My talk will explore the interdependence of exactitude in scholarly as well as scientific contexts in nineteenth-century Prussia. Focusing on the influential historiographic work of August Boeckh (1785-1867) on ancient metrology I will sound out the different notions of accuracy, exactitude and precision and how they are differentiated and adopted not only in the sciences but also in the realms of philology and historiography. A special light is shed on the media practice of “comparing” and how this technique can itself be compared to the practices of measuring in the sciences. The first half of the nineteenth century is thereby identified as the crucial period when the exactness of the exact sciences, as well as the notion of accuracy in the humanities, start to diverge from one another in order to develop an epistemic virtue each on its own.
