Translating Metrology

For early modern European savants, metrology was a major conceptual and practical crossroads, where antiquarian inquiries into the patriarchs’ cubit and the Roman foot met with urgent contemporary matters of commercial and scientific exchange. Translating unfamiliar but newly relevant Chinese vocabularies of measure, number, and weight proved an irresistible challenge. The Leiden professor of mathematics and Arabic, Jacob Golius (1596–1667); the Bodleian Keeper, Thomas Hyde (1636–1703); and the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, Gresham Professor of Geometry, and city surveyor, Robert Hooke (1635–1703), were among the most influential scholars to try their hand at translating Chinese numerical and metrological expressions. While these efforts to establish a vocabulary fundamental to scientific translation exhibit a wide variety of investigatory methods and distinct networks of citation and collaboration, the working assumptions at issue suggest an emerging set of norms for ‘sinological’ knowledge transfer avant la lettre.