Chronology as an Early Modern Discipline

In 1704, the clergyman-scholar and science lecturer John Harris, FRS,included in his Lexicon Technicum – a dictionary ofarts and sciences – a one-line description of chronology:‘Chronology, in the common sense of the word now, is the arithmeticalcomputing of time for historical uses; so as thereby truly to date thebeginnings and ends of princes reigns, the revolutions of empires andkingdoms, battles, sieges, or any other memorable actions.’ A greatadmirer of Isaac Newton, Harris dedicated much of his dictionary toNewton's mathematics and science, but he was evidently not interestedin chronology. Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728),which would be of great influence on the editors of theEncyclopédie and the EncyclopaediaBritannica, had a bit more to say about the topic, although thedescription remained concise. Chambers wrote that chronology involvedknowledge of astronomy, geography, and various forms of mathematics, andtheir application to ‘the antient monuments.’ It was‘one of the eyes of history’ – the other beinggeography – and ‘serve[d] good purposes in theology.’Still, from those remarks any reader unfamiliar with the discipline would behard-pressed to find out what chronology exactly entailed.

In the 1744 revision of Harris's Lexicon, this timeprovided by an anonymous ‘Society of Gentlemen’,‘chronology’ was listed explicitly on the front page, and itsdescription significantly expanded, possibly as a result of the ongoingdebate about Newton's Chronology of Ancient KingdomsAmended.