Seite - 375 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

375Coping with Enlightenments assistant von Triesnecker or by his former assistant Pilgram.114 However, the volumes for 1788 and 1789 contain a number of pieces that attest to his ability, in his advanced years, to adopt a perspective on major issues in his profession, and to highlight these in a genre that was very different from all of his previous contributions; and he did so in a way that harmonized with the strategy of emphasizing his Jesuit and Hungarus allegiances. In 1781, Frederick William (Friedrich Wilhelm) Herschel (1738–1822) ascer- tained that a celestial body he had observed was not a star, but a planet, which at first he named Georgian star (after King George iii), but it became univer- sally known as Uranus. This first discovery of a planet in the solar system since antiquity became a sensation, in spite—or precisely because—of the fact that the existence of such a planet had been predicted on purely speculative grounds as an inevitable part of a structurally consistent cosmology by Kant in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (Universal natural history and theory of the heavens [1755]). In turn, Kantian speculative cosmol- ogy was not dissimilar in its narrative scope and ambition to biblical cosmogo- ny and mythical astrology, which also received significant stimuli from the “new science” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Together, they have been shown to have supplied a great deal of inspiration for astronomical di- dactic poetry, a genre that flourished in eighteenth-century Hungary.115 It was such a piece of poetry, the Historia Uraniae musae (History of the muse Ura- nia) by György Alajos Szerdahely (1740–1808), originally published in the previ- ous year, that introduced the appendix of the Ephemerides for 1788. This was followed by another poem, by Hell himself, the Lis astronomorum (The feud of astronomers—i.e., the controversy on the naming of the new planet). Szerdahely soon composed a companion, Elegia epidictica, per quam demon­ stratur Uraniam musam esse primogenitam Urani (Epideictic elegy demon- strating that the muse Urania was Uranus’s first born) and republished along with the Historia and the rest of his collected poetical works in 1788 in a vol- ume entitled Silva Parnassi Pannonii (Forest of the Pannonian Parnassus). 114 Cf. Sommervogel, “Hell, Maximilien,” 244–46. Beginning in the late 1780s, the highly tal- ented, but far less renowned astronomer Johann Tobias Bürg (1766–1834) also took part in observations at the Vienna University Observatory. After Hell’s death in 1792, he served as von Triesnecker’s adjunct and co-editor of the Ephemerides. For a popular account of Bürg’s career, see Maria G. Firneis, “Johann Tobias Bürg (1766–1834): Littrows Gegenspiel- er in Wien,” Die Sterne 69 (1993): 148–53. 115 Piroska Balogh, “Sic itur ad astra: Változatok a csillagászati tanköltemény műfajára Szer- dahely György Alajos és Pálóczi Horváth Ádám műveiből,” in Magyar Arión: Tanulmányok Pálóczi Horváth Ádám műveiről, ed. Rumen István Csörsz and Béla Hegedüs (Budapest: Rec.iti, 2011), 101–12, here 104.