Page - 35 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

35Introduction the success of which soon earned him wide respect in the European Republic of Letters and made him a nodal figure in a scholarly network. It was owing to the renown—the social–cultural capital—established on a carefully constructed career that Hell received an invitation from King Chris- tian vii (1749–1808, r.1766–1808) to lead, with the sponsorship of the Danish– Norwegian monarchy, an expedition beyond the Arctic circle within the con- text of the grandest collective international enterprise of eighteenth-century astronomy (perhaps field sciences altogether): the observation of the transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in 1769. The expedition was highly pro- ductive, yielding not only precise astronomical, geomagnetic, and other mea- surements and calculations but also a wealth of empirical material about the language of the indigenous Sámi114 people, which associated Hell’s name with heated controversies in yet another field of scholarship: Finno-Ugrian linguis- tic kinship and, by implication, the early history of the Magyars. The suppres- sion of the Society of Jesus in 1773 left Hell’s status as a state servant unaffected, and he continued as director of the observatory and editor of the Ephemerides until his death, but his overall situation as an ex-Jesuit became more precari- ous. What has been called the breakthrough of the Enlightenment in Austria in the 1780s, both in its top-down form known as Josephism and other manifesta- tions, as well as responses to these by various stakeholders (especially the Hun- garian political elite), further complicated this situation. He nevertheless—or precisely for this reason—remained highly active as a networker and a man of science, dedicating his energies to various institutional projects as well as to research and writing on diverse fields from astronomy through magnetism to language and history. This summary points, first, to the anachronism of attempts to appropriate and highlight Hell as a member of the Hungarian and the Slovak national sci- entific pantheon (as “Miksa” and as “Maximilián,” respectively). Upon enrol- ment in the gymnasium, Hell seems to have known (besides German and Latin) the “Slavic” (obviously, Slovak) language, and later on he claimed to have picked up Hungarian, but his personal attachments can hardly be styled as “national” in any modern sense. His identity can instead be located in four, partially overlapping spaces, which include: (1) loyalty to the house of Habsburg and the Viennese court, (2) commitment to the Society of Jesus and Catholic universalism, (3) status enjoyed as a citizen of the also international Repub- lic of Letters, and finally (4) veneration of the Latinate, “Hungarus” cultural 114 Throughout this book, in accordance with current usage, this is the designation used in the authors’ own discussion. In quotations from sources and references, however, eigh- teenth-century alternatives (Lapp, Lappish) have been retained.