Page - 81 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

81The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces urban: education, where they covered the full spectrum with two boys’ schools, a seminary and a convent for nobles (convictus nobiliorum), a gymnasium, and especially the academy, which was re-established in 1698.128 Originally con- fined to a single faculty of philosophy, the academy obtained a faculty of theol- ogy as well in 1712. The number of students in the college grew steadily (from fifty in 1703 and 186 in 1711, to 387 in 1747, 427 in 1753, and 493 in 1771),129 as did academic prestige: in 1753, shortly after Hell’s arrival, the official designation of the institution changed from Collegium Academicum to Alma Universitas, that is, a university proper. Besides being a training ground for future Jesuits, the college offered cultural goods of a broad appeal way beyond the boundar- ies of the Catholic community. The curriculum underwent several waves of ambitious innovations, so that advanced students could pursue topics in the natural sciences, post-Ptolemaic astronomy was cultivated, historical studies— with a healthy equilibrium of extolling patriotic virtues and the prestige of the Habsburgs—became established, and Hebrew took its place alongside Latin and Greek in the study of classical languages.130 To support these develop- ments, the college maintained a library with holdings that grew from about one thousand to six thousand between the beginning of the eighteenth cen- tury and the suppression of the Society, containing an impressive number of titles in modern natural philosophy and other secular fields.131 From 1726 on, it also made room for a printing press, which until 1773 issued 353 works in Latin as well as the local vernaculars, mainly textbooks for the regional schools and religious literature, but also works relevant to enlightened improvement in the economy and the polity.132 All of this made the Cluj academy a highly distinc- tive institution and enabled it to compete successfully with the prestigious Calvinist higher schools of the region in attracting even non-Catholic students. Thus, in late 1752, Maximilian Hell arrived in a peripheral but vibrant socio- cultural and academic setting, where the stakes of cultivating the values of Je- suit science at a high-level of professionalism were significant, even though different from other far-away missionary outposts like China, where the influ- ence earned by impressing the emperor and a small circle of court mandarins 128 On the academy generally, see Vencel Bíró, A kolozsvári jezsuita egyetem szervezete és épít- kezései a xviii. században (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület, 1945); Varga, “Katolikus közép- és felsőoktatás Erdélyben,” 111–63. 129 Bíró, A kolozsvári jezsuita egyetem, 7 (based on the college registers). 130 Shore, Jesuits and the Politics of Religious Pluralism, 92, 94, 106. 131 Lajos György, A kolozsvári római katolikus Lyceum-könyvtár története 1579–1948 (Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 1994), 55–78. 132 Varga, “Katolikus közép- és felsőoktatás,” 119.