Page - 40 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 140 total of over one thousand titles, with the richest collection (held by the teach- er and later chief magistrate Johann Haunold [dates unknown]) alone consist- ing of 334 items; his Banská Bystrica contemporary, merchant, mint master, diplomat, and humanist scholar Hans Dernschwam (1494–1568/69) possessed a library of 1,062 volumes (but in which over 2,100 separate works were bound together).5 This was, of course, exceptional. The average number of books in larger burgher collections grew from 162 in the sixteenth century to 243 in the eighteenth, when libraries of three hundred to five hundred items, notewor- thy by general European standards, were not uncommon. Besides the social and intellectual elite of the towns—entrepreneurs, city magistrates, priests, teachers—a wide array of artisans and craftsmen from butchers and shoemak- ers through locksmiths and saddlers to tanners, bell-founders, and others had small libraries too. By and large, throughout the period Latin and German al- ternated as the dominant language of the books in the collections, with a small—but slowly increasing—proportion of titles in Czech and Slovak, and a handful of titles in Hungarian. Most of the books, between fifty-five and sixty percent, addressed secular topics, with a preponderance of historical works and ancient classics, but—probably thanks to the practical and technological interests of many possessors in a mining district—an unusually high propor- tion of them can be associated with the “new science.” Turning to schools, one needs to pay attention to the confessional land- scape. As everywhere in Hungary,6 the Protestant reform took quick and great strides in the mining towns, where its advance was facilitated by the fact that, as chartered communities, their councils enjoyed the right of patronage and thus the privilege of freely electing their parish priests. Hussite influences and incursions in the area during the fifteenth century and strong business ties with German provinces may also have prepared the ground for the reception of Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) ideas. These seem to have been widely circulating and followed in the region in the immediate aftermath of 1517. Already in 1521, the town council of Banská Štiavnica received orders from King Louis ii (1506– 26, r.1516–26) to ensure the safety of the local Dominican friars from harassment 5 Čičaj, Bányavárosi könyvkultúra, 11; for details, see Jenő Berlász, Dernschwam János könyvtára (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1964). 6 According to the generally accepted estimate, by 1570 around seventy-five to eighty percent of the population of Hungary had converted to one of the Protestant creeds, leaving Catho- lics a minority of twenty to twenty-five percent. By the early eighteenth century, the situation was almost the exact reverse. For an overview of the beginnings of the Reformation in Hun- gary, see Zoltán Csepregi, “Die Anfänge der Reformation im Königreich Ungarn bis 1548,” in Die Reformation im Mitteleuropa/Reformacija v srednji Evropi, ed. Vincenc Rajšp et al. (Lju- bljana: Založba zrc, 2011), 127–47.