Page - 388 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

© PER PIPPIN ASPAAS AND LÁSZLÓ KONTLER, ����  |  doi:10.1163/9789004416833_011 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. Conclusion Borders and Crossings Eighteenth-century societies in the Habsburg lands, as elsewhere in Europe, were marked by distances and borders, socially, spatially, and otherwise. The cultural experience belonging to the life worlds that they separated differed significantly. The traversability of the distances and the porosity of the borders were varied and changeable, subject to diverse influences from political inter- est and stratagem through economic growth or decline to the development of patterns and means of communication, and more. So were the opportunities for transgressing the borders and connecting the life worlds. Maximilian Hell was born and raised among circumstances that, despite some appearances, equipped him well for such transgressions. Apart from his university years, the scenes of his life before his appointment as imperial and royal astronomer were “borderlands”: relatively recently captured and consoli- dated possessions of the Habsburg crown whose value for it derived from its newly conceived geopolitical interests and stakes in the region east of the Riv- er Leitha. In some sense thus peripheral, yet these scenes were by no means marginal. Hell’s birthplace was home to, and several of his family members were key figures in, a branch of industry that assumed strategic importance in the great power aspirations of the Habsburgs. The Society of Jesus, which of- fered unique opportunities for mobility and which by family decision Hell joined as a young adult, was firmly established there, while in Transylvania, where he was active as a much more mature but still early career scholar, the order was assigned a central role in the monarchy’s “civilizing mission”—thus an excellent learning ground for developing skills of creative adjustment to varying, even contradictory, constraints and requirements. Between these two stations, Hell could already ascertain how promising the combination of his descent and his Jesuit affiliation was during the years of his university studies in the imperial metropolis, where—naturally also thanks to his obvious mathematical and more broadly scientific talents—he first began integration in the intertwining patronage networks of aristocratic– governmental circles and the Society of Jesus during the 1740s. The firmness of this integration and intertwining is further underscored by his appointment, a few years later, as the first director of the new Imperial and Royal Observatory, the creation of which was central to the larger endeavor of the Habsburg government to raise the imperial seat once and for all to the status of a Euro- pean scientific capital. Accepting this position was a major “crossing” for the