Page - 24 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

24 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich]) in L’viv, with the principal aim of forging both scholarship and local patriotism.16 In the late eighteenth and early nine- teenth centuries, these provincial institutions were still linked to a strong sense of patriotic regionalism, rather than to the resuscitation or invention of nations. In most cases, this local patriotism was also not linguistically ex- clusive but rather inclusive, seeking to unite regional peoples from all social and linguistic groups. The aristocratic patronage enabled the museums to be active internationally and encouraged scientific development irrespective of political limitations.17 In fact, the scholars and institutions supported by aristocrats enjoyed to a certain extent a better situation than those financed directly by the empire, which were under closer scrutiny from Vienna. The learned societies in Bohemia and Galicia were able to realize various ver- sions of provincial scholarship in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Prague the Private Society in Bohemia for the Development of Mathematics, the Fatherland’s History, and Natural History (Private Gesellschaft in Böhmen, zur Aufnahme der Mathematik, der vaterlän- dischen Geschichte und der Naturgeschichte), an aristocratic organization founded around 1771, included representatives of several noble Bohemian families. It was strictly a regionally bound institution that aimed to foster research on provincial and regional topics and to catch up with “German” cities, where academies had already reinforced universities, as Ignaz Born wrote in the introduction to the first volume of the society’s proceedings.18 In 1784 Joseph II and the Studienhofkommission (the Aulic Educational Commission, serving as the de facto Ministry of Education) denied the so- ciety status as a learned academy. The society was, however, allowed to use university facilities; it received one room in the Prague Carolinum (from 1828, two rooms), and its bylaws were approved. In 1791 Leopold II awarded the society royal status, and from then on it was known under the bilingual name Königliche böhmische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften / Královská česká společnost nauk (the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences), uniting Bohemian scholars regardless of their language or religious affiliation.19 The society’s links with the aristocracy ensured a stable financial situation, al- lowing it to grant awards, subsidies, and scholarships and to publish Gelehrte Nachrichten (Learned news, 1771–72) and, later, Abhandlungen (Treatises).20 In Galicia, in contrast, the first provincial learned society was estab- lished only in 1827, when Count Joseph Maximilian (Józef Maksymilian) Ossoliński, the imperial librarian in Vienna, opened the Ossoliński Scientific Institute (Ossolineum) in L’viv after ten years of preparation. Ossoliński was