarsi sin dell’ultimo indumento,
com’era costume de’ tempi, ed a corcarsi di ricapo, e questa volta,
non sopra, sotto le lenzuola, e quasi immediatamente si
addormentò.
Quel mistero tutto psichico, che si chiama il sogno, imperscrutato
pur sempre, malgrado sia questa nostra l’età delle analisi e delle
esplicanze, volle aggiugnersi al sonno riparatore del corpo,
confortando lo spirito affievolito della gentile dormiente d’imagini
gioconde d’amore.
Ella sognava del suo Neruccio.
Sel mirava dinanzi sanato delle sue ferite, bello di tutta quella dolce
e pensosa bellezza, che — al primo vederlo — le aveva ispirato
pensieri tanto soavi. Egli le stringeva la destra, le fissava
teneramente i suoi due grandi occhi bruni negli occhi e —
ricordandole le solenni promesse tra loro scambiate nel tugurio del
vecchio Rinolfo — le andava mormorando sommesso:
— Il momento è venuto di mantenerle!
Cullata da sì deliziose illusioni, l’anima della giovinetta, immemore
delle patite sofferenze, aliava beata per mezzo un eliso tutto
splendori, inni, profumi. Un calore sottile sottile, un senso mite di
voluttà celestiale, le s’insinuava, le repeva, grado grado, per tutte le
fibre. Agitandosi mollemente sul fianco, ella scuopriva in parte di
sotto le coltri i tesori della sua vergine persona e — come volesse
riafferrare qualche amata e fuggevole visione — stendeva le braccia
frementi ed allungava le mani.
In uno di questi suoi moti incontrò alcunchè di morvido e di villoso,
che le fece ritrarre repugnante la mano e la svegliò di sobbalzo.
Si guardò attorno spaurita e scorse al suo fianco un uomo, cui, della
mano, aveva senza dubio sfiorato la barba.
Mezzo svestito, scalmanato in faccia, con le narici convulse, la bocca
semichiusa, il respiro callido e stridente; quell’uomo le stava sopra
piegato ad arco, figgendo su le parti svelate del suo bel corpo un
occhio iniettato di sangue e pregno di concupiscenza.
Quell’uomo era Pierluigi Farnese.
La fanciulla che — riconoscendo in lui il temerario, da cui era stata
inseguita su la piazza della cattedrale di Parma ed alle cui insidie
l’aveva sottratta il suo Neruccio — indovinò subito qual sorta di
pericolo la minacciasse; allibì di terrore nel rivederselo al fianco e —
come la mimosa, che, al più leggero contatto, raggrinza il pudico
fogliame — si aggomitolò frettolosa sotto le coperte e se le strinse
tremante sopra le spalle, mettendo un piccolo strido.
— Non strillare, sai, bella mia! — le intimò tosto il Farnese, mentre
studiavasi inutilmente d’insinuare le dita fra le lenzuola — se meni
romore, e’ sarà fiato sprecato per te e pazienza perduta per me,
cose, affè mia, nè gaie, nè profittevoli per tutti due!
E rintostò ne’ suoi tentativi.
— Angioli del paradiso — balbutì la giovinetta schermendosi — ma
chi siete voi?.... ma perchè qui?.... cosa volete.... cosa pretendete da
me?
— Chi mi sia non ti dèe premere — fece il duca, con un suo ghigno
che mal giungeva ad atteggiarsi a sorriso — un gentiluomo, un
cavaliere, per certo... mi si scorge in volto.... ho il naso ducale!.... e,
quel che più rileva, un uomo che t’ama, che è pazzo, farnetico,
delirante per te!.... cosa voglio?.... ingenua domanda, in mia fede!....
e cosa posso volere da una bella, da una vaga, da una seducente
creatura quale tu sei?
— Angioli del paradiso — ripetè la fanciulla, tremando a verga e
cercando ravvilupparsi sempre più tra le coltri.
Ma Pierluigi era riuscito nel suo intento di cacciarvi sotto una mano;
sicchè — stringendone solidamente un lembo nel pugno le trasse a
sè con impeto sì violento, che la poverina — per non rotolare
travolta giù dal lettuccio, — dovette allentare la mano e lasciarsele
strappare di dosso.
Il duca le gittò lontano, in un canto.
Vedendosi così denudata sotto il fuoco di que’ sguardi procaci, al
contatto di quelle mani insolenti; la misera s’accosciò restringendosi
tutta sopra sè stessa e velatosi il volto, ruppe in singhiozzi.
Pareva la statua della disperazione.
Pregustando le ebrezze del suo trionfo, il Farnese la contemplava con
un sorriso di satanica gioia.
Era infernale a vedersi.
Ricordava Mefistofele dinanzi a Margherita.
Quello istesso piangere, quello istesso angosciarsi della sua vittima,
gli tornavano sovrammodo cari, perchè, in tal guisa, questa sempre
più si affiochiva e si rendeva inetta a resistergli.
Impaziente d’ogni maggiore indugio, fe’ un moto inanzi per
stringersela fra le braccia. Ma, in quel medesimo punto, qualcuno ne
lo rattenne, battendogli sovra una spalla.
Pierluigi si volse come tocco da un serpe.
Olimpia Marazzani gli stava di fronte.
— Tu qui? — sclamò egli stizzito ed interdetto.
— Ti dò noia, eh! — gli rispose quella, crollando il capo
melanconicamente — oh, cotesto è l’amore che tu
m’impromettesti!... io, per elezion del mio core.... ripeto parole
tue.... non mi avrò mai altra donna fuori che te!.... per quanto me lo
consentano quelle uggiose convenienze, que’ maladetti doveri, che
m’impone il mio stato, io non sarò mai che tuo, sempre tuo, tutto
tuo!... ed ecco in qual maniera adempi alle tue promesse!... qui,
sotto lo istesso tetto che ne ricovra, sotto i miei occhi medesimi, tu
ne vagheggi, ne ricerchi un’altra, mi preferisci un’altra, mi confetti
con lo scherno il disprezzo!
— Evvia! — fece il Farnese imbarazzato abbassando i suoi sotto gli
sguardi fulminanti di quella donna, che lo dominava — non pigliare
le cose per codesto verso.... tu cadi in abbaglio....
— Qualche menzogna, forse? — lo interruppe fieramente la sua
ganza.
— No, no, — soggiuns’egli, forzandosi a sorridere, nella speranza di
volgere la faccenda in burletta — ma tu mi sospetti a torto.
Perocchè amore no se po vedere,

E no se tratta corporalemente.
come cantava Pier delle Vigne!

— Scherzi?
— Dico solo, che tu non sai mettere il debito divario fra amore e
capriccio.
— All’incontro ce ne metto uno immenso; ma quale il capriccio?....
quale l’amore?....
— Nol chiederesti, Olimpia, se ti fosse data maniera di contemplare
te stessa negli occhi.
— E perchè cotesto?
— Perchè in que’ tuoi occhi, che paiono diamanti, c’è dentro trasfusa
tutta l’anima tua.... un’anima grande, bella, robusta.... un’anima di
fuoco, che non cura gli ostacoli, che non teme i perigli, che, nel
caso, saprebbe tutto sfidare: la morte come l’infamia... ed è
all’anima soltanto che il vero amore si apprende... mel credi?....
E — in così dire — la ricinse del braccio e le stampò su le labra un
ardente bacio. — Amava dassenno e quasi ugualmente temeva
quella donna ancora sì giovine e già sì resolutamente determinata al
male; gl’ispirava un misto tra paura e rispetto, e però si
avvolpacchiava del suo meglio a mitigarne, con le blandizie, il troppo
giusto risentimento.
Ma non per questo Olimpia smise il corrucciato cipiglio. Anzi:
— Per la croce! — soggiunse, respingendolo — non intendo l’amore
in codesta maniera.... non ne accetto le speciose tue distinzioni fra
spirito e materia... per me vale tutt’uno: è uno assieme individuo,
che ha mestieri di questa quanto di quella... o dimmi: cos’è
altrimente?.... amor di spirito, platonismo insensato!.... amor di
materia, istintiva brutalità!.... dunque?....
— E allo istinto nulla concedi?
— Ah, cotesto solo ti muove?
— Questo solo, tel giuro!
Durante un cosiffatto colloquio, la misera Bianca, che —
intravedendo nella sopravvenuta un angelo tutelare — aveva ripreso
un cotal po’ di coraggio; trascinatasi ginocchione sino dappiè del
letto, dove giacevano le sue vesti su di una sedia, se n’era
impadronita furtivamente e se ne andava cuoprendo.
Olimpia, cui le proteste di Pierluigi parevano inclinare a più mite
consiglio, talchè si disponesse a lasciar secolui quella stanza, forse
per trarlo a la propria, volse fatalmente in quel punto gli sguardi
sopra di lei.
Il sentimento di pudicizia, che traspariva vivissimo dalle oneste
sembianze e da ogni moto dell’amabile giovinetta, mentre — con
l’ansia del naufrago, che tocchi della mano la proda salvatrice — si
affrettava ad occultare le proprie nudità; le produsse il medesimo
effetto di una rampogna. — Si sentiva umiliata da un sì modesto e
verecondo contegno tanto disforme da quello, ch’ella stessa aveva
serbato in non dissimile circostanza. — Quella fanciulla tanto tenera
del proprio onore, da ributtare gli amplessi di un uomo con sì
disperata insistenza e da sorridere di gioia alla sola speranza di poter
sfuggire a’ suoi baci; le pareva aver l’aria di volerle infliggere una
severa e sferzante lezione e — con la mobilità di affetti che è tutta
propria delle nature violenti — dimenticava lo sfregio sanguinoso,
che il suo amante era stato sul punto di farle; dimenticava la sua
gelosia; dimenticava lo stesso suo amore; per non risentirsi che di
quella tacita ed involontaria censura ed opporvi un odio profondo.
Sì; ella detestava mortalmente quella dolce ed incolpevole creatura,
solo perchè la riconosceva tanto migliore di sè. — Si pentiva d’essere
intervenuta ad impedire al suo amante che avesse il tempo di
contaminarla, di perderla per sempre. — Era tentata di scappar via
da sola, per abbandonarla di nuovo in balìa del suo destino. — La
irritava la parte di genio benefico, che, suo malgrado, era venuta ad
assumere verso di lei.
Un pensiero d’inferno le traversò, intanto, il cervello, e:
— Non era che un capriccio? — chiese ghignando al Farnese.
— Un capriccio, un mero capriccio soltanto! — le rispose questi
sollecito, rianimato da quel ghigno, che gli parve un sorriso.
— Ebbene — ella soggiunse — vuoi inaudita prova di amore?... io
stessa ti aiuterò a levartene il ruzzo!
— Tu? — sclamò strabiliando il Farnese.
Bianca, che — a malo stento — era pervenuta ad allacciarsi la
gonna, si arrestò, a quelle parole, come pietrificata. — Nel suo
candido cuore, nel suo vergine intelletto, non c’era posto per sì
nefanda mostruosità: si rifiutavano a capirla.
— Tu? — replicò il duca.
— Sì, sì — affermò Olimpia, fulminando la poveretta di una
trionfante occhiata di dileggio — io t’amo al punto, vedi!.... da volere
tutto quanto a te piaccia... e poi quella spigolistra mi è uggiosa....
l’aborro!.... sentirla fremere, palpitare, dibattersi inutilmente,
consumare i vani suoi sforzi sotto la stretta delle mie mani; è una
voluttà anche questa!... ed io ti aiuterò, sì.... ma ad un patto....
E si chinò a mormorargli alcune parole all’orecchio. — Quindi:
— Ah, per la croce! — soggiunse, scuotendo il capo in atto di sfida
— ella fa la ritrosa?... si estima da più del suo sesso?... minaccia
strillare?.... io ne soffocherò le grida, sta certo!....
E si avventò al letto come una belva.
Le parole da lei susurrate all’orecchio di Pierluigi erano queste:
— Ora tua, poi.... morta?.... me lo prometti?
Pierluigi aveva annuito del capo.
Si può dire, per conseguenza, ch’egli si accingeva a violare un
cadavere.
Capitolo XX.
Per forza.
Consegnata la sua padroncina alla contessa di Santafiora, il nostro

buon Terremoto altro pensiero non s’era più dato che di concedere
qualche po’ di riposo a quel suo poveraccio di corpo tutto
ammaccato e pesto dalle fatiche, ed una maragnuola giacente in un
canto del cortile glie ne aveva pòrto il comodo e l’occasione. —
Addormitosi su quella, poco dopo il suo giungere al castello, aveva
tirato via un bravo sonno da ghiro sino al calar della notte.
Imbruniva appunto, quando un calpestìo concitato lo risvegliò.
Volse l’occhio d’onde procedeva ed — in quel dormiveglia, che, dopo
un sonno durato oltre il comune, precede sempre il completo
ridestarsi — credette intravedere mastro Pellegrino di Leuthen,
avviato verso il portone d’uscita.
Era, infatti, il tedesco, che si rendeva al quartiere di Monte Aguzzo,
per informare il suo degno padrone dell’esito felice della sua
spedizione.
Il gigante — dopo un par di protendimenti e quattro sbadigli — stava
forse per voltar fianco sul suo giaciglio e fare a ripiglino con Morfeo;
quando un secondo calpestìo venne a mantenerlo sveglio e ad
attirare di nuovo la sua attenzione.
Questa volta partiva d’in su le scale e, sebben frettoloso, leggero
leggero come se di qualcuno che camminasse su la punta de’ piedi.
Aguzzò egli lo sguardo trammezzo il morente barlume e — con suo
grande stupore — vide sbucare di sotto il loggiato ed inoltrarsi alla
sua volta una paurosa figura d’uomo tutto scuro come la notte
imminente e con la buffa calata.
Era il Cavalier Nero, che discendeva dalla misteriosa sua visita alle
stanze di Olimpia.
Terremoto, messo in curiosità, si tenne quatto a suo luogo,
sbirciando di sottocchi il sopraggiunto. Il quale — attraversato il
cortile in tutta la sua ampiezza — si dètte a sguaraguardare
d’ogn’intorno tra’ fessi della visiera, come se in busca di alcunchè, e
ad aggirarsi da destra a manca, sino a che venne a trovarsi sopra di
lui.
Allora si curvò ad osservarlo.
Arcangelo Rinolfo chiuse gli occhi.
Quando li riaperse, vide che quello, reputandolo forse addormentato,
gli si sdraiava accanto su lo stesso suo cumulo di paglia.
Terremoto sentì un brivido corrergli per tutte le ossa.
Poco stante, il suo compagno di giaciglio prese, o finse prendere
sonno a sua volta e si mise a russar leggermente.
Il colosso non era niente tranquillo.
Malgrado il suo coraggio a tutte prove, dovuto per metà alla
fenomenale sua forza e, per l’altra allo strambo prognostico di
Gerolamo Cardano; era egli pure superstizioso e credenzone come i
più del suo tempo e quella specie di negro fantasma, che s’era
andato a corcare al suo fianco, non lasciava di suscitargli qualche
cattivo pensieraccio per lo capo.
Il demonio tendeva, a volte, di così brutte trappole!
Però decise di non recargli la minima noia, per quello adagio eredato
senza benefizio d’inventario da’ romani, che insegna a guardarsi dal
cane che dorme; ma e di tenersi in su l’allarme e di non chiudere più
occhio.
In tal modo, vide rientrare tutti quanti coloro ch’erano stati di fuori
alle bombanze dello sposalizio; e il cortile stivarsi alla lettera di una
calca di gente d’ogni cartiglia; ed i signori salire agli appartamenti;
poi, man mano, diradarsi anco gli altri per rendersi a’ respettivi
dormitori; quindi — ai rintocchi del cuoprifuoco battuti dalla
campana del castello, cui facevano eco le altre diverse del borgo —
le scòlte dare il loro grido di veglia; cigolare le catene del ponte; i
lumi andare, venire, oscillare e, poco a poco, l’un dopo l’altro,
smarrirsi ed estinguersi; e finalmente tutto rientrare nelle tenebre e
nel silenzio.
Circa mezz’ora dopo, una ronda lo rasentò.
Un degli armigeri — non badando che a lui — chiese a un
compagno:
— Chi è cotesto elefante?
L’altro rispose:
— Gli è il familio della signorina di Camia arrivata oggi stesso al
castello.
— Briaco?
— Non so: dorme da stamattina!
— Per Iddio.... peggio d’una marmotta!
E tirarono di lungo senza nemmanco avvertire l’altro dormiente.
Terremoto ne trasse argomento per pigliarne un sospetto anche
maggiore e — senza considerare come l’ombra istessa dello immane
suo corpo proiettata sul suo compagno di letto, fosse stata quella
che aveva nascosto costui agli occhi de’ soldati di ronda:
— Poffare! — andava mulinando fra sè — che, per costoro, e’ si sia
reso invisibile? gli è uno spediente cotesto, a cui il padrone di giù
ricorre assai volte... uno de’ mezzi meglio acconci... quello di non
vederlo!
E, intanto — biascicando fra i denti il vade retro Satana — lo
dardeggiava di frequenti occhiate furtive.
In questa, l’oggetto delle sue paure parve scuotersi leggermente
come si risvegliasse in quel punto e, adagino adagino, curandosi di
non muovere il minimo rumore, si levò ritto su in piedi e lentamente,
quasi camminasse su le ova, s’avviò alla chiostrata, ch’era vestibolo
alle scale.
Ai sospetti, alle superstiziose apprensioni, tenne dietro, nell’animo
del giovine Rinolfo, una intensa, indomabile curiosità. — Quell’uomo
— seppur tale — che aspettava la quiete e il buio della notte per
rimettersi in moto, non poteva mirare a nulla di rassecurante. —
Forse quel suo cauto e sospettoso nottivagare racchiudeva un
pericolo, una minaccia per qualcuno. — Ned egli era di tempra da
rimanersene in panciolle ove reputasse altri bisognevoli di aiuto: e
poi considerava trovarsi albergato in casa di buoni amici degli ottimi
suoi signori e forse le tenebrose manovre dello incognito esser
rivolte contro taluno di quelli; e poi gli soccorreva un pensiero anche
più spaventoso: ch’e’ fosse un Nicelli inteso a’ danni della istessa sua
padroncina.
E — non vi reggendo — surse egli pure guardingo dal suo poltriccio
e, passo passo, si dètte a seguire su per le scale il Cavalier Nero.
Camminavano l’un dietro l’altro, a mo’ di due volpi, studiando,
misurando, pesando ogni lor più lieve mossa, rattenendo il respiro,
quasi fiutando l’aere.
Come toccarono il secondo piano e furono presso la stanza di
Olimpia Marazzani, il cui uscio semiaperto lasciava scappar fuora un
largo sprazzo di luce; il primo si arrestò a specularne lo interno dalla
socchiuditura e — non iscorgendovi nulla — si spinse inanzi resoluto.
La lampada da notte giacente sul tavolino era l’unico oggetto che
potesse testimoniare della presenza di Olimpia. — Del resto, tutto
trovavasi nell’ordine identico di quando egli vi aveva fatto la sua
prima incursione: non tocco il letto, non smossa una seggiola, non
solamente alterata una delle mille pieguzze de’ cortinaggi.
Il Cavalier Nero dovette probabilmente presumere che la donna
ch’egli cercava si fosse ritirata nello spogliatoio; poichè ne aperse
l’uscio e vi entrò.
Ma ivi pure tutto era immobilità e silenzio.
O fosse per spingere sino all’ultimo le proprie investigazioni, o fosse
per nascondervisi nell’attesa di Olimpia, dallo spogliatoio, l’incognito
si cacciò per quel contiguo andituccio, che appariva senza sfogo e a
tastoni ne toccò il fondo.
Intanto, Terremoto — posto a sua volta l’occhio alla semiapertura
dell’uscio esterno — stava inutilmente guatando ed origliando, senza
nulla gli riuscisse nè vedere, nè udire, che meritasse attenzione.
Quando d’un tratto, gli ferì all’orecchio un confuso mormorio di voci.
Sembrava procedere da una vicina stanza, cui pure si giungeva per
lo stesso loggiato su cui egli si teneva in vedetta.
Anche da quella stanza sfuggiva una sottile striscia di luce lunghesso
uno de’ stipiti, il che ne denotava l’uscio non chiuso.
Al bisbiglio successe uno strisciar di piedi, un cigolar di mobili, come
lo strepito di una lotta, ed un lamento, un lamento soffocato, un:
— Vergine Santa! — che gli fece dare un trabalzo al cuore.
In quelle due parole gli era parso riconoscere la voce della sua
giovine signora.
Non stette ad esitare più oltre e.... si slanciò.
Era, infatti, quello istesso momento in cui la svergognata concubina
del Farnese si avventava su Bianca ed — abbrancatala alle spalle —
la rovesciava supina sul letto; mentre l’infame suo amante le
cacciava una mano su la bocca per soffocarne gli strilli.
Un attimo ancora e la misera giovinetta sarebbe stata perduta,
perduta per sempre.
— Inutili squasilli! — le susurrava schernendo la feroce complice di
Pierluigi — o t’accheti, o ti stràngolo!
E questi:
— Bada che qui sono il padrone, che omai nessuno può più
strapparti dalle mie braccia!
— Eccetto me! — sclamò una voce in quel punto.
E i due scellerati rotolarono a un tempo sul pavimento, lasciando
libera Bianca.
Era Terremoto.
Balzato nella stanza al gemito della sua signora, egli aveva sferrato i
due pugni stretti delle sue enormi manacce sul petto di Olimpia e sul
capo di Pierluigi.
I due percossi rovinarono rovesci sul pavimento come se saettati da
una catapulta.
La donna, nel cadere, mise un lagno straziante e... svenne.
Il sangue le eruppe dalla bocca e dalle narici.
Pierluigi, per contro, non ne rimase che sbalordito, sicchè giunse
subito a raddrizzarsi ed a curvarsi sopra di lei, stendendole le braccia
per prestarle soccorso.
Ma una mano ne lo rattenne.
Si volse allora persuaso fosse di nuovo il gigante.
Ma s’ingannava.
Era, invece, il Cavalier Nero, entrato in quello istesso mentre, per
l’usciolino segreto, che — dal picciol àndito in cui lo vedemmo
impegnarsi — ammetteva alla stanza di Bianca.
La giovinetta — sottratta a pena ed in modo sì miracoloso alla
propria infamia — s’era gittata fra le braccia del suo salvatore, il
quale — sorreggendola:
— Scellerato! — sclamava, mostrando il pugno stretto al Farnese.
Il Cavalier Nero accorso al lamento della caduta e che — fuori di
questo — null’altro aveva inteso della scena precedente; alle parole
ed al gesto del colosso ed allo stesso atteggiarsi di Pierluigi sopra di
quella, suppose che il sangue e lo svenimento di Olimpia fossero
dovuti onninamente a quest’ultimo.
Laonde, scuotendogli bruscamente il braccio per cui lo aveva
ghermito:
— Ah! — gli disse con voce sorda e minacciosa — messer Pierluigi si
sbizzarrisce nel recare oltraggio alle donne?.... ma bada, che l’esser
duca di Castro e di Nepi, e marchese di Novara, e gonfaloniere di
Santa Madre Chiesa, e spurio rigetto dello stesso pontefice... bada
che non potrebbe bastare a sottrarti alla mia vendetta!
— Strozzatelo, messere! — soggiunse il gigante, dando un passo
inanzi — se vi occorrono le mie mani, eccole tutte e due al vostro
servizio.
— Ed io le accetto — fece il Cavalier Nero — ma solo per affidarlo
alla loro custodia.... a voi!
E lo invitò ad impadronirsi dell’altro braccio del duca, mentr’egli si
piegava a raccogliere Olimpia, che giaceva sempre svenuta sul
pavimento.
Intanto continuò a dire:
— Se, tuttavia, o tenta sfuggirvi o solo fa l’atto di mettere un grido;
nessuna misericordia.... servitevene come meglio vi aggrada!
— Oh, non istate in temenza, messere! — sclamò il colosso,
stringendo il braccio del principe sì da illividirgli le carni.
All’aspetto, agli atti, a’ propositi di rappresaglia e di morte di que’
due sconosciuti, l’uno più misterioso e minacciante dell’altro; il
Farnese — sbiancato in viso quanto il pannolino della sua camiciuola
— si arretrò sgomento, girando intorno sguardi smarriti come in
cerca di refugio e di scampo.
Di prima giunta, gli aveva sorriso il progetto di acclamare a gran
voce i suoi due capitani o le scôlte e provarsi così a volgere in fuga i
suoi due aggressori; ma le ultime parole dirette dal mascherato al
gigante e la costui stretta brutale, glie ne fecero ben presto
abbandonare il pensiero.
Frattanto il primo dei due aveva deposto la caduta su l’uno de’
seggioloni e — con ogni maggiore sollecitudine — le si affaccendava
d’intorno, detergendole la schiuma sanguigna che le bruttava le
labra e studiandosi di richiamarla in sè stessa.
Ma Olimpia non dava cenno di vita.
Allarmato, ansioso, egli le situò una mano sul petto.
Stette in ascolto.
Il cuore le batteva.
Non era morta.
Allora si volse nuovamente a Terremoto e:
— Ditemi ora — gli chiese — cosa contate voi fare?
— Sono il suo servo — disse il gigante indicando la sua giovine
signora.
— Oh, fuggire!.... fuggire!... — rispose questa, sostituendosi
premurosa al suo familiare.
— Sul momento?
— Oh, sì.... sì.... sul momento.
— Tale è pure il mio desiderio.... però è mestieri che costui ci serva
di salvocondotto!
— Io? — balbettò Pierluigi, meravigliando.
— Tu stesso — gli rispose il Cavaliere Nero, riafferrandolo per l’altro
braccio, mentre traeva di sotto il ferraiuolo un lungo ed acuto
pugnale.
Pierluigi allibì.
— Ho da lasciarlo? — interrogò Terremoto.
— Sì, basto io solo — gli rispose l’incognito, assumendo un fare più
altiero dacchè lo sapeva vassallo — e poichè la signora vostra può
reggersi in piede e sostenersi, senza uopo di voi, caricatevi madonna
sopra le spalle.
— Colei? — fe’ Terremoto segnando Olimpia.
— Appunto!.... voi mi seguirete con le due dame, io vi precederò con
costui!
— E che pretendete io mi faccia? — chiese tremando il Farnese.
— Oh, ben poco! — gli rispose il Cavalier Nero — ci guiderai sino alla
castellania e là... giovandoti del dominio tuo, come fratello alla
signora del luogo, darai ordine al castaldo di aprirci le porte e
scendere il levatoio.
— E null’altro? — osservò Pierluigi, già un po’ tranquillato dalla
speranza di cavarsene a sì buon patto.
— Noi ti faremo grazia della vita — continuò l’incognito — purchè tu
ci dia modo di uscire issofatto da questo maladetto castello.
— E sia pure.
— E purchè tu medesimo n’esca un tratto con noi.
— Io?
— Oh, so troppo con quale razza di astuti io m’abbia a fare, per
affidarmi alle tue concessioni e promesse!... non saremmo così
sull’impalcatura del ponte, che tu daresti contrordine di rialzarlo, per
precipitarci quanti siamo giù nella fossa, o ci sguinzaglieresti alle
calcagna le tue barbute per acchiapparci!.... ma da galeotto a
marinaro!.... i Farnesi e la volpe sono nati a un sol parto; ma, se
vuoi salva la pelle, dovrai accompagnarci sin dove a noi convenga
lasciarti, securi di poter proseguire il nostro cammino, senza paura di
frodi.... consenti?
— Per forza!
— E, bada, ve’!... non un tentativo di tradirci!... io ti camminerò di
costa con questo ferro sempre snudato nel pugno.... al minimo atto
tu faccia, che solo m’ispiri un dubio, un sospetto, e te lo pianto
quanto è lungo nel dosso.... m’intendi?
— Eh, gli è chiaro... ma, penso, ho a scendere, ho ad uscire in
questo arnese.... in semplice farsetto.... senza nulla in capo?....
lasciate almanco....
— Oibò, oibò! — lo interruppe l’incognito, girandogli su le spalle il
proprio ferraiuolo — prenditi questo; tiratene il capperuccio sul capo,
e non pensar altro!... il verno è ancor lontano e non c’è rischio ti
buschi imbeccate!.... ti sta bene così?
— Eh, per forza! — replicò di malumore il Farnese, avviandosi fuor
della stanza, incalzato da presso dal Cavalier Nero.
Terremoto — trattasi in groppa Olimpia sempre priva de’ sensi —
tenne loro dietro, insieme a Bianca, che, intanto, erasi data cura di
completare il proprio abbigliamento.
Mille argomenti di dispetto s’accavalciavano nel torbido cervello di
Pierluigi: avrebbe pur voluto trovar maniera di uscire con manco
sfregio da quella umiliante sua situazione; ma comprese facilmente
come ogni resistenza gli tornasse impossibile, azzardoso e pieno di
pericoli ogni altro tentativo.
E si decise a subir rassegnato la propria sorte.
Scesero pian pianino ed in silenzio le scale e traversarono cauti il
loggiato fiancheggiante il cortile sino alla castellanìa.
Ivi Pierluigi chiamò sommesso il castaldo, il quale toltosi di letto e
fattosi in su l’uscio, agli ordini del possente fratello della signora, non
seppe opporre la menoma osservazione.
Abbassò il ponte e schiuse la porta.
Nell’uscire, il Farnese, dietro assenso del Cavalier Nero:
— Rientrerò fra due ore — gli disse — per segnale darò tre lunghi
fischi.... sta in guardia.
Ed uscirono tutti cinque all’aria aperta.
Capitolo XXI.
Gli affari di Stato.
Dalla riva sinistra dell’Arda, i nostri tre fuggiaschi, con Pierluigi

Farnese come mallevadore e Olimpia sempre recata in collo da
Terremoto, presero a ponente, per un angusto sentieruolo che, dopo
non quattro miglia di cammino, li condusse a breve tratto da Vigolo
de’ Marchesi, su la destra della Chiavenna.
Al di là di questo torrentello sorge un chiostro di Benedettini erettovi
nel secolo XI da Oberto II Pallavicino.
Un uomo stava sdraiato a piedi di una grossa quercia che velava del
suo fogliame uno de’ fianchi di quel monistero, ed al cui tronco
erano allacciati per le briglie due cavalli insellati.
Giunto su la sponda del torrente e messo piede nel suo alveo, che,
in quella stagione, trovavasi completamente a secco; il Cavalier Nero
mandò fuori dal taglio della celata un acutissimo sibilo, inteso a pena
il quale, l’individuo corcato si rizzò di repente e, staccati i cavalli
dall’albero, s’avanzò in direzione della Chiavenna, menandoli a mano.
Il Cavalier Nero si volse quindi al Farnese ed:
— Eccoci giunti! — gli disse — ora sfido te, sfido i tuoi cagnotti, sfido
l’inferno, ad aver mie novelle.
— E son libero? — domandò Pierluigi con ansia.
— Sì — gli rispose quello — puoi ritornarne al tuo covo.
E — strappatogli il ferraiuolo di dosso — lo respinse con piglio
disdegnoso.
Il Farnese divorò il suo maltalento per tema di peggio e — senz’altro
aggiugnere — si avacciò a ribattere la strada percorsa per restituirsi
a Castell’Arquato.
IL Cavalier Nero lo segui dello sguardo sin che gliel permise la notte,
poscia, volgendosi a Bianca:
— E voi, madonna — le chiese — per qual parte sareste diretta?
Incerta della risposta, la fanciulla guardò trepidamente il suo
familiare quasi per dimandare il consiglio.
— Eh, messere — sclamò allora costui, invitato a rompere il silenzio
da quello sguardo della sua signora — egli è che qui madonna la non
ci può rimanere, poichè quel satanasso non istarebbe dal rimetterle
le unghie sopra, e che nemmanco a casa sua la ci può ritornare,
poichè vi si trovino altri suoi malevoli forse ancor peggio a temersi:
per cui e’ mi sembra uno imbroglio, ma di que’ più maladettamente
arruffati che mai si diano da distrigare!
— Altro di meglio io non saprei — interloquì in quel mentre la stessa
Bianca — chè ricovrare presso li miei zii di Perugia.... e’ sono omai i
soli congiunti che tuttavia mi rimangano.
— E voi corrervi tosto, madonna — cominciò a dire con grande
animo il dabben Terremoto — ed io sempre servirvi di guida....
Ma s’arrestò d’un tratto perplesso e:
— Gli è, piuttosto — soggiunse con voce raumiliata — gli è ch’io ci
vedo di mezzo due grandi e grosse difficoltà!
— Quali? — interrogò il Cavalier Nero.
— La prima che non c’è a contare madonna possa trascinarsi sin là,
così appoggiata al mio braccio, alla bella pedona.... e la seconda....
— La seconda?
— Eh, la seconda che nè lei ned io abbiamo intorno nemmanco la
croce di una baiocchella.
— Per inquanto a ciò — fece nobilmente l’incognito, togliendosi di
scarsella quella medesima borsa, d’onde aveva tratto le monete date
alla vecchia camerista ed offrendola a Bianca — madonna non vorrà
farmi lo sfregio di rifiutare....
— Oh, messere... volle interromperlo la giovinetta.
Ma quello prosegui:
— Posso conoscere il vostro nome?
— Bianca della Staffa — gli rispose la fanciulla.
— Nepote a messer Giovanni di Camia — aggiunse premuroso il
gigante.
— Ebbene, madonna Bianca — conchiuse il Cavalier Nero — que’
vostri zii, presso cui intendete recarvi non mancheranno, vuo’
credere di sodisfare il picciol debito che vi propongo contrarre verso
di me.
— E a chi dovranno spedire il valsente? — dimandò Bianca,
accettando questa volta la borsa, che le veniva profferta in modo
tanto squisito.
— Al Cavalier Nero — rispose l’incognito — nella torre di Gropparello.
— Sarà fatto, messere! — asseverò Bianca.
— Ed in quanto al modo di viaggiare — continuò quello accennando
all’uomo, che s’era, intanto avvicinato con le cavalcature — io
dispongo di due corridori; ma, siccome madonna è tuttavolta
svenuta, l’uno non m’è più necessario e di buon cuore ve l’offro.
— Oh, messere.... — sclamò Bianca confusa da tanta cortesia,
volendo forse affacciargli qualche obiezione.
Ma quello:
— Me lo rimanderete con la persona che si avrà incarico di riportarmi
il danaro.
— A codesto patto — fece la giovinetta — nol saprei rifiutare....
accetto e ve ne ringrazio.
— Ed ora, — riprese quello, balzando in arcione — non più indugiare
un momento!
E, voltosi a Terremoto:
— Datemi in braccio madonna — gli disse.
Il gigante eseguì l’ordine e del suo miglior garbo s’ingegnò di
adagiargli sul davanti della sella Olimpia de’ Marazzani sempre fuori
de’ sensi.
L’uomo venuto da’ pressi del convento s’era di nuovo allontanato.
— Dio vi governi! — sclamò allora il Cavalier Nero e, dato di sproni,
si gittò verso mezzogiorno traverso le agate che ingemmano il rio
Rimore e le madrepore disseminate fra la Chiavenna ed il Chero sino
in riva al Vezzeno, nel piccolo villaggio di Tavasca, dove si arrestò ad
una casa de’ marchesi Tedaldi.
Rimasti soli, Terremoto aiutò la sua giovine signora a salire in groppa
dell’altro cavallo, poi — montatovi sopra a sua volta — lo spinse di
trotto in tutta opposta direzione, fra Vigostano e la Sforzesca, verso
la grossa terra di Fiorenzuola.
Avventurosamente per Pierluigi, quando fece ritorno alla rôcca di
Castell’Arquato le tenebre erano ancora profonde e tutti più che mai
immersi nel sonno. — Dètte egli i convenuti tre fischi, in seguito a’
quali gli venne calato il levatoio, attalchè potè restituirsi al suo
quartiere senza che — ad eccezione del castaldo, cui pose in mano
varie monete di oro insegnandogli cosa dovesse rispondere se
interrogato — nissun’altro sapesse di quella notturna sua uscita.
La facilità somma con la quale, prima in compagnia, poi solo, aveva
potuto andarsene, e ritornare, era naturalmente tutta dovuta alle
speciali circostanze del momento, al trovarsi la terra in festa ed il
castello popolato da tanto numeroso stuolo di dame e cavalieri, amici
e congiunti de’ castellani. — Altrimenti il solo stridore delle catene
del ponte avrebbe bastato per attirare l’attenzione delle vedette e
degli uomini d’arme ed assoggettare lui e le persone cui
forzatamente aveva giovato di salvocondotto e di scorta al più
rigoroso controllo.
Malgrado la rabbia che lo divorava, era tanta la stanchezza indottagli
dalle emozioni della giornata e particolarmente dalla lunga gita
coatta allora fornita che, — a pena in camera — si gittò sul letto e si
addormentò.
L’indomani non riaperse gli occhi che a giorno alto e quando tutto il
castello era già in subbuglio per la improvvisa sparizione delle due
fanciulle.
Donna Costanza, non veggendole apparire in onta dell’ora già tarda,
aveva spedito alle loro stanze le due minori sue figlie, Giulia e
Faustina, le quali l’erano ritornate pallide in viso e tutte tremanti,
dicendole non solo quelle stanze deserte, ma sfatto il lettucciulo di
Bianca e quello di Olimpia no, gli usci d’ingresso e di comunicazione,
aperti, spalancati, le lampane tuttora accese e scoppiettanti
consunte.
Donna Costanza inquisì quanto servidorame trovavasi nel castello;
ma nessuno valse a darle il minimo schiarimento. — Fece ricerca del
familio che aveva accompagnato la giovine della Staffa. — Tutti
rammentavano averlo visto dormire s’un mucchio di paglia nel
cortile; ma di raccapezzarlo non ci fu verso. — Chiamò allora il
castaldo. — Indettato da Pierluigi, costui rispose, durante la notte,
non essere uscito e rientrato chè il signor duca di Castro.
Donna Costanza non sapeva più che pensare, e le inevitabili versioni
di un genio malefico, di un gran diavolo sceso dall’alto del mastio, e
scappato via pel fumaiuolo, soffolcendo ciascuna delle due fanciulle
disparse con una delle sue ali da pipistrello, cominciavano a circolare
tra il minutame de’ valletti e delle fantesche.
Pierluigi, che già mulinava entro sè di muovere a questo e quello
dimande, per tentare se pure gli riuscisse scuoprire chi fossero i due
temerari, che lo avevano in modo sì umiliante oltraggiato e
schernito, — non a pena ebbe sentore del turbamento e
dell’agitazione della sorella, che vi renunziò, per tema di non
richiamarne i sospetti su di sè stesso.
Nullostante, non volendo renunziare del paro al desiderio che lo
pungeva e di riavere Olimpia sua, e d’impadronirsi di Bianca, e di
vendicarsi de’ suoi insultatori; chiamò nuovamente a sè Pellegrino di
Leuthen, il solo che alcunchè di chiaro travedesse in quella buia
faccenda, e gli espose per filo e per segno tutto quanto gli era
accaduto.
Com’ebbe terminato la sua narrazione:
— Jesus mein god! — sclamò il tedesco, giugnendo le mani in atto di
estremo stupore — quanto crante diafole foi afere puttate terre con
pugno, intofinare, intofinare.... essere Derremote, antiche serfitore
pofere Ciofanne li Camie... ma quanto ome fisciere galate, niente
capire... niente sapere fostre penefolensce matonne Olimbia!
— Ed è di costui in particolar modo — fece biecamente il Farnese —
che m’importa conoscere il volto, il nome, la dimora... due cose io
voglio: recuperare Olimpia ed anco quella vostra leziosa nepote dei
Camia.... non patirò mai che una meschina feminuccia possa menar
vanto d’essersi in simil guisa fatta giuoco di me: mai!... l’altra: avere
in mie mani e vendicarmi di que’ due manigoldi.... oh, come
pagheranno caro il loro ardimento!... e voi solo, Pellegrino mio, voi
solo potete giovarmi a raggiungere il mio duplice scopo.
— Pellecrine sempre umilissime serfe fostre eccellensce!
— Voi avete l’odorato del segugio, l’occhio della lince, la furberia
della volpe....
— Troppo pone, eccellensce!
— Vi lancerete subito su le loro tracce.... il mio Trentacoste con le
sue barbute verrà con voi, obbedirà ciecamente ai vostri ordini, ed io
non dubito....
— Troppo pone, eccellensce!.... io fare tilicentemente, foi precare Tio
pone risultamente mia spetiscione.
Poco stante, col più lungo e lanternuto dei due capitani di Pierluigi e
una serqua d’armigeri, mastro Pellegrino di Leuthen lasciò la rôcca
per battere le circostanti campagne, promettendo al suo nobile
signore, che, dove gli tornasse di metter la mano su qualcuno degli
evasi, o solo di averne indizio, non mancherebbe di spedirgli tosto un
pedone a dargliene lo annunzio.
Tormentato a un tempo dal livore contro gli sconosciuti che gli
avevano inflitto tanto vilipendio, dal rammarico della sua Olimpia e
dalla foia bestiale, che la vista e il contatto di Bianca gli avevano
eccitato, Pierluigi Farnese — anima cupa e vendicativa se mai ve ne
fu — si contorceva, per così dire, sotto l’ansie cocenti di un’attesa
febrile. — Al più leggero calpestìo di chi entrasse nel cortile, al
minimo rumore che salisse in direzione delle sue stanze, egli
supponeva dover’essere un inviato di Pellegrino che gli apportasse le
sospirate novelle.
Così trascorse tutta la giornata.
A tarda sera, battuto già il coprifuoco, si udì improvisamente il suono
di un corno. Pierluigi trasalì.
Era, senza dubio, l’emissario di Pellegrino.
Il sopravenuto chiedeva, infatti, di lui.
Era una staffetta.
Ma, in luogo di giungere da’ dintorni, come il duca confidava,
procedeva direttamente da Roma ed era apportatrice di una lettera
del Santo Padre.
Paolo III faceva vive istanze al figliuolo di restituirsi immediatamente
a Roma, dove la sua presenza era richiesta da gravi affari di Stato.
Addio amori e vendette!
Comunque di malincuore, — Pierluigi dovette decidersi ad obbedire.
Lasciando presso la sorella i figliuoli e la nuora, che, lo avrebbero
raggiunto più tardi; egli parti da Castell’Arquato, con l’alba del dì
successivo, accompagnato solamente dal suo segretario Apollonio
Filareto e dall’altro suo capitano Alessandro da Terni.
Trentacoste e le barbute rimanevano in giro con Pellegrino di
Leuthen senza che egli potesse averne nissuna contezza. Ed era ciò
che maggiormente il cuoceva.
Fine della seconda parte.

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A Contemporary Theory of Mathematics Education

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How then do we understand renewal in mathematics education practice? When I

mathematical learning as a collective experience. The reviewer’s concern for “maxi-

A Singular Journey into Mathematics Education

i­nstitutional structures. De Freitas and Walshaw (2016) have discussed a range of

Manchester, UK Tony Brown

5.4 Changes to Mathematics Teacher Education in England������������������ 53

8.3.5 Discourse, Relationality and Subjectivity���������������������������� 119

Tony Brown is Professor of Mathematics Education at Manchester Metropolitan

Mathematical ideas have become very familiar to us as compulsory elements of

domains. Mathematics is considered by many as a discipline beyond social dis-

Mathematics as a field of human intellectual endeavour preceded all of us living

Barwell (2019) investigates how we might conceive of mathematics education in

1.1 Chapter Outline

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical discussion of how we understand mathematical

choice of viable teaching materials, educational targets or models of practice

Quantunque la eccessiva stanchezza fisica e morale, che opprimeva

Perocchè amore no se po vedere,

come cantava Pier delle Vigne!

Consegnata la sua padroncina alla contessa di Santafiora, il nostro

Dalla riva sinistra dell’Arda, i nostri tre fuggiaschi, con Pierluigi

Fine della seconda parte.

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A Singular Journey into Mathematics Education

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5.4 Changes to Mathematics Teacher Education in England�� 53

8.3.5 Discourse, Relationality and Subjectivity�� 119

1.1 Chapter Outline