Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe Jesuit Studies Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit History Editor Robert A. Maryks ( Independent Scholar ) Editorial Board James Bernauer, S.J. ( Boston College ) Louis Caruana, S.J. ( Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome ) Emanuele Colombo ( DePaul University ) Paul Grendler ( University of Toronto, emeritus ) Yasmin Haskell ( University of Western Australia ) Ronnie Po-chia Hsia ( Pennsylvania State University ) Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. ( Loyola University Maryland ) Mia Mochizuki ( Independent Scholar ) Sabina Pavone ( Università degli Studi di Macerata ) Moshe Sluhovsky ( The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ) Jeffrey Chipps Smith ( The University of Texas at Austin ) volume 27 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/js Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe By Per Pippin Aspaas László Kontler leiden | boston This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-Nd 4.0 License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. The publication of this book in Open Access has been made possible with the support of the Central European University and the publication fund of UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Cover illustration: Silhouette of Maximilian Hell by unknown artist, probably dating from the early 1780s. (In a letter to Johann III Bernoulli in Berlin, dated Vienna March 25, 1780, Hell states that he is trying to have his silhouette made by “a person who is proficient in this.” The silhouette reproduced here is probably the outcome.) © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2214-3289 ISBN 978-90-04-36135-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41683-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Acknowledgments VII List of Illustrations IX Bibliographic Abbreviations x Introduction 1 1 Enlightenment(s) 7 2 Catholic Enlightenment—Enlightenment Catholicism 11 3 The Society of Jesus and Jesuit Science 17 4 What’s in a Life? 26 1 Shafts and Stars, Crafts and Sciences: The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces 37 1 A Regional Life World 37 2 Turbulent Times and an Immigrant Family around the Mines 44 3 Apprenticeship 53 4 Professor on the Frontier 76 2 Metropolitan Lures: Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science 91 1 An Agenda for Astronomic Advance 91 2 Science in the City and in the World: Hell and the respublica astronomica 106 3 A New Node of Science in Action: The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame 134 1 A Golden Opportunity 134 2 An Imperial Astronomer’s Network Displayed 144 3 Lessons Learned 155 4 “Quonam autem fructu?” Taking Stock 166 4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” 172 1 Scandinavian Self-Assertions 174 2 The Invitation from Copenhagen: Providence and Rhetoric 185 3 From Vienna to Vardø 195 5 He Came, He Saw, He Conquered? The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum 209 1 A Journey Finished and Yet Unfinished 210 vi Contents 2 Enigmas of the Northern Sky and Earth 220 3 On Hungarians and Laplanders 230 4 Authority Crumbling 256 6 “Tahiti and Vardø will be the two columns [...]”: Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax 258 1 Mission Accomplished 260 2 Accomplishment Contested 269 3 A Peculiar Nachleben 298 7 Disruption of Old Structures 305 1 Habsburg Centralization and the De-centering of Hell 306 2 Critical Publics: Vienna, Hungary 315 3 Ex-Jesuit Astronomy: Institutions and Trajectories 330 8 Coping with Enlightenments 344 1 Viennese Struggles 344 2 Redefining the Center 366 Conclusion: Borders and Crossings 388 Appendix 1 Map of the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus (with Glossary of Geographic Names) 394 Appendix 2 Instruction for the Imperial and Royal Astronomer Maximilian Hell, S.J. 398 Bibliography 400 Index 459 Acknowledgments This book owes its existence to the forms of academic sociability characteristic of the twenty-first-century Republic of Letters. The two authors became aware of each other’s work via internet searches. They then further explored mutual interests by email. They first met in person at a conference in Barcelona in 2010, and then at a dissertatio viva in Tromsø, Norway, in May 2012 (in the roles of author and reviewer, respectively). Their comradeship was sealed during a trip, in the footsteps of their hero and the protagonist of this book, to the Is- land of Vardø for the observation of the 2012 transit of Venus. The idea of a jointly written book is yet more recent. Apart from our indebtedness to one another, we have accumulated a huge debt of gratitude to many institutions and individuals. First among the former are UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and Central European Uni- versity in Budapest, not only as congenial environments to nurture, discuss, and mature the ideas contained in these pages but as sources of generous support for our research, and even the preparation of the manuscript for pub- lication. Special mention must be made of many libraries and archives, in par- ticular the kindness and expertise of librarians and archivists, who have supported our work across Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Italy. During the advanced stages of writing, László held a Senior Fellow- ship at the Lichtenberg Kolleg at Georg August University (Göttingen), a Fer- nand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute (Florence), and a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Cambridge, which secured ideal conditions for concentrating on this project. Per Pippin has, for his part, benefited from liberal working conditions at the University Library of Tromsø, with grants from the EU COST Action “Reassembling the European Republic of Letters” led by Howard Hotson (Oxford) facilitating the occasional research trip to archives or conferences. His doctoral thesis, upon which parts of this book are modulated, was originally sponsored by the Research Council of Norway, with additional grants from the Nordic Sámi Institute (Kautokeino/ Guovdageaidnu) and Tromsø Geophysical Observatory. Colleagues from whom we drew a great deal of encouragement, inspiration, support, and advice during various stages of working on this project include Hans Erich Bödeker, Wendy Bracewell, Stéphane van Damme, Emese Egyed, Robert Evans, István Fazekas, Maria Firneis, András Forgó, Martin van Gel- deren, Dezső Gurka, Rune Blix Hagen, Truls Lynne Hansen, Dominik Huenni- ger, Catherine Jami, Zsófia Kádár, Eva Kowalska, Anthony LaVopa, Antal viii Acknowledgments Molnár, István Németh, Krisztina Oláh, András Oross, the late Thomas Posch, William O’Reilly, Antonella Romano, Simon Schaffer, Silvia Sebastiani, Ann Thomson, Zsuzsanna Borbála Török, Nils Voje Johansen, and Richard What- more. The manuscript has been read and helpfully commented on, in whole or in part, by Gábor Almási, Piroska Balogh, Daniel Margocsy, Andreas Klein, Katalin Szende, Zsuzsa C. Vladár, Thomas Wallnig, and the two anonymous reviewers commissioned by the publisher. Katalin Pataki expertly produced the maps of Hell’s networks, and Tim Page polished our English prose and un- dertook the unpleasant chore of putting together the bibliography. We are tre- mendously grateful to them all, while all remaining shortcomings are naturally our sole responsibility. Both of us have published several articles and book chapters in which topics of this volume figure prominently. These are referred to in the notes and the bibliography. We are grateful to the publishers of these works for the opportu- nity of piloting our research and our ideas. However, each of these studies has been very substantially reworked, and the material discussed in them has been rearranged, so that textual overlap is minimal, and this book is an independent and original publication. In keeping with the conventions of the publisher, all quotations from lan- guages other than English have been translated, usually without mention or spelling out of the original wordings. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are by the authors. As always, a final word of thanks must go to our families and friends, who stood by with patience and understanding, even empathy for our infatuation with a grumpy and conceited character whose ideas and ideals belong to a world other than ours. We can only hope to be ever able to reciprocate. On the 250th anniversary of our protagonist’s observation of the transit of Venus between the Sun and the Earth, Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler Tromsø and Budapest June 3, 2019 Illustrations Figures 1 The astronomer Maximilian Hell. Mezzotint (1771), by Johann Elias Haid (1739–1809). Hungarian National Museum xii 2 Map of source locations of observation reports published in the Ephemerides 112 3 Map of Hell’s correspondence 115 4 The shift of Venus’s path from two sites of observation 139 5 From Hell’s manual for the 1761 transit of Venus 139 6 The black-drop effect 158 7 The ship of Hell and his associates approaching Kjelvik, the last harbor before reaching Vardø. Drawing by Hell, published in the Ephemerides of 1791 206 8 Map of the Island of Vardø and with the nearby islands and the coast of Finnmark, by Hell and the engraver M. T. Sallioth (Insula WARDOEHUUS cum Adjacentibus Insulis et Littore Finn marchico, a Maximiliano Hell; M. T. Sallioth fec. [Vienna, 1772]). Hungarian National Library, Map Department, TR 8 116 207 9 The house of Hell and Sajnovics at Vardø, with the observatoriola on the left. Drawing by Hell, published in the Ephemerides of 1791 208 10 Maximilian Hell. Copperplate by the Augsburg miniature artist Johann Esaias Nilson (1721–88), based on a drawing by Wenzel Pohl (1720–90) 219 11 Sámi community, drawing by unknown artist, with annotations by Hell. Univer- sitätssternwarte Wien, Manuscripte Hell 234 12 Prince Árpád acknowledged as principal leader by raising on the shield (“in a Khazarian style”) by the Magyar chieftains and their allies. Illustration of a map of ancient Hungary drawn by Hell on the basis of Anonymus’s Gesta Hunga- rorum (Tabula geographica Ungariae Veteris Ex Historia Anonymi Belæ Regis Notarii, a P. Maximiliano Hell S.I. Gabriel Ruderstorffer [Vienna, 1772]). Hungar- ian National Library, Map Department, TR 378 248 Map 1 Map of the Austrian province of the Society of Jesus 395 Bibliographic Abbreviations Ephemerides Ephemerides Anni [...] ad meridianum Vindobonensem jussu Augus- torum calculis definitae [...] . Vienna. HARS Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences . Paris. JS Journal des Sçavans . Paris. KVAH Kongliga Vetenskaps Academiens Handlingar . Stockholm. NcASIP Novi commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolita- nae . St. Petersburg. PTRSL Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London . London Skrifter Kiøb. Skrifter, som udi det Kiøbenhavnske Selskab af Lærdoms og Viden- skabers Elskere ere fremlagte og oplæste . Copenhagen. Figure 1 The astronomer Maximilian Hell in “Lappish garment” Mezzotint (1771), by Johann Elias Haid (1739–1809). Digitized by the Hungarian National Museum © PER PIPPIN ASPAAS AND LÁSZLÓ KONTLER, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004416833_00� This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. Introduction The letter of America’s great son, Franklin, describing his experiments in electricity made in Philadelphia, to Collinson in London, is dated October 19, 1752. The same was also pursued in Europe by a few men, among whom Beccaria particularly distinguished himself. Hell, too, was occupied ex- actly during this time by similar physical experiments and thoughts, but he never made them public. Several souls may possess the power of in- venting the same thing, but the circumstances do not assist the one as they do the other. [...] The indefatigable Frantz appointed there [at the Viennese university observatory] Hell as director, and the tower owes its shape and arrangement to him. Why can such sons of the fatherland not have scope for their labors in their field here at home? Even if great minds are born to us, it is other lands that benefit from them. When Hell gave lessons in mechanics, so as to raise skilled and clever artists and crafts- men for Vienna, it was not our people who made progress. gábor döbrentei, “Hell Maximilián élete” (The life of Maximilian Hell), in Erdé- lyi Muzéum (Pest: Trattner, 1817), 8:90, 91–92 ... In the life of this man, we see a happy coincidence of circumstances un- der which his faculties and powers could be developed and perfected, and which earned him reputation among the mathematicians and as- tronomers of our times. The future preoccupations of his mind were pre- saged early on; his mind received a clear direction already in his tender youth, and the various situations in which Hell was later placed provided him with an opportunity to pursue this unhindered, and to earn himself everlasting merits with the perfection of his science. “Maximilian Hell,” in Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1792: Erhaltend Nachrichten von dem Leben merkwürdiger in diesem Jahre verstorbener Personen , ed. Friedrich Schlich- tegroll (Gotha: Perthes, 1793), 1:282–283 ∵ In the image on the opposite page, a man is sitting in a composed, elegant, yet casual posture in front of his desk. His right elbow is resting on the desk; sheets Introduction 2 of paper on the desk and in his left hand, and a quill in an inkpot identify him as a man of letters; his two fingers gently touching the visible parts of a quad- rant also point to expertise in using instruments of astronomical observation. In the picture hanging on the wall behind him, a shining celestial body in the dark sky is shedding bright light on a wooden building; the stark silhouettes create a sense of cold freshness—a contrast with the coziness of the interior, intimated by the grandfather clock in the background on the right, and the graceful fall of the drapery on the desk. The central figure may be past the prime of his life, but an upright back and muscular legs reveal him to be in a good physical condition: while a scholar, he is agile, not averse to exertion. His look, too, is lively, confident, and penetrating, yet benign. His cheeks seem slightly frostbitten, as if he had just rushed across the chilly space that sepa- rates the small house from his present seat. He has still not shed the outfit that protects him from a hostile climate and helps him get around: pointed foot- wear, to facilitate easy movement in thick snow, warm socks and scarf, a full- length fur coat, and an all-round fur cap that can be fastened under the chin. As the inscription tells the viewer, the sitter is the reverend father Maximilian Hell of the Society of Jesus, royal and im- perial astronomer, in his Lappish garment, having felicitously carried out the observation of the transit of Venus before the Sun’s disc on June 3, 1769 at Vardøhus in Lapland, at the behest of Christian vii of Denmark and Norway. The box-like structure attached to the wooden house in the picture is actually Maximilian Hell’s (1720–92) and his associates’ makeshift “observatory,” its im- age being reproduced from Hell’s own sketches. This mezzotint was executed, on the basis of a drawing by Wenzel Pohl, in 1771 by the Augsburg artist Johann Elias Haid (1739–1809)1—a keen and accomplished portraitist of contempo- rary celebrities from Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–95) through Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Voltaire (1694–1778) to German scholars like Johann Jakob Moser (1701–85), Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807), and Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68)—at what is generally viewed as the climax of Hell’s career: right after his return from the Arctic region, having successfully partici- pated, at the helm of an expedition sponsored by the king of Denmark–Norway, in one of the emblematic collaborative ventures of eighteenth-century field 1 The print, at a price of one florin and twenty-five kreuzers , was recommended as “a nice pres- ent to the enthusiasts of Haid’s works, and to scholars who appreciate the services of Mr. Hell” in the Kayserlich königlich allergnädigst privilegirte Realzeitung (hereafter: Realzeitung ), no. 34 (August 17, 1771): 539–40. 3 Introduction science. Apart, perhaps, from the striking gaze of the protagonist and the refer- ence in the inscription, it is hardly possible to identify him as a prominent Je- suit. The picture, while following iconographic traditions of representing “great men of science,” is unusual in representing the full body of the sitter. It marks, in a generic manner, the triumph of metropolitan science and civility, reinforced by an ability to accommodate to the circumstances of a rough field, and to adopt from local interlocutors the means of overcoming its adversity. From visual representation, let us now turn to the written testimonies on Hell cited above, not as contemporaneous as the portrait, but excerpted from assessments conceived within a generation of his death, in the style of the aca- demic éloge established a century earlier by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) as permanent secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. The first one was written by the Transylvanian Hungarian poet Gábor Döbrentei (1785–1851), and published in one of the locally important serial publications of the time dedicated to the cultivation and refinement of man- ners and letters, arts and sciences in a Hungary perceived as backward, edited by Döbrentei himself. While the account focuses on Hell’s character, career, and achievements, and is generally imbued with appreciation and enthusiasm, the pessimistic tenor and substance of the selected passage conveys a sense of resignation deriving from such a perception of backwardness. “Circumstances” ( környülmények ) are alleged to set a major barrier for scholars from a marginal country, lagging behind in progress, which tends to prevent them from making a mark in the learned world. When they manage to rise to a recognized status, this supposedly occurs despite Hungary’s circumstances, and frequently with the result that the “benefits” they produce do not have any fertilizing effect in their homeland. The notions informing Haid’s portrait and Döbrentei’s eulogy are readily discernible in several strands of literature discussing Hell’s life and work. Inter- nationally, Hell has figured prominently in historical accounts of the “Venus transit enterprise,” and generally in histories of astronomy in the eighteenth century and more broadly. These are predominantly “internalist” histories of science, preoccupied with the accuracy of measurements, the peculiarities of instrumentation, and other features that enable contemporary practitioners to enter into a meaningful professional dialogue with figures they identify as their predecessors.2 These studies faithfully record Hell’s contribution, as the 2 The Arctic expedition figures as an episode in Harry Woolf’s (1923–2003) standard The Tran- sits of Venus: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), as well as several more recent surveys, in no small measure occasioned by the 2004 and 2012 transits. Eli Maor, Venus in Transit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); William Sheehan and John Westfall, The Transits of Venus (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004); Chris- tophe Marlot, Les passages de Vénus: Histoire et observation d’un phénomène astronomique Introduction 4 leader of one of more than two dozen expeditions committed to the same task and scattered all over the globe, to the 1769 Venus transit observations and the ensuing calculations of the solar parallax (and, by implication, the distance between the Earth and the Sun). They also dwell on the dispute the results oc- casioned between Hell and several colleagues, particularly the Parisian astron- omer Joseph Jérôme de Lalande (1732–1807), as well as the subsequent accusa- tions that Hell had falsified data, and his “vindication” from these charges several decades later. These accounts are marked by generally sound scholar- ship, a fine eye for detail, and, sometimes, excellent story-telling and hilarious anecdotes, a sense for the drama and heroism, the hope and despair, the tri- umph and failure involved in the cultivation and progress of scientific knowl- edge, especially in field expeditions. However, they usually capture their sub- jects in static moments rather than in the dynamics of their movement across temporal and spatial boundaries, in real and symbolic terms. Apart from ges- tures toward the perceived need of paying attention to factors of patronage and institutional setting, they fail, or make little effort, to systematically ac- knowledge the character of scientific knowledge production as a social and cultural practice, one thoroughly intertwined with other similar practices, de- termined by and determining agendas other than deriving from the desire to advance the disciplines. The premises on which they rest are different from this book, and they are insufficiently contextualized. The other thrust of modern scholarship, in which Hell is not merely a sup- porting cast member but takes center stage, and in which the attitude of Döb- rentei may be traced, is even more pronouncedly conceived in the heroic mold, although the framing is different. In this literature, Hell has been hailed as the first3 practitioner in his field in his home region who not only successfully ad- opted and applied the most recent—Newtonian—advances in the discipline but also made original and substantial contributions to its further develop- ment. As a statement of fact, this is not at all mistaken. What is noteworthy, however, is that this claim is combined not only with the sentimentalized (Paris: Vuibert/Adept, 2004); Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (New York: Penguin, 2012); Mark Anderson, The Day the World Discovered the Sun: An Extra- ordinary Story of Scientific Adventure and the Race to Track the Transit of Venus (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2012). 3 Or, at any rate, one of the first: the Ragusan Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich/Ruđer Josip Bošković (1711–87) is a (more) famous contemporary counterpart. For overviews of his life and contributions, see Piers Bursill-Hall, “Introduction,” in R.J. Boscovich: Vita e attività scien- tifica; His Life and Scientific Work , ed. Piers Bursill-Hall (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1993), v–xxiii; Jonathan A. Wright, “Ruggiero Boscovich (1711–1787): Jesuit Science in an Enlightenment Context,” in Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational His- tory , ed. Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich Lehner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 353–70. 5 Introduction image of a savant arising from a peripheral environment and heroically defying perceived marginality in order to advance mainstream Western science. It also implies the patriotic appropriation of Hell, by Hungarian and Slovak authors, for their own respective national scientific canons—based on the shaky foun- dation of his having been born and raised in a geographic territory then com- prising the northern fringe of the Kingdom of Hungary, but transferred after the First World War to the new Czechoslovak state, and being part of Slovakia since the disintegration of Czechoslovakia in 1992.4 As a stepping stone for transcending the anachronism involved in such rep- resentations it is helpful to invoke the second quote introducing this introduc- tion. The Thuringian teacher and scholar Anton Heinrich Friedrich Schlich- tegroll (from 1808 von Schlichtegroll [1765–1822]) is best known for his short life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), published in the first volume of his obituaries on famous people who died in 1791, which was so successful that he launched a series (apparently, no longer writing the lives himself, but “col- lecting” them).5 The passage quoted from the biography of Hell, contained in the second volume, is remarkable on account of its strikingly different use of “circumstance” from Döbrentei, where it serves to denote limiting conditions or constraints. Here, by contrast, we learn of “a happy coincidence of circum- stances” ( Umstände ) and “various situations in which Hell was later placed,” all providing him, as enabling conditions or stimulating provocations, with “op- portunities” to exert active agency in “earning merits with the perfection of his science”—in negotiating and maintaining (if sometimes also losing) positions amid temporal and spatial transitions, in a career spanning half a century of significant political, intellectual, and cultural change, and traversing back and forth between local, regional, imperial, and global realms of experience. Valuable contextualized historical studies of Hell have since been pub- lished, locating him more firmly and at the same time with greater plasticity in his contemporary milieux. Hell’s “scientific environment in Vienna” has been explored in a great deal of detail, looking not merely to Vienna but the 4 A two-volume work devoted to “the memory of Maximilian Hell,” a concise monograph on Hell as “an important figure of Slovak science,” a host of relatively short Hungarian- and Slovak-language articles, and references in survey histories of Hungarian and Slovak astron- omy belong here. See mainly Ferenc Pinzger, S.J., Hell Miksa emlékezete , 2 vols. (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1920 and 1927); Elena Ferencová, Maximilián Hell významná osobnosť slovenskej vedy a techniky (Bratislava: Asklepios, 1995). Both of these make available a respectable number of sources. A comprehensive bibliography on Hell and his fellow Jesuit Venus observer János (Joannes) Sajnovics, listing over six hundred titles, is also available; see Sándor Hadobás, Hell Miksa és Sajnovics János bibliográfiája (Rudabánya: Érc- és Ásvány- bányászati Múzeum Alapítvány, 2008). 5 Bernhard Ebneth, “Schlichtegroll, Friedrich von,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 23 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007), 72–73. Introduction 6 Habsburg monarchy as a whole, especially in regard of the activities of the Society of Jesus and other Catholic orders.6 Even more pertinently, the simplis- tic historiographical representations summarized above have also been chal- lenged in a trans-regional study of Hell, looking at him in Central European and Scandinavian contexts, resorting to a combination of biographical recon- struction and the “relocation” of European and global astronomical knowledge as pursued in relation to the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus.7 The ambition of this book is different from, and perhaps larger than both. It cannot aspire to be a biography in the ordinary sense: the scarcity of available “ego-documents” and other sources that may shed light on Hell as a person with a “self” requires caution in this regard. Rather, it proposes to utilize Hell’s embeddedness, simultaneously or in turns, in several eighteenth-century life worlds of differ- ing scales, both real and symbolic, and the apparent facility with which he moved among them, for testing the permeability of the boundaries construed as separating them. By doing so, it hopes to reveal something interesting, from a non-metropolitan perspective, about the eighteenth-century European pro- cesses of shaping and exchanging knowledge. These worlds and “worlds” in- clude the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional, small but prosperous and self- conscious urban centers of northern Hungary and Transylvania, with their traditions of mines, manufactures, good education, and self-government; the imperial metropoles of the Habsburgs and the Oldenburgs, both ambitious to consolidate their realms as empires and to enlist science in the service of this endeavor (and the staunch resistance it met in the case of the former from the elite of the Hungarian parts of the monarchy); the icy wilderness of the Arctic, with the opportunities it offered for scientifically penetrating unusual natural phenomena as well as human diversity; the cosmopolitan and Catholic hier- archy of the Society of Jesus; and the cosmopolitan and apparently non- hierarchical Enlightenment Republic of Letters. The “circumstances” that af- fected the ups and downs of Hell’s career, presenting him with chances and raising barriers that challenged him to develop ever new strategies of accom- modation and self-assertion, arose from the changes—some of them gradual, others abrupt, all of them significant—in the relation between these “worlds” over the half century of his active life. A consideration of the jeux d’échelles , 6 Nora Pärr, “Maximilian Hell und sein wissenschaftliches Umfeld im Wien des 18. Jahrhun- derts” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2011; published Nordhausen: Bautz Verlag, 2013). 7 Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell (1720–1792) and the Eighteenth-Century Transits of Venus: A Study of Jesuit Science in Nordic and Central European Contexts” (PhD diss., Uni- versity of Tromsø, 2012); http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4178 (accessed April 8, 2019). 7 Introduction “scalar games”8—“trickster travels,” one might say9—pursued by Hell among these poles highlights hitherto unappreciated dimensions of the dynamics of science, state-building, Enlightenment, and Catholicism in the Habsburg mon- archy and beyond, in a period of dramatic transformations. Before delving into the depths of this saga, the remainder of this introduc- tion briefly examines the relevance to our subject of recent developments in Enlightenment studies, especially with regard to their integration with the study of Catholicism (the literature on the “Catholic Enlightenment”), includ- ing the Jesuit order and Jesuit science, and with the processes of state-building and cultural realignment known as enlightened absolutism. Next, while this is not a biography, the “life” of an individual is central to its argument to an ex- tent that it is pertinent to ask how the present account may benefit from the recent emergence of a new style of historical biography. The engagement with both of these topics is not meant to be exhaustive: rather, it is confined to the aspects that seem relevant to the present undertaking. 1 Enlightenment(s) It is helpful to continue by turning to yet another appreciation of Hell, this time cited from a piece of modern scholarship on the Society of Jesus in the Eastern European periphery: “While Hell’s academic and scientific accom- plishments place him firmly within the Enlightenment, he was also a product of the late Counter-Reformation culture of Hungary and one of several Jesuits who became identified with the development of Hungarian national consciousness.”10 Hell is only one, and by no means a central, figure in this analysis of “the politics of religious pluralism in eighteenth-century Transylva- nia.” Nevertheless, this brief characterization raises interesting questions about the relationship that an eminent mid- to late eighteenth-century Jesuit scientist of Hell’s peculiar background may have had to the various aspects, strains, and manifestations of the Enlightenment, and to the budding move- ments of national awakening in Central Europe that both incorporated the in- tellectual agendas of the Enlightenment and arose in response to them. 8 Cf. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard- Seuil, 1996). 9 The expression is borrowed, of course, from Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 10 Paul Shore, Jesuits and the Politics of Religious Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Transylva- nia: Culture, Politics, and Religion, 1693–1773 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 105.