Page - 173 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

173The North Beckons science. All travel costs had been covered by the king’s treasury, and several scientific treatises pertaining to the expedition had been published by the Roy- al Society of Sciences in Copenhagen. The Hell expedition of 1768–70, considering the multiplicity of the motives of the diverse agents who participated in its instigation and realization, the complexity of its endeavors, and the range of the responses to it, is an espe- cially suitable means for highlighting the contingencies that shaped the nature of knowledge production in the Age of Enlightenment. As such, its study un- derscores the now widespread concern with the history of science not merely as the evolution of bodies of specialized disciplinary knowledge but as a set of social and cultural practices embedded in contexts that lay outside the domain of “science” itself.3 The recognition that the loyalties and agendas of the prac- titioners of science depend on such contexts, and that their goals and achieve- ments have implications beyond the augmentation of scientific knowledge, leads to a more sophisticated understanding of what actually happens in their cultivation of the ethos of pursuing knowledge. Such contexts of the Hell expe- dition were manifold, and while they powerfully delineated certain paths to tread for the protagonists, they operated in a way that retained for them a fair scope of active engagement and agency. These contexts include stately self- assertion on the part of a Scandinavian kingdom; a peculiar type of transna- tional collaboration in eighteenth-century field science; trans-confessional exchange; broader processes of European expansion and exploration both in distant territories and in internal borderlands; self-fashioning by savants from a nodal place of astronomical research in the geographic margins of learned Europe, and their forging of identities on personal–professional, national as well as global scales; in its repercussions—to be discussed chiefly in Chapter 8—even political conflict in a Central European composite monarchy. Besides a consideration of the material practices and the actual results of the expedition, the task of this chapter is to establish this pivotal episode in Hell’s career firmly in the intersection of these contexts.4 3 Most famously and perhaps pioneeringly, see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); also Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century Eng- land (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For an earlier attempt to analyze Hell’s ex- pedition in this perspective, see László Kontler, “Distances Celestial and Terrestrial: Maximil- ian Hell’s Arctic Expedition, 1768–1769; Contexts and Responses,” in The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the Eighteenth Century, ed. André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 721–50. 4 The nature of the sources unfortunately does not allow any meaningful engagement in the case of the Hell expedition with the equally important question of the “native voices” that