Page - 114 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 2114 places were also fellow brethren. Even the suppression and persecution of the Society does not seem to have initially caused a major disruption of the flow of information from such locations: observations from Pont-à-Mousson, for in- stance, were still reported in the Ephemerides in 1771.66 It must also be men- tioned that on the testimony of the annual, Hell was unconnected with quite a few Jesuit observatories of the time—some of them important, others less so.67 Yet again, the absence of a location does not necessarily mean lack of con- nection: it suffices to mention the Mannheim of Christian Mayer. In addition, Hell’s correspondence shows that he did make efforts to initiate contact with French Jesuit colleagues like Esprit Pézenas (1692–1776) in Marseille and Lau- rent Béraud (1702–77) in Lyon, who were not responsive. At the same time, some of the material that fed the appendices of the Eph- emerides can be traced in Hell’s extant personal correspondence with the most highly recognized fellow astronomers of Europe at the time. As already seen, he was especially well connected in Paris, and Christian Mayer in Heidelberg/ Schwetzingen and Weiss in Trnava have also been mentioned. But Hell’s part- ners also included Leonardo Ximenes (1716–86) in Florence, Eustachio Zanotti (1709–82) in Bologna, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719–1800) in Göttingen, Jo- seph Stepling (1716–78) in Prague, Anders Johan Lexell (1740–84) in St. Peters- burg, Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin (1717–83) in Stockholm, and several others.68 Many of his correspondents were fellow Jesuit scholars: the strong sense of community, and the regular exchange of letters inherent in the way of life and modus operandi of the society were elements that fitted perfectly well with the Sagan). The identification of Jesuit observatories in this note and in n. 344 is based on Udías, Searching the Heavens and the Earth, 21–22. 66 It must be added, however, that none of the recent literature known to us about the sup- pression of the Jesuits in the Western Catholic monarchies—such as Mélanges de ’l École française de Rome, special issue, “De la suppression à la restauration de la Compagnie de Jésus: Nouvelles recherches,” ed. Pierre-Antoine Fabre, 126, no. 1 (2014), or Fabre and Pat- rick Goujon, Suppression et rétablissement de la Compagnie de Jésus (1773–1814) (Paris: Les- sius, 2014)—discusses the question of the fate of the observatories maintained by the or- der. D. Gillian Thompson, “The French Jesuits 1756–1814,” in Burson and Wright, Jesuit Suppression, 181–98, discusses the fate of Jesuits, but is also silent about the impact on the Jesuit infrastructure of learning. 67 These include Lisbon, Coimbra, Avignon, Marseille, Parma, Brescia, Siena, Palermo, Mann- heim, Augsburg, Olomouc (Olmütz). 68 wus, Manuscripte Hell, vol. 3. For further analysis of the extant parts of Hell’s correspon- dence, and the extent to which it represented a network with denominational bias, see Per Pippin Aspaas and Katalin Pataki, “Did Astronomy Constitute a Denominationally Neutral Space within the Republic of Letters? An Outline for the Use of Visualization Tools in the Study of Astronomical Correspondence,” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert und Österreich 34 (July 2019): 65–89.