Page - 11 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Introduction ♦  11 Polonicarum (!), Hungaricarum, and Italicarum48 were planned, but the sug- gestion of a state history encompassing local histories was soon replaced by an Austriacarum rather than a Habsburgicarum. The introduction and description of the objectives of the series, despite occupying several pages in the first ten volumes, were soon removed. Nationally oriented editions of sources appeared outside of the series, such as Augustyn Bielowski’s six-volume Monumenta Poloniae Historica = Pomniki dziejowe Polski (Polish historical monuments, 1863–92), which opened with documents on Slavs in the Vistula region, and Antoni Zygmunt Helcel’s Starodawne prawa polskiego pomniki (Monuments of old Polish laws), published from 1856 on, envisaging an empire-transgressing space. Monumenta historiae Bohemica (Bohemian historical monuments) (with a secondary title in Czech, Staré paměti českých dějin [Bohemian/Czech historical monuments]) was later published under the supervision of Anton (Antonín) Gindely in Prague from 1865 on. While the imperial academy was intended to synthesize the forces concentrated in local academies, its mutation into an “Austrian” academy proved to be an obstacle to communication. To begin with, it had different competences than the local proto-academies (i.e., the scientific societies), not to mention the national academies (e.g., the French and British ones). As James E. McClellan has discussed, academies across Europe shared similar structures, competences, and scopes.49 However, while the imperial acad- emy was in many ways similar to other academies across Europe, the most important proto-academies in the Habsburg monarchy were in fact struc- tured differently, and they had different aims. Regional proto-academies of science such as the Cracow Scientific Society (Towarzystwo Naukowe Krakowskie) and the Patriotic Museum in Bohemia (Vaterländisches Museum in Böhmen / Vlastenecké muzeum v Čechách, known after 1848 as the České museum [Bohemian/Czech Museum] and from 1854 as the Museum Království českého [Museum of the Czech Kingdom])50 concen- trated on the development of science and scholarship in their national tongues after 1848. The Society of the Patriotic Museum in Bohemia (Gesellschaft des vaterländischen Museums in Böhmen, established in 1818) began life as a multicultural Bohemian institution, but under the reign of Palacký, it soon turned to publishing predominantly on the past and present of Czechs in Bohemia. From its inception, the Cracow Scientific Society (established in 1815, incorporated in 1846 in Galicia) aimed to expand Polish-language scholarship through literary research and the development of a scientific