Page - 5 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

5Introduction 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.