Page - 241 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

241The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum rights derived from the military prowess demonstrated by their ancestors in the taking of the land, and that a sort of politia commixta, the proper form of government already among Attila and the Huns, was also preserved among their Hungarian offspring. The two works were first printed in 1746 and 1781, respectively,98 a period in which this theory (perpetuated by several later me- dieval and humanist chronicles and the most frequently printed Hungarian book of all time: the 1517 Tripartitum, a collection of customary law by jurist and statesman István Werbőczy [1458–1541]99) still held considerable authori- ty.100 While Anonymus was edited by the Protestant Bél and his disciple Jo- hann Georg Schwandtner (1716–91), and Kézai by the Piarist erudite Elek Horányi (1736–1809), it is noteworthy that—as Pray’s work signals—historical interest among Hungary’s Jesuits was turning from questions of chronology and dynastic issues to problems central to discourses of identity shortly before the time Hell and Sajnovics formulated their ideas on Hungarian–Sámi (lan- guage) kinship. We shall consider the predominantly hostile reaction of the adherents of the “Scythian” theory to their proposition in Chapter 8, in connection with the chances of Hell finding new social allies after the suppression of the Society of Jesus by reconfiguring himself as a Hungarus patriot. What is important to note here is that the efforts in the “domestic” (Trnava) edition of the Demon­ stratio to tacitly forge a link for the Sámi and the Hungarians with the Huns by tracing their languages back to Chinese (supposedly the source of all Asian languages)101 may point to an awareness on the part of Hell that the theory put forward in the Demonstratio is likely to evoke resentment and needs 98 György Szabados, A magyar történelem kezdeteiről: Az előidő­ szemlélet hangsúlyváltásai a xv–xviii. században (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2006) 14, 19. Hell also planned to include Anonymus’s Gesta in the Expeditio litteraria. Sajnovics, Demonstratio (1771), 130. 99 See several studies in Martyn Rady, ed., Custom and Law in Central Europe (Cambridge: Centre for European Legal Studies, 2003). 100 For a brief introduction to this tradition and its ideological significance, see László Kontler and Balázs Trencsényi, “Hungary,” in European Political Thought 1450–1700: Reli­ gion, Law, and Philosophy, ed. Howell Lloyd, Glenn Burgess, and Simon Hodson (New Ha- ven: Yale University Press, 2007), 176–207, here 180–81, 185–86; for more details, see Jenő Szűcs, “Theoretische Elemente in Meister Simon de Kézas Gesta Hungarorum (1282–1285): Beiträge zur Herausgestaltung der ‘europäischen Synchronismus’ der Ideenstrukturen,” in Szűcs, Nation und Geschichte (Cologne: Böhlau, 1981), 263–328. 101 For the ascription of this proposition to Hell, and its divergent linguistic grounds—the emphasis on monosyllabic roots in Chinese as well as Sámi and Hungarian; the applica- tion of metathesis and reading words backward, etc.—from the overall thrust of Sajno- vics’s approach, see Vladár, “Hell mint nyelvész,” 338–40.