Joachim Jungius and the Transfer of Knowledge from Weaving to Mathematics in the 17th Century

Joachim Jungius, one of the most renowned German scholars in the first half of the 17th century, wrote between the 1620s and the 1640s a set of notes, later titled Texturæ Contemplatio (A contemplation of weaving). These unpublished notes, written in German and Latin, deal with weaving and other textile practices, and attempt to present various weaves mathematically and to investigate them scientifically. But what was the nature of this mathematization of weaving? How well did Jungius know the artisans and the artisanal practices he discussed? This paper aims to describe the encounter between weaving and mathematics in Jungius’s writings in order to examine the relations between the artisanal knowledge of textiles and its supposed mathematization during the first decades of the 17th century.