Page - 26 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Introduction26 added to the existing stock of Jesuit or Jesuit-staffed facilities between 1700 and 1773.76 To venture a pun on the title of this book, the Society of Jesus pursued its scientific ends with perseverance and vigor until the very end. 4 What’s in a Life? At this point, it is appropriate to revert to the central character of this book, who directed one of these new observatories over a period of thirty-seven years, almost exactly half of it stretching beyond the suppression of the Society of Jesus. Hell was hyper-active in the creation and dissemination of “Catholic knowledge,” employing a wide range of strategies and practices to represent and assert in the public space the agendas, interests, and values of science and the scientist. As that space was fluid and changeable, subject to the impact of power relations and socio-cultural dynamics, the study of such practices is at the same time the study of so many attempts at accommodation and negotia- tion at each of the levels and spaces mentioned previously.77 Before a sketch of these attempts is drawn as a means of laying out the specific agenda of the chapters of this book, we also need to ask, by interrogating recent approaches to historical biography, what lessons such accommodations as revealed by the life of a single individual may hold about the relations of those levels and spaces. Biography is one of the oldest genres of historical rendition, which enjoyed a decent amount of popularity with the general public even at times of dispar- agement among professional historians.78 It is only quite recently that it has re-emerged from the latest of such periods,79 when the main objection against it was the untenability of the idea of the self as a singular, coherent entity, and of the individual self as an autonomous being capable of acting in accordance with its own will. While this might still have looked an adequate framework for interpreting the historical role of important political leaders, the long eclipse in the prestige of political history itself altogether relativized the interpreta- tive value of biography during the ascendancy of large-scale, quantitative, 76 Steven J. Harris, “Boscovich, the ‘Boscovich Circle,’ and the Revival of Jesuit Science,” in Bursill-Hall, R.J. Boscovich, 527–48. 77 Cf. above, 6. 78 For a helpful overview, see Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 79 On the first phases of this revival, see Lloyd Moote, “New Bottles and New Wine: The Cur- rent State of Early Modernist Biographical Writing,” French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 911–26; Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., Biographie schreiben (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003).