Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Jesuit Studies Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit History

Editor

Robert A. Maryks (Independent Scholar)

Editorial Board

James Bernauer, S.J. (Boston College) Louis Caruana, S.J. (Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome) Emanuele Colombo (DePaul University) Paul Grendler (University of Toronto, emeritus) Yasmin Haskell (University of Western Australia) Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Pennsylvania State University) Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. (Loyola University Maryland) Mia Mochizuki (Independent Scholar) Sabina Pavone (Università degli Studi di Macerata) Moshe Sluhovsky (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Jeffrey Chipps Smith (The University of Texas at Austin)

volume 27

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/js

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

By Per Pippin Aspaas László Kontler

leiden | boston

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-Nd 4.0 License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

The publication of this book in Open Access has been made possible with the support of the Central European University and the publication fund of UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

Cover illustration: Silhouette of Maximilian Hell by unknown artist, probably dating from the early 1780s. (In a letter to Johann III Bernoulli in Berlin, dated Vienna March 25, 1780, Hell states that he is trying to have his silhouette made by “a person who is proficient in this.” The silhouette reproduced here is probably the outcome.) © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

ISSN 2214-3289 ISBN 978-90-04-36135-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41683-3 (e-book)

Copyright 2020 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Contents

Acknowledgments VII List of Illustrations IX Bibliographic Abbreviations x

Introduction 1 1 Enlightenment(s) 7 2 Catholic Enlightenment—Enlightenment Catholicism 11 3 The Society of Jesus and Jesuit Science 17 4 What’s in a Life? 26

1 Shafts and Stars, Crafts and Sciences: The Making of a Jesuit Astronomer in the Habsburg Provinces 37 1 A Regional Life World 37 2 Turbulent Times and an Immigrant Family around the Mines 44 3 Apprenticeship 53 4 Professor on the Frontier 76

2 Metropolitan Lures: Enlightened and Jesuit Networks, and a New Node of Science 91 1 An Agenda for Astronomic Advance 91 2 Science in the City and in the World: Hell and the respublica astronomica 106

3 A New Node of Science in Action: The 1761 Transit of Venus and Hell’s Transition to Fame 134 1 A Golden Opportunity 134 2 An Imperial Astronomer’s Network Displayed 144 3 Lessons Learned 155 4 “Quonam autem fructu?” Taking Stock 166

4 The North Beckons: “A desperate voyage by desperate persons” 172 1 Scandinavian Self-Assertions 174 2 The Invitation from Copenhagen: Providence and Rhetoric 185 3 From Vienna to Vardø 195

5 He Came, He Saw, He Conquered? The Expeditio litteraria ad Polum Arcticum 209 1 A Journey Finished and Yet Unfinished 210

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access vi Contents

2 Enigmas of the Northern Sky and Earth 220 3 On Hungarians and Laplanders 230 4 Authority Crumbling 256

6 “Tahiti and Vardø will be the two columns […]”: Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax 258 1 Mission Accomplished 260 2 Accomplishment Contested 269 3 A Peculiar Nachleben 298

7 Disruption of Old Structures 305 1 Habsburg Centralization and the De-centering of Hell 306 2 Critical Publics: Vienna, Hungary 315 3 Ex-Jesuit Astronomy: Institutions and Trajectories 330

8 Coping with Enlightenments 344 1 Viennese Struggles 344 2 Redefining the Center 366

Conclusion: Borders and Crossings 388

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

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Acknowledgments

This book owes its existence to the forms of academic sociability characteristic of the twenty-first-century Republic of Letters. The two authors became aware of each other’s work via internet searches. They then further explored mutual interests by email. They first met in person at a conference in Barcelona in 2010, and then at a dissertatio viva in Tromsø, Norway, in May 2012 (in the roles of author and reviewer, respectively). Their comradeship was sealed during a trip, in the footsteps of their hero and the protagonist of this book, to the Is- land of Vardø for the observation of the 2012 transit of Venus. The idea of a jointly written book is yet more recent. Apart from our indebtedness to one another, we have accumulated a huge debt of gratitude to many institutions and individuals. First among the former are UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and Central European Uni- versity in Budapest, not only as congenial environments to nurture, discuss, and mature the ideas contained in these pages but as sources of generous ­support for our research, and even the preparation of the manuscript for pub- lication. Special mention must be made of many libraries and archives, in par- ticular the kindness and expertise of librarians and archivists, who have ­supported our work across Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Italy. During the advanced stages of writing, László held a Senior Fellow- ship at the Lichtenberg Kolleg at Georg August University (Göttingen), a Fer- nand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute (Florence), and a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Cambridge, which secured ideal conditions for concentrating on this project. Per Pippin has, for his part, benefited from liberal working conditions at the University Library of Tromsø, with grants from the EU COST Action “Reassembling the European Republic of Letters” led by Howard Hotson (Oxford) facilitating the occasional research trip to archives or conferences. His doctoral thesis, upon which parts of this book are modulated, was originally sponsored by the Research Council of Norway, with additional grants from the Nordic Sámi Institute (Kautokeino/ Guovdageaidnu) and Tromsø Geophysical Observatory. Colleagues from whom we drew a great deal of encouragement, inspiration, support, and advice during various stages of working on this project include Hans Erich Bödeker, Wendy Bracewell, Stéphane van Damme, Emese Egyed, Robert Evans, István Fazekas, Maria Firneis, András Forgó, Martin van Gel- deren, Dezső Gurka, Rune Blix Hagen, Truls Lynne Hansen, Dominik Huenni- ger, Catherine Jami, Zsófia Kádár, Eva Kowalska, Anthony LaVopa, Antal

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access viii Acknowledgments

­Molnár, István Németh, Krisztina Oláh, András Oross, the late Thomas Posch, William O’Reilly, Antonella Romano, Simon Schaffer, Silvia Sebastiani, Ann Thomson, Zsuzsanna Borbála Török, Nils Voje Johansen, and Richard What- more. The manuscript has been read and helpfully commented on, in whole or in part, by Gábor Almási, Piroska Balogh, Daniel Margocsy, Andreas Klein, Katalin Szende, Zsuzsa C. Vladár, Thomas Wallnig, and the two anonymous reviewers commissioned by the publisher. Katalin Pataki expertly produced the maps of Hell’s networks, and Tim Page polished our English prose and un- dertook the unpleasant chore of putting together the bibliography. We are tre- mendously grateful to them all, while all remaining shortcomings are naturally our sole responsibility. Both of us have published several articles and book chapters in which topics of this volume figure prominently. These are referred to in the notes and the bibliography. We are grateful to the publishers of these works for the opportu- nity of piloting our research and our ideas. However, each of these studies has been very substantially reworked, and the material discussed in them has been rearranged, so that textual overlap is minimal, and this book is an independent and original publication. In keeping with the conventions of the publisher, all quotations from lan- guages other than English have been translated, usually without mention or spelling out of the original wordings. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are by the authors. As always, a final word of thanks must go to our families and friends, who stood by with patience and understanding, even empathy for our infatuation with a grumpy and conceited character whose ideas and ideals belong to a world other than ours. We can only hope to be ever able to reciprocate. On the 250th anniversary of our protagonist’s observation of the transit of Venus between the Sun and the Earth,

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler Tromsø and Budapest June 3, 2019

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Illustrations

Figures

1 The astronomer Maximilian Hell. Mezzotint (1771), by Johann Elias Haid (1739–1809). Hungarian National Museum xii 2 Map of source locations of observation reports published in the Ephemerides 112 3 Map of Hell’s correspondence 115 4 The shift of Venus’s path from two sites of observation 139 5 From Hell’s manual for the 1761 transit of Venus 139 6 The black-drop effect 158 7 The ship of Hell and his associates approaching Kjelvik, the last harbor before reaching Vardø. Drawing by Hell, published in the Ephemerides of 1791 206 8 Map of the Island of Vardø and with the nearby islands and the coast of ­Finnmark, by Hell and the engraver M. T. Sallioth (Insula WARDOEHUUS cum Adjacentibus Insulis et Littore Finn marchico, a Maximiliano Hell; M. T. Sallioth fec. [Vienna, 1772]). Hungarian National Library, Map Department, TR 8 116 207 9 The house of Hell and Sajnovics at Vardø, with the observatoriola on the left. Drawing by Hell, published in the Ephemerides of 1791 208 10 Maximilian Hell. Copperplate by the Augsburg miniature artist Johann Esaias Nilson (1721–88), based on a drawing by Wenzel Pohl (1720–90) 219 11 Sámi community, drawing by unknown artist, with annotations by Hell. Univer- sitätssternwarte Wien, Manuscripte Hell 234 12 Prince Árpád acknowledged as principal leader by raising on the shield (“in a Khazarian style”) by the Magyar chieftains and their allies. Illustration of a map of ancient Hungary drawn by Hell on the basis of Anonymus’s Gesta Hunga- rorum (Tabula geographica Ungariae Veteris Ex Historia Anonymi Belæ Regis Notarii, a P. Maximiliano Hell S.I. Gabriel Ruderstorffer [Vienna, 1772]). Hungar- ian National Library, Map Department, TR 378 248

Map

1 Map of the Austrian province of the Society of Jesus 395

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Bibliographic Abbreviations

Ephemerides Ephemerides Anni […] ad meridianum Vindobonensem jussu Augus- torum calculis definitae […]. Vienna. HARS Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. Paris. JS Journal des Sçavans. Paris. KVAH Kongliga Vetenskaps Academiens Handlingar. Stockholm. NcASIP Novi commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolita- nae. St. Petersburg. PTRSL Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. London Skrifter Kiøb. Skrifter, som udi det Kiøbenhavnske Selskab af Lærdoms og Viden- skabers Elskere ere fremlagte og oplæste. Copenhagen.

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access Figure 1 The astronomer Maximilian Hell in “Lappish garment” Mezzotint (1771), by Johann Elias Haid (1739–1809). Digitized by the Hungarian National Museum

Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler - 9789004416833 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 10:08:54AM via free access