Page - 3 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

3Introduction 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