Page - 316 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 7316 correctives in mind, it nevertheless remains true that the flowering of Enlight- enment both as rational criticism through free and unbiased discussion, and as improvement through the quest, systematization, dissemination, and applica- tion of up-to-date knowledge in contexts other than the reform initiatives of the government, owed a great deal to the constant dialogue with it from the outset. In the case of the rise of an enlightened public in Vienna,18 a look at some of the central figures might illustrate this point. Von Sonnenfels—as the son of a recently converted and ennobled teacher of Hebrew, pretty much an outsider— first made a mark on the Viennese scene in the Deutsche Gesellschaft (German society) of the early 1760s, dedicated to promoting the improvement of the German language as propagated by Gottsched, and of vernacular literary cul- ture in general. It was the recognition of his qualities and potential as a local philosophe by the aristocratic reformers around the government, who had per- sonal experience of and were fully conversant with the “world of the Enlight- enment” in Paris and elsewhere—besides Kaunitz, members of his Council of State like Egid Valentin Baron von Borié (1719–93), or the Zinzendorf brothers, correctives to the view of the Enlightenment in the region as “unoriginal” and “derivative,” see Teodora Shek Brnardić, “Intellectual Movements and Geo-political Regionalization: The Case of the East European Enlightenment,” East-Central Europe/L’Europe du Centre- Est 32, nos. 1–2 (2005): 147–77; Brnardić, “The Enlightenment in Eastern Europe: Between Regional Typology and Particular Micro-history,” European Review of History: Revue euro- péenne d’histoire 13, no. 3 (2006): 411–35; László Kontler, “Introduction: The Enlightenment in Central Europe?,” in Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945), vol. 1, Late Enlightenment: Emergence of the Modern National Idea, ed. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 33–44. For more recent studies of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg realm in non- Viennese and non-Hungarian contexts, see Ivo Cerman, Rita Krueger, and Susan Rey- nolds, eds., The Enlightenment in Bohemia: Religion, Morality, and Multiculturalism (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011); Marija Petrovič, “Austrian Enlightenment in Cyrillic: Joseph Kurzböck’s Cyrillic Printing Shop and the Transmission of the Enlightenment to Austria’s Serbs,” Austrian History Yearbook 48 (2017): 25–38. On how such studies “redress the habitual imbalance of an Enlightenment historiography [in the Habsburg lands] mainly focused on Vienna,” see Franz Leander Fillafer, “Whose Enlightenment?,” Austrian History Yearbook 48 (2017): 111–25. 18 For comprehensive treatments, see Oszkár Sashegyi, Zensur und Geistesfreiheit unter Jo- seph ii: Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte der Habsburgischen Länder (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1958); Ernst Wangermann, Die Waffen der Publizität: Zum Funktionswandel der poli- tischen Literatur unter Joseph ii (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004). The topic is explored from the perspective of literary scholarship in Leslie Bodi, Tauwetter in Wien: Zur Prosa der ös- terreichischen Aufklärung 1781–1795 (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1977). See also Heather Morrison, “Pursuing Enlightenment in Vienna, 1781–1790” (PhD diss., Louisiana State Uni- versity, 2005).