Page - 393 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

393Borders and Crossings became fragmented, it seemed a realistic hope that he would be able to resort to the credit raised in some of them against the ones where a deficit had sud- denly been accumulated. In the interest of maintaining his positions, he might even be said to have been working across the boundaries of distinct scientific fields. Eventually, what appears to be his attempt to maintain the continuity of his ends by “de-centering” the realm that had once bred him but then aban- doned him, turns out to have failed. Yet, his story is not less instructive for the fact that it was a failure: it reveals something about what men of science oper- ating on multiple scales in early modern Europe may—or may not—have achieved by “negotiating knowledge” at times of imperial consolidation.