Page - 57 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

57The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces language that in more recent times is known as Croatian),55 followed by seven percent Italian, one percent Romanian, and one percent French speakers. Bi- and trilingualism, then, must have flourished among the novices of the Aus- trian province. The eighteen-year-old Maximilian Hell was no exception. Ac- cording to the list of novices at Trenčín, he knew Latinam, German[icam], Slav[icam] bene (Latin, German, and Slavic [Slovak] well).56 One notices the absence of Hungarian in this entry: the ethnic Hungarian component in the population of Upper Hungary was meager. But as we shall see, even those who, like Hell, had no Hungarian, could still refer to themselves as a Hungarus and characterize Hungary as their patria. Hell spent most of his adolescence and early adulthood in the milieu of the Jesuit colleges of northern Hungary, in towns that were of great importance to the intellectual and cultural development of the kingdom as a whole. His for- mation there was interrupted by years of higher training at the University of Vienna. It is helpful to consider what can be garnered, mainly from sheer data and indirect evidence, about Hell’s experiences in the former places, and then return to the Viennese years. Banská Bystrica, already mentioned several times as an important center in the mining district, within a long day’s walk from Hell’s hometown, was the site of a medium-sized Jesuit college with around thirty members57 during the time of Hell’s secondary studies there. Thus, in terms of weight and significance, it belonged to the second tier of Jesuit estab- lishments in the region, surpassed only by Trnava with its residence, college, and university and around a hundred members (itself second only to Vienna and Graz in the whole of the Habsburg lands), and Trenčín, the seat of the only other novitiate besides Vienna in the entire Austrian province of the Society, with over seventy members (including the novices, overwhelmingly recruited from the Kingdom of Hungary). By contrast, the college of Levoča, where Hell was sent to take up his first teaching position upon his graduation as a magister from the University of Vienna in 1745, was a relatively small institution, with 55 Szilas, “Austria,” 287. It is difficult to find a neutral designation for the Slavic languages of the eighteenth century. For a balanced and well-informed discussion in English, see To- masz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (Bas- ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 56 Nomina noviciorum secundum Ordinem, quo ingressi sunt in hanc domum probationis Trenchinij Provinciae Austriae Societatis Jesu, under the heading Quas linguas calleat (quoted after Pinzger, Hell Miksa, 1:13). 57 Members of Jesuit colleges included fully ordained priests (sacerdotes), magisters (gradu- ates of lower university studies), secular assistants (coadiutores temporales), and in the case of training houses, novices (novitii).