Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

Pieces for the puzzle of an overall understanding of Hell’s career have been laid out, then, by
representatives of various nation states, academic disciplines and religious denominations.
Does this mean that a mere ‘cut and paste’ operation would provide a coherent story of his
life, capable of shedding light on his contributions to the international Venus transit projects
and how they were received? Unfortunately not. For one thing, various pieces do not match.
The modern map is too often used to navigate in a terrain that looked so much different to
Hell and his contemporaries. Breaking down national barriers in a search for the ‘mental map’
of the past is necessary. This does not mean that boundaries did not exist in the past, only that
they were different, and that we need to appreciate this fact in our search for historical insight.
I.1.2 ANALYTICAL APPROACH, SELECTION OF SOURCES AND TECHNICAL
REMARKS
Some gaps and shortcomings in the available historiography have already been outlined. In
the remaining sections of this chapter, I will describe how I intend to meet the challenges
posed by those gaps and shortcomings.
I.1.2.1 ANALYTICAL APPROACH
This thesis understands itself as a work in the field of history of science. History of science is,
as an academic activity, a sub-branch of history. Not in the sense that this kind of research is
exclusively, or even mainly, undertaken by professional historians, but because the same
standards apply, whether an academic historian (or historically oriented sociologist,
philosopher, scholar of literature, or similar) or a scientist (usually from the pertaining
discipline) is involved. The questions posed to the sources will vary over time and between
various co-existing and competing ‘schools’, as in any academic field, but they must be
analysed according to the principles of source criticism. 57
‘Big histories’ covering the main developments in particular branches of science, or even
science and learning in the widest sense and over multiple centuries, were long ranked as the
best way to proceed as a historian of science. The last decades have, however, witnessed a
fragmentation of approaches and a general narrowing of spatial, geographical and linguistic
57 See, however, Kragh’s excellent Introduction to the Historiography of Science (1987) for examples of scholars
that have argued for a more anachronistic (or “presentist”) approach to the history of science.
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