Page - 349 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

349Coping with Enlightenments the academies of Paris, London, and Berlin were maintained from about twice as much. The other difficulty was that the whole scheme implied a deep conflict of interest between Hell as the future “director of calendar issues” and the man on whom the continuous publication of the Ephemerides depended: court publisher and printer Johann Thomas von Trattner (1717–98), who made for- tunes on the lucrative trade in calendars. Von Trattner, arguably the most suc- cessful book-dealer of the time in Austria,18 seems to have spared no effort to ruin the financial scheme, and by implication the academy project. One of his strategies was to annoy Hell by delaying the delivery of the 1775 volume of the Ephemerides. In a letter to Weiss, Hell felt the need to thus apologize and avert the responsibility: The Ephemerides, which were finished at the end of the year, I have not yet been able to acquire from Trattner despite repeated requests. I sus- pect that he has deliberately chosen to cause me this bother because he has learned of the imperial decree, by which all the calendars that used to be printed throughout the hereditary lands have now been earmarked to finance the academy of sciences that is to be established here in Vien- na. In this way, he has been bereaved of an income of thousands of flo- rins. As soon as I receive these Ephemerides, I will send a copy to my Highly Honorable Mister Colleague [i.e., Weiss] in Trnava.19 Trattner did not stop there. During an audience, he “moaned and begged” the empress to revise the plans, unless she wanted to send him, together with his creditors, to bankruptcy.20 This story is confirmed by a Danish theology stu- dent, Andreas Christian Hviid (1749–88), who visited Vienna from October 27, 1778 to January 20, 1779 with the aim of transcribing ancient manuscripts. His travel diary is crammed with detailed information not only on archives and li- braries but also on the intellectual elite of the Habsburg capital. Hviid met Hell on several occasions, both in the home of the highly sociable papal nuncio Giuseppe Garampi (1725–92) and in the observatory. Despite their diverging views on religion and politics—Hviid was a Protestant and highly supportive of Enlightenment ideas—he describes Hell in sympathetic terms. Hviid was 18 See, e.g., Peter R. Frank and Johannes Frimmel, Buchwesen in Wien 1750–1850: Kommenti­ ertes Verzeichnis der Buchdrucker, Buchhändler und Verleger (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 198–200. 19 Hell to Weiss, January 27, 1775, in Pinzger, Hell Miksa, 2:118. 20 Feil, Versuche, 65.