Page - 56 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 156 the houses of the province could not be carried out by the superior, the task was delegated to these rectors. As for the Jesuit rank-and-file, its growth in number during the eighteenth century reflected the continuing vigor of the Society—and the support of the Catholic dynasty and government in Vienna—after the expulsion of the Otto- mans from Hungary. The number of brethren in the whole of the Austrian province rose from around a thousand in 1651 and 1,300 in 1716 to a record high of 1,904 in 1767, out of which 1,038 were active in the fifty smaller or bigger con- vents in the territory of Hungary.52 Their background was as diverse as the eth- nic and linguistic composition of the Habsburg monarchy. On the basis of forms filled in at the entrance of each novice (usually still in their teens), it has been established that of the total number of “Austrian” Jesuits who were around in 1773, forty-four percent came from Austria, and forty-one percent from the Kingdom of Hungary.53 The remaining fifteen percent derived largely from neighboring territories under Habsburg rule or the Holy Roman Empire, such as Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, or Tyrol. The form also contains information about the novices’ linguistic skills. Knowledge of Latin had been instilled in all these Jesuits from a young age, as it not only formed the core of the curriculum in the Jesuit schools but its use was also compulsory in conver- sation.54 As for vernacular languages, nearly sixty-five percent of the “Austrian” Jesuits of Hell’s generation were recorded to have known German well (bene), whereas only thirty percent were in command of Hungarian. Nearly as many mastered a Slavic language (seventeen percent Slovak, eleven percent the 52 These figures are taken from András Gyenis, Régi jezsuita rendházak: Központi kormányzat (Vác: n.p., 1941), 5–6. It is noteworthy that the average number of members in a province in the mid-seventeenth century was four hundred to eight hundred (and the Bohemian province was set up with fewer than three hundred). Practical considerations thus may well have warranted the division of the Austrian province and the creation of a Hungarian one. It has been suggested that the reasons why this did not happen included rivalry and mutual suspicion between Jesuits of Austrian and Hungarian background, and the court- ly influence of the former, who also alleged their Hungarian colleagues to be both “barba- rous” and much too sympathetic to the nationalist cause. See Lukács, A független magyar jezsuita rendtartomány kérdése, passim. 53 László Szilas, “Austria I. Antigua,” in Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús: Biográfico-temático, ed. Charles Edward O’Neill and Joaquín María Domínguez (Rome: Institutum historicum S.I., 2001), 1:277–92, here 1:286–87. See also Félix Litva, entry enti- tled “Eslovaquia,” in O’Neill and Domínguez, Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, 2:1262–65. 54 See Joseph Bruckner, La Compagnie de Jésus: Esquisse de son institut et son histoire (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1919), 444–49; Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 54.