Page - 33 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

33Introduction environment as the protagonist of this book, the Viennese botanist and chem- ist of French Dutch background, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin (1727–1817), has been presented with an explicit attempt at redefining the principles of science biography. Preoccupation is with the shaping of von Jacquin’s “scientific per- sona”109 through unraveling his “communicative actions” and self-representa- tion in the shifting contexts of places and spaces—geographic locations and institutional and other zones of acting and interacting—relationships with persons, communities as well as objects, and strategies that include self-posi- tioning vis-à-vis trends in contemporary scientific thought and practice, trans- actions with wielders of political, administrative, and academic authority, and activities of organizing and networking.110 Key to this was von Jacquin’s high- level of public visibility from the moment he appeared on the Viennese scene and the consequent possibility for contemporaries and posterity to “grasp” him. The careers of Hell and von Jacquin, the Jesuit astronomer’s junior by a mere seven years, and just like him central to the project of transforming Vi- enna into a capital of science from the 1750s, may offer more parallels and com- parative possibilities than hitherto attempted, even in the pages that follow.111 Besides their eminent role on the local scene, the two men were also distin- guished as the mid-eighteenth-century Habsburg expeditionists, even though the status of von Jacquin’s voyage to the Caribbean in the 1750s in the making of his scientific persona was very different from that of Hell’s northern journey: while in the case of the latter, the invitation to lead the Venus transit observa- tion was the acknowledgment of his already-established reputation, for von Jacquin the expedition was a breakthrough, marking his transformation from botanophilus (lover of plants) to verus botanicus (genuine botanist).112 The ex- tent to which a research and narrative agenda similar to Maupertuis the liber- tine and the also quite flamboyant von Jacquin can be pursued in the case of a Jesuit father is limited: for instance, “ego-documents” in the strict sense are scarce, similarly to “private” relationships, which nevertheless substantially 109 For a now classic study of an emblematic figure of a different period from this perspec- tive, see Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, nos. 1–2 (2003): 1–8, and the whole thematic issue it introduces, dedicated to the application of the notion of “anthropological persona” (Marcel Mauss [1872–1950]) to situations in the history of science. 110 Marianne Klemun and Helga Hühnel, Nikolaus Joseph Jacquin (1727–1817): Ein Natur- forscher (er)findet sich (Göttingen: V & R unipress, Vienna University Press, 2017). 111 Hell is not mentioned at all in the magisterial study cited in the previous note. 112 Klemun and Hühnel, Nikolaus Joseph Jacquin, 111–28.