Seite - 82 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 182 with tokens of European technological advancement and mathematical- astronomical prowess also secured penetration in the rank-and-file of a cen- trally dominated social hierarchy.133 Indeed, Hell, who spent less than three full years in Cluj, was the only one among the Jesuits active there who ever made a mark in scholarship, if we disregard János Frivaldszky (1730–84). Fri- valdszky was an eclectic professor of philosophy and mathematics, as well as librarian and historian of the house and co-founder of the Transylvanian Soci- ety for Agriculture. His published work ranged from pioneering dissertations on iron ore and the minerals of Transylvania (strongly criticized by von Born) through pieces of antiquarianism to studies dedicated to fighting famine by crop-rotation and turning familiar crops to new uses.134 Yet, the delegation of Hell as a dynamic and promising, young but already widely experienced man of science to peripheral Cluj was meant to give a boost to existing local initia- tives in his fields of expertise. The first professor there to devote attention to astronomy was Miklós Jánossi (1701–41), active in Cluj in the mid-1730s, possi- bly also engaging in observations from his own domicile in the convent, al- though astronomy appears as a matter of applied mathematics, not empirical measurement, in his 1737 textbook on trigonometry.135 A significant element of Hell’s commission was apparently to redress this situation and supervise the construction of a new building of the college with an observatory,136 which was to be the fourth one run by Jesuits in the Austrian province after Vienna, Graz, and Trnava (also still a project in progress). In fact, throughout the time Hell spent in Cluj, whatever observations he carried out there seem to have been done, similarly to Jánossi, from his home,137 and it is not clear exactly what preparations for a real observatory were really 133 On Jesuit mathematics and astronomy in China, see Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662– 1722) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); for the development of the parallel with Transylvania, see Shore, Jesuits and the Politics of Religious Pluralism, 157–58. 134 http://jezsuita.hu/nevtar/frivaldszky-janos/ (accessed April 12, 2019). 135 László Heinrich, Az első kolozsvári csillagda (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1978), 24–27; http://jezt- suita.hu/nevtar/janossi-miklos/ (accessed April 12, 2019). A collaborator of Jánossi in Cluj in 1737 was Mihály Lipsicz (1703–65) (http://jezsuita.hu/nevtar/lipsicz-mihaly-ii/ [ac3- cessed April 12, 2019]), who later, in the early 1740s, may have taught Weiss in Trnava and published Hungaria coelestis astronomiae et chronologam in synopsi complentes (Košice, 1741), a “baroque fusion of science and triumphalist history.” Cf. Shore, Jesuits and the Poli- tics of Religious Pluralism, 164. 136 No actual instruction to Hell in this sense is extant, but (considerably later) references in Hell’s own work and correspondence, as well as the posterior accounts of his life in Schlich tegroll, von Triesnecker, and Döbrentei are unanimous about the chief purpose of his appointment in Cluj. 137 Gábor Döbrentei, “Gróf Batthyány Ignác,” Erdélyi Muzéum 2 (1815): 3–18, here 5.