Seite - 6 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Introduction6 Habsburg monarchy as a whole, especially in regard of the activities of the Society of Jesus and other Catholic orders.6 Even more pertinently, the simplis- tic historiographical representations summarized above have also been chal- lenged in a trans-regional study of Hell, looking at him in Central European and Scandinavian contexts, resorting to a combination of biographical recon- struction and the “relocation” of European and global astronomical knowledge as pursued in relation to the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus.7 The ambition of this book is different from, and perhaps larger than both. It cannot aspire to be a biography in the ordinary sense: the scarcity of available “ego-documents” and other sources that may shed light on Hell as a person with a “self” requires caution in this regard. Rather, it proposes to utilize Hell’s embeddedness, simultaneously or in turns, in several eighteenth-century life worlds of differ- ing scales, both real and symbolic, and the apparent facility with which he moved among them, for testing the permeability of the boundaries construed as separating them. By doing so, it hopes to reveal something interesting, from a non-metropolitan perspective, about the eighteenth-century European pro- cesses of shaping and exchanging knowledge. These worlds and “worlds” in- clude the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional, small but prosperous and self- conscious urban centers of northern Hungary and Transylvania, with their traditions of mines, manufactures, good education, and self-government; the imperial metropoles of the Habsburgs and the Oldenburgs, both ambitious to consolidate their realms as empires and to enlist science in the service of this endeavor (and the staunch resistance it met in the case of the former from the elite of the Hungarian parts of the monarchy); the icy wilderness of the Arctic, with the opportunities it offered for scientifically penetrating unusual natural phenomena as well as human diversity; the cosmopolitan and Catholic hier- archy of the Society of Jesus; and the cosmopolitan and apparently non- hierarchical Enlightenment Republic of Letters. The “circumstances” that af- fected the ups and downs of Hell’s career, presenting him with chances and raising barriers that challenged him to develop ever new strategies of accom- modation and self-assertion, arose from the changes—some of them gradual, others abrupt, all of them significant—in the relation between these “worlds” over the half century of his active life. A consideration of the jeux d’échelles, 6 Nora Pärr, “Maximilian Hell und sein wissenschaftliches Umfeld im Wien des 18. Jahrhun- derts” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2011; published Nordhausen: Bautz Verlag, 2013). 7 Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell (1720–1792) and the Eighteenth-Century Transits of Venus: A Study of Jesuit Science in Nordic and Central European Contexts” (PhD diss., Uni- versity of Tromsø, 2012); http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4178 (accessed April 8, 2019).