Abstract
Maximilian Hell (1720–1792) was one of the foremost Jesuit scholars in eighteenth-century Central Europe.1 He is chiefly remembered on account of his contribution to the 1769 Venus transit observations at the helm of an expedition to the Arctic region, and his calculation of the solar parallax based on the collation of his own data with others. He was also the éminence grise behind the other result of the expedition, the Demonstratio. Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse, published in 1770 by his assistant János (Joannes) Sajnovics and “demonstrating” on the basis of fieldwork among the Sámi the theory of the kinship of the Hungarian and Sámi (Lappish) languages.2
I am grateful to Per Pippin Aspaas for his comments.
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Notes
Sándor Hadobás’s bibliography on Hell and his fellow Jesuit Venus-observer János (Joannes) Sajnovics lists over 600 titles, but these include only two monographic studies on Hell: a helpful though dated and “hagiographic” work by Ferenc Pinzger S. J., Hell Miksa emlékezete [Remembrance of Miksa Hell], 2 vols. (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1920–1927);
and Elena Ferencová’s biography, Maximilián Hell významná osobnosť slovenskej vedy a techniky [Maximilián Hell, an important figure of Slovak science and technology] (Bratislava: Asklepios, 1995). Both make available a respectable number of sources. The rest of the literature includes many contributions to “popular science” and relatively few scholarly articles. Two recent dissertations must be mentioned. One of them explores Hell’s scientific milieu in Vienna, while the other focuses on the 1768–70 Venus transit expedition, but examines it in the context of Hell’s entire career. See Nora Pärr, “Maximilian Hell und sein wissenschaftliches Umfeld im Wien des 18. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2011; published, Nordhausen: Bautz Verlag, 2013); and
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., University of Tromsø, 2012), accessed July 12, 2013, http://hdl.handle.net/10037/4178
“Lappish” is regarded derogatory today. The theory had been entertained by several scholars over the previous century and a half. For a recent summary, see László Kontler, “Distances Celestial and Terrestrial: Maximilian Hell’s Arctic Expedition, 1768–1769. Contexts and Responses,” in The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century, ed. André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 721–750. For Hell’s role behind Sajnovics’s authorship, see Aspaas, “Maximilian Hell,” 117–119. The material published in the Demonstratio would have formed part of the Tomus historicus in a multivolume Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum, which Hell planned but never realized.
The standard work is Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Science (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1959).
See also more recent surveys: Eli Maor, Venus in Transit (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2004);
William Sheehan and John Westfall, The Transits of Venus (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004);
and Christophe Marlot, Les Passages de Vénus: Histoire et observation d’un phénoméne astronomique (Paris: Vuibert/Adept, 2004);
Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (London: William Heinemann, 2012);
Christiaan Sterken and Per Pippin Aspaas, eds., Meeting Venus (Brussels: Vrije Universiteit Brussels, 2013).
The first astronomical observatory in Vienna was created by court mathematician Johann Jakob (Giovanni Iacopo) Marinoni (1676–1755) on the top of his own house in 1730; the “tower” of the Jesuit College followed in 1733 (directed by Father Josef Franz, one of Hell’s teachers and patrons). After Marinoni’s death his equipment was bequeathed to the empress, who donated it to the university, marking the beginning of the university observatory. On the history of the latter, see Jürgen Hamel, Isolde Müller, and Thomas Posch, eds., Die Geschichte der Universitätssternwarte Wien. Dargestellt anhand ihrer Instrumente und eines Typoskripts von Johann Steinmayr, Acta Historica Astronomiae, vol. 37 (Frankfurt: Harri Deutsch Verlag, 2010).
Jürgen Hamel, “Ephemeriden und Informationen: Inhaltliche Untersuchung Berliner Kalender bis zu Bodes Astronomischen Jahrbuch,” in 300 Jahre Astronomie in Berlin und Potsdam (= Acta Historica Astronomiae, vol. 8. Frankfurt: Harri Deutsch Verlag, 2000), 49–68;
Cornelia Maria Schörg, “Die Präsenz der Wiener Universitätssternwarte und ihrer Forschungen in den deutschsprachigen astronomischen Jahrbüchern und Fachzeitschriften 1755–1830,” unpublished Mag. Phil. thesis, University of Vienna (2009), 31–37.
Paris, Pont-à-Mousson, Rome, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Naples, Madrid, Ingolstadt, Schwetzingen, Würzburg, Trnava, Graz, Vienna, Prague, Wrocław, Poznan, Lviv, and Vilnius. To this number, one may add places with Jesuit colleges that had no observatories but supplied Hell with data (such as Dillingen and Ljubljana), and two observatories maintained by other prestigious Catholic orders (Benedictines at Kremsmünster and Augustinians at Sagan). The identification of Jesuit observatories in this note and the next one is based on Augustín Udías, Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 21–22.
Journal des Sçavans (1773): 90–93, 113–115. On the relationship of Hell and Lalande, see Per Pippin Aspaas, “Le Père Jesuit Maximilien Hell et ses relations avec Lalande,” in Jerôme Lalande (1732–1807). Une trajectoire scientifique, ed. Guy Boistel, Jerôme Lamy, and Colette Le Lay (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 129–148.
On the highly complex character and activities of Kästner, see Rainer Baasner, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, Aufklärer (1719–1800) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991)
On March 18, 1761, Hell explicitly requested the editors of the Journal des Sçavans to review the Ephemerides. USW MS Hell, vol. 3. See further, Hell to Weiss, January 11, 1783. Pinzger, Hell emlékezete, 2: 137; Hell to Kästner, March 6, 1785; Hell to Kästner, January 26, 1788. György Gábor Csaba, ed., A csillagász Hell Miksa írásaiból [From the writings of the astronomer Miksa Hell] (Budapest: Magyar Csillagászati Egyesület, 1997), 58.
For details, see below. I had access to copies of Maskelyne’s accounts (held at the archive of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, RGO 35/134) in the private collection of the late Magda Vargha at the Konkoly-Thege Institute for Astronomy in Budapest. Cf. also Ottó Kelényi B., Az egri érseki líceum csillagvizsgálójának története [The history of the astronomical observatory at the lycée of the Eger bishopric] (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1930), 6.
For more details in English, see Robert J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683–1867 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2006), especially chaps. 1–4, 6–8, and 11.
Useful surveys also include Domokos Kosáry, Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (Budapest: Corvina, 1987);
Éva H. Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs. An Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism (Budapest: Central European U. P., 1997).
See László Kontler, “Polizey and Patriotism: Joseph von Sonnenfels and the Legitimacy of Enlightened Monarchy in the Gaze of Eighteenth-Century State Sciences,” in Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 75–91, 232–236 (footnotes).
Winfried Müller, “Der Jesuitenorden und die Aufklärung im süddeutschösterreichischen Raum,” in Katholische Aufklärung—Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland, ed. Harm Klueting, with Norbert Hinske and Karl Hengst (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1993), 225–245.
See also Helmut Kröll, “Die Auswirkungen der Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens in Wien und Niederösterreich: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Josephinismus in Österreich,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 34 (1971): 547–617;
on the consequences of the suppression to the members of the order, Hermann Haberzettl, Die Stellung der Exjesuiten in Politik und Kulturleben Österreichs zu Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Verband der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1973);
Antonio Trampus, I gesuiti e l’Illuminismo. Politica e religione in Austria e in Europa centrale (1773–1798) (Florence: Olschki, 2000).
Ferdinand Maas, “Die österreichischen Jesuiten zwischen Josephinismus und Liberalismus,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 80 (1958): 66–100, here 66–67.
A project for an academy drafted by Leibniz and supported by the imperial general and statesman Eugene of Savoy sank into oblivion after 1716; later plans inspired by the famous writer and language reformer Johann Christoph Gottsched and pursued by the founder, Freiherr Josef von Petrasch, of the first German scientific society in the Habsburg lands (at Olmütz in 1746) also came to nothing. In 1764 Hell himself failed in reviving the idea of an academy of sciences. See Joseph Feil, Versuche zur Gründung einer Akademie der Wissenschaften unter Maria Theresia (Vienna: Gerold, 1860). According to the report of a Danish visitor of Hell’s, the 1764 initiative was thwarted because Hell rejected an (unnamed) minister’s insistence that members of the academy should be appointed by the government; Aspaas, “Maximilianus Hell,” 145–146.
László Kádár, “Eszterházy Károly racionalizmusa” [The rationalism of Károly Eszterházy], Vigilia 64/6 (1999): 443–444.
See further Béla Kovács, ed., Eszterházy Károly emlékkönyv [Memory book of Károly Eszterházy] (Eger: Érseki Gyűjteményi Központ, 1999); and especially the chapter of István Bitskey, “‘Püspökünk, példánk és tükörünk volt.’ Eszterházy Károly életpályája és egyénisége” [“He was our bishop, example, and mirror.” Károly Eszterházy’s career and personality], 7–22.
Az 1777-iki Ratio Educationis, trans. and ed. Aladár Friml (Budapest: Katholikus Középiskolai Tanáregyesület, 1913), 50.
For details, see Kontler, “Distances celestial and terrestrial,” 744–750. It has, however, also been emphasized that hostility to “Finno-(Lappo)-Ugrianism” was confined to a minority, and the dominant feeling was perplexity (resulting in hybrid theories). See László Szörényi, “Nyelvrokonság, őstörténet és epika a 18. századi magyarországi jezsuita latin irodalomban” [Language kinship, ancient history, and epic in the 18th-century Hungarian Jesuit Latin literature], Irodalomtörténeti közlemények 101/1–2 (1997): 16–24;
István Margócsy, “A tiszta magyar. Nemzetkarakterológia és nemzeti történelem összefüggései Bessenyei és kortársai nyelvrokonság-felfogásában” [The pure Hungarian. The correlations of national characterology and national history in the language kinship conceptions of Bessenyei and his contemporaries], in A szétszórt rendszer. Tanulmányok Bessenyei György életművéről [The dispersed system. Studies on the oeuvre of György Bessenyei], ed. Csaba Csorba and Klára Margócsy (Nyíregyháza: Bessenyei Kiadó, 1998), 131–140.
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© 2014 László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
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Kontler, L. (2014). The Uses of Knowledge and the Symbolic Map of the Enlightened Monarchy of the Habsburgs: Maximilian Hell as Imperial and Royal Astronomer (1755–1792). In: Kontler, L., Romano, A., Sebastiani, S., Török, B.Z. (eds) Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484017_4
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