This session explores quantification, measurement, accuracy, and precision at the intersection of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Past historiography has tended to associate this cluster of notions with the natural sciences. We suggest that, historically, several humanistic disciplines shared comparable quantitative aims and practices. The sciences of antiquity concerned with the material culture of the past are a particularly important case in point. Our papers will demonstrate the existence of quantitative and experimental methodologies in the two intertwined disciplines of historical metrology and numismatics. We will consider scholarship in the German-speaking countries at the beginning of the antiquarian tradition and then focus on its afterlife in the early nineteenth century.
Already in the early modern period, authors of treatises “de mensuris et ponderibus” like Georg Agricola (1494-1555) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) routinely weighed substances and materials as an aid to the study of ancient weights and measures (Pastorino). In the eighteenth century, experimentation on material heritage gained momentum with Johann Beckmann (1739-1811), who used the “knowledge of the handicrafts” to study ancient standards of coinage (Szalay). The reception of the literature “de mensuris et ponderibus” maintained telling proximity to the treasury and questions of political economy. This will be shown for August Boeckh (1785-1867) and his seminal synthesis of all weights and measures of antiquity (Echterhölter). Boeckh transformed the antiquarian tradition but stayed faithful to the empirical rigor of the humanists. This is most evident in the operation of “comparing,” as practiced by authors subscribing to Boeckh’s research program of “comparative metrology” (Krajewski).
