Seite - 58 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 158 fewer than twenty members.58 Hell spent two years in Levoča, teaching gram- mar and syntax in his first year and rhetoric and poetry in the second, when he was also assigned with keeping the historia domus (history of the house) and acted as an assistant to the local clergy, Patris regentis socius. He was also the chair of the pupils’ congregation of the Virgin Mary, a function in which he could exercise his own rhetorical skills.59 Levoča was a unique place from a different point of view than the other lo- calities where Hell had spent time so far. In the far-away northeast of Upper Hungary, it belonged to the group of Spiš towns, which had enjoyed a set of privileges defined on a regional basis since the thirteenth century, and the po- litical picture was further complicated by the fact that the right to tax these lands had been mortgaged to Poland by the king of Hungary in 1412, an ar- rangement that continued until the first partition of Poland in 1772. Better known in the period by its German name Zips, the area was much of a “lan- guage island” (Sprachinsel) where Protestantism had gained an early foothold. Its cultural and political association with Vienna was thus comparatively loose not only because of physical remoteness, and it is no coincidence that early in the eighteenth century the Rákóczi revolt drew a great deal of support in Spiš. The presence in Levoča of a Jesuit gymnasium and other Catholic institutions was part of Viennese efforts to stabilize this area as a loyal hinterland of the empire.60 Still, even though in Levoča as well as in all the other towns where Hell spent his youthful years, a Lutheran majority was preserved among the inhabitants, confessional relations in the period seem to have been relatively calm.61 Protocols of the town magistrates rarely refer to the Jesuits—and then in neutral contexts—and while the residence or the college was often party to litigation over property, debt, or other matters, these were not different in 58 The figures given are approximate because there was naturally some fluctuation over the years. They are based on Lukács, Catalogi personarum, 8 (1734–47): 140, 333, 757. This in- valuable collection also provides full membership lists of all Jesuit colleges, residences, and missions in the Austrian province. On the Jesuit period of the Catholic gymnasium in Levoča, see László Halász, A lőcsei királyi katholikus főgymnasium története (Lőcse: Reiss József, 1896), 14–39. 59 Lukács, Catalogi personarum, 8:821. 60 On the cultural history of the area, see Wynfrid Kriegleder, Andrea Seidler, and Jozef Tan- cer, eds., Deutsche Sprache und Kultur in der Zips, Presse und Geschichte: Neue Beiträge 24 (Bremen: Edition lumière, 2007). 61 This was despite the fact that the latest settlement of religious affairs in the Kingdom of Hungary, the Carolina resolutio issued by Charles vi/iii in 1731, still restricted rights of worship by non-Catholics, allowed them very limited self-government, kept mixed mar- riages under the control of the Catholic Church, and punished conversion to any version of Protestantism.