Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

Sven Widmalm investigates the history of geodesy in Sweden in the entire period from 1695
to 1860 in his doctoral thesis Mellan kartan och verkligheten (‘In-Between Map and Reality’,
in Swedish, 1990). No survey could of course be undertaken without astronomical knowledge,
and Widmalm in his thesis explores at length the international orientation of Swedish
astronomers, a topic that he has later pursued in a particularly condensed way in his study
A Commerce of Letters (originally printed as a report in 1991, then edited for publication in
Science Studies, 1992). Here, Widmalm analyses the international correspondence of Swedish
astronomers throughout the eighteenth century, exemplified by the characters Celsius,
Wargentin, Melanderhielm and Svanberg. Informal though it may seem, the frequent
exchange of letters between Wargentin and his peers was crucial for establishing Sweden as a
major player in international astronomy in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Päivi Maria Pihlaja, who defended her doctoral thesis on ‘Science under the Polar Star:
Northern Research and the Contacts between the Swedish Academy of Sciences and France
during the Eighteenth Century’ in 2009 (in Finnish), has studied the contacts between
Swedish researchers and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. 28 Although astronomy is
merely one of a series of subjects that are studied by Pihlaja, her contributions are valuable
starting points for our understanding of the Venus transit campaigns in eighteenth-century
Sweden, seen in an international context.
Whereas Pihlaja focuses on the Swedish relationship with the leading scientific body of
France, Mathias Persson in his doctoral thesis ‘The Proximate Other: Swedish Erudition and
Politics in a German Journal, 1753-1792’ (in Swedish, 2009) investigates how Swedish
science and politics was portrayed in the leading German scientific journal, the Göttingische
Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen. In general, the ‘foreignness’ of Sweden was neither
exoticised nor denigrated, Persson concludes. Rather, eighteenth-century Sweden was
portrayed as a closely related scientific culture that in many ways resembled that of the highly
successful University of Göttingen. 29
28 Lacking knowledge of Finnish, my sense of Pihlaja’s thesis has primarily been acquired from personal
communication as well as from a review by Peter Stadius (in Swedish, 2010). However, her articles 2005a (in
English), 2005b (in English) and 2006 (in Swedish) are all noteworthy.
29 In the vein of Persson, Ingemar Oscarsson (2011) has traced the presence of Swedish science in various
international journals, in particular the Journal des Savants.
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