Page - 333 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

333Disruption of Old Structures In this time of hardship, I was left only with two choices: either to bid farewell to my chair as imperial and royal astronomer, if I wished to finish my vast, three-volume work Expeditio litteraria as promised, or to sup- press this work, if I decided to continue in my chair as an astronomer, a chair in which I, for as long as the Society of Jesus existed, was helped by assistants in my work.62 In other words, while the routine activities of the observatory—those pre- scribed to Hell in the instructions of 1755—were indeed unaffected, the logis- tics had to be revised. What emerges from these lines is that, before 1773, the imperial and royal astronomer was able to delegate such basic tasks to person- nel put at his disposal not by the maintainer (the state), but via the established practices of apprenticeship in the Society of Jesus, so that he could dedicate a good part of his own time and energies to other scientific projects. Hell also seems to have staked the execution of his ambitious plan of publishing a comprehensive, multi-volume account of the Arctic expedition on the con- tinuation of such arrangements, and he blamed the failure of completing the magnum opus on the frustration of these expectations by the suppression of his order, as a result of which he was forced to deal with much of the daily chore himself. To be sure, this was still far better than the fate of the Jesuit Observatory of Vienna, just two-hundred meters away, which was closed shortly after the sup- pression of the Society. The director Liesganig was appointed professor at the former Jesuit college of Lviv in Galicia, which had come under Austrian rule in the aftermath of the first partition of Poland in 1772.63 As mentioned above, from his base in Lviv Liesganig conducted extensive surveys of the new Habsburg province of Galicia and served as the director of an observatory that had been founded by the Jesuits around 1771.64 As Liesganig passed away in 62 Maximilian Hell, “Observationes astronomicae latitudinum, & longitudinum locorum borealium Daniae, Sueciae, Norwegiae, & Finnmarchiae Lapponicae per iter arcticum an- nis 1768, 1769, & 1770 factae,” Ephemerides 1791 (1790), 301–2. 63 The Jesuit college of Lviv was founded in 1661 and received papal approbation as a univer- sity as late as 1759, a status it lost in 1773. For the next decade, it was known as the There- sianum, or academy for noblemen, until Joseph ii renewed its university status in 1784. 64 In some of the literature, this observatory is missing entirely, cf. Derek Howse, “The Greenwich List of Observatories: A World List of Astronomical Observatories, Instru- ments, and Clocks, 1670–1850,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 17, no. 4 (1986). Else- where, it is conjectured that it was founded by Liesganig, who came to Galicia in 1774, cf. Udías, Searching the Heavens, 31. However, an engraving of “the observatory of the Jesuit college, 1771” is included in Brosche, Der Astronom der Herzogin, 25. Von Zach, in an article in his Monatliche Correspondenz 4 (November 1801): 547–57, here 550, claims that a Jesuit