Page - 325 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

325Disruption of Old Structures and intellectual ferment. The “bodyguard-writers”40 became familiar, among other things, with the movement for the improvement of German, which de- veloped into the language of Goethe (1749–1832) by the 1770s. The publication of The Tragedy of Agis in 1772 by the most outstanding among them, György Bessenyei (1746–1811) is usually considered to mark the starting point of a simi- lar process in the case of Hungarian. Bessenyei went on to publish pamphlets on educational policy, endorsing Maria Theresa’s comprehensive educational reform, the Ratio educationis of 1777, but emphasizing the need for the exten- sive use of Hungarian. In order to make the language worthy of that task, in 1781 he also proposed the establishment of a “patriotic” learned society dedi- cated to the cultivation of letters in the vernacular.41 The linguistic and literary revival thus began to overflow into a general cul- tivation of native traditions: a sizeable elite group was emerging whose mem- bers’ cultural and intellectual sensibilities were broadly European, but whose identity was shifting from Hungarus to Magyar. It is also worth emphasizing that their vision of the future restoration of the erstwhile greatness of the Hun- garian nation was predicated on galvanizing their own class to a new dyna- mism through modern letters and knowledge practices. This was a vision of improvement that, in their own view, depended on maintaining a discourse of identity built on a prestigious pedigree and social exclusiveness, both under serious attack from the mid-1760s by the Viennese court and government, to- ward which their attitudes were therefore highly ambivalent. The oeuvre of Bessenyei, who was not only a writer but also an accomplished moral and so- cial philosopher, testifies to such ambivalences in a way that, as we shall see, is highly relevant to Hell’s recently conceived interests in the Hungarian lan- guage and history. 40 On the Hungarian Guards, with references to the figures mentioned, see László Deme, “Maria Theresa’s Noble Lifeguards and the Rise of the Hungarian Enlightenment and Na- tionalism,” in The East Central European Officer Corps, 1740–1920s: Social Origins, Selection, Education, and Training, ed. Béla Király and Walter Scott Dillard (Boulder, CO: Columbia University Press, 1988), 197–212. The Hungarian-language literature is respectable. How- ever, historians have hitherto largely yielded the field to literary scholars, whose main preoccupation has been the rise of vernacular literature and are yet fully to discover the subject and approach it with their own questions. The standard monograph is Ferenc Bíró, A felvilágosodás korának magyar irodalma (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 1994), esp. 69– 92, 161–85; 41 [György Bessenyei], Egy magyar társaság iránt való jámbor szándék, excerpts in English as A Benevolent Plan for a Hungarian Society, published in Lengyel and Tüskés, Learned Soci- eties, 80–89.