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The Viennese Jesuit court astronomer Maximilian Hell was a key figure in the eighteenth-century circulation of knowledge. He was already famous by the time of his celebrated 1769 expedition for the observation of the transit of Venus in northern Scandinavia. However, the 1773 suppression of his order forced Hell to develop ingenious strategies of accommodation to changing international and domestic circumstances. Through a study of his career in local, regional, imperial, and global contexts, this book sheds new light on the complex relationship between the Enlightenment, Catholicism, administrative and academic reform in the Habsburg monarchy, and the practices and ends of cultivating science in the Republic of Letters around the end of the first era of the Society of Jesus.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Per Pippin Aspaas, PhD, with a thesis on Maximilian Hell (2012), is senior academic librarian at UiT The Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø). With a background in classical philology as well as the history of science, he has published on various branches of early modern science and the uses of neo-Latin.
László Kontler, PhD (1996), is professor of history at Central European University (Budapest/Vienna). He has published on intellectual history, the history of political thought, translation and reception, and scientific knowledge production, including
Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760-1795 (Palgrave, 2014).
