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11Introduction
“
capitalist world system.” According to Wallerstein, while capitalism as a pecu-
liar set of relations of production continued to be confined to portions of the
Western world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thanks to the spe-
cial dynamism it assumed during this period, it was capable of drawing into its
orbit and turning to its own purposes regions where those relations were not
capitalist, to an extent that, complementing the West as the “core,” they all
formed parts of the same global system as “semi-peripheries” and “peripheries.”24
One may not need to agree with the Wallersteinian analysis of the capitalist
world system, nor even adopt the language of center and periphery, in order to
conceive of the Enlightenment, by the same token, as a “system” of eighteenth-
century culture and thought possessing its own intellectual and ethical priori-
ties and agendas as well as more or less clear boundaries, while at the same
time capable of involving, affecting, enlisting, or even swallowing entities
whose own logic and mode of operation was not necessarily altogether or per-
vasively “enlightened.”
2 Catholic Enlightenment—Enlightenment Catholicism
One obvious candidate for the role of such an ambiguously located entity in
the Enlightenment world is the Christian church and religion, especially its
Catholic version, which according to classic accounts so thoroughly imbued
the structures of tradition and authority that were the prime target of critique
by the eighteenth-century’s “little flock of philosophers.”25 Renaissance hu-
manism and the Protestant Reformation have long been credited with prepar-
ing the ground for the enlightened assault on dogma, superstition, and fanati-
cism, but Catholicism, with its continued attachment to devotional practices
such as the adoration of saints and belief in miracles, its maintenance of
armies of apparently idle monks, ostentatious baroque pomp, and universal
monarchy as the appropriate form of ecclesiastical government, was deemed
antithetical to the ideals of emancipation, utility, and progress associated with
the Enlightenment. It is true that a Catholic Enlightenment was discovered in
German scholarship as long ago as the beginning of the twentieth century, as
part of a more comprehensive attempt to deliver the Enlightenment from the
James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001).
24 Originally developed in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agri-
culture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York:
Academic Press, 1976).
25 For this famous epithet, see Gay, Enlightenment, 1:3–8.
Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Titel
- Maximilian Hell (1720–92)
- Untertitel
- And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe
- Autoren
- Per Pippin Aspaas
- László Kontler
- Verlag
- Brill
- Ort
- Leiden
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-90-04-41683-3
- Abmessungen
- 15.5 x 24.1 cm
- Seiten
- 492
- Kategorien
- Naturwissenschaften Physik
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Acknowledgments VII
- List of Illustrations IX
- Bibliographic Abbreviations X
- Introduction 1
- 1 Shafts and Stars, Crafts and Sciences: The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces 37
- 2 Metropolitan Lures: Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science 91
- 3 A New Node of Science in Action: The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame 134
- 4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” 172
- 5 He Came, He Saw, He Conquered? The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum 209
- 6 “Tahiti and Vardø will be the two columns […]”: Observing Venus andDebating the Parallax 258
- 7 Disruption of Old Structures 305
- 8 Coping with Enlightenments 344
- Appendix 1 Map of the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus (with Glossary of Geographic Names) 394
- Appendix 2 Instruction for the Imperial and Royal Astronomer Maximilian Hell, S.J 398
- Bibliography 400
- Index 459