Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

UNPRINTED SOURCES AND LITERATURE
Maximilianus Hell and Joannes Sajnovics corresponded frequently with numerous persons
both inside and outside the circles of Jesuit learning. Especially Father Hell evidently had a
wide network of correspondents, although his epistolary output cannot be compared to that of
famous contemporaries like Albrecht von Haller (17,000 surviving letters), Johann Heinrich
Samuel Formey (18,000), Johann Caspar Lavater (20,000) or François Voltaire (21,000). 1
Sections 1a, 1b and 2a provide tabular overviews of all unprinted letters that have been
available for this study, either adressed to, or written by Hell or Sajnovics. These lists are
merely meant to document sources that have been available for the present work, and cannot
provide anything more than a patchy and fragmentary impression of what their
correspondence must have been like.
The number of archives used for this study is limited. Of the archives that have been visited, it
is only the collections of the Wiener Universitätssternwarte (Vienna University Observatory)
that has been studied in depth. If concerted efforts were made to search for surviving parts of
Hell’s correspondence in for example France, Italy or in places once belonging to the
Habsburg Empire, it is likely that many more documents would surface. 2 Furthermore, none
of the numerous letters that were printed in the lifetime of Hell and Sajnovics are included in
the present tables; witness the heading “unprinted sources”. Left out, therefore, is a
considerable amount of letters that are either referred to, quoted from or printed in full by
Father Hell in his Ephemerides Astronomicae, 3 by Sajnovics in the Demonstratio 4 or by other
contemporaries in various books, 5 newspapers and journals. 6 Nor have I attempted to
1 These figures are from Stuber 2005, pp. 314-315.
2 Several previously unprinted letters have been referred to in the present work already. See also Toth 2003 on a
report of Hell concerning the profusion of almanacs in the Austrian empire, dating from 1774; Smolka and Šolc
2008 on expert opinions of Hell concerning the observatory of Prague, dated Vienna 7 & 14 April 1787; Aspaas
2010 on Lalande’s and Hell’s correspondence; etc.
3 Some examples: extracts of various letters addressed to Hell are printed in his report on the 1761 transit of
Venus, cf. Hell 1761, pp. 39-40, 42-45, 47-49, 62-67, etc; several letters exchanged between Hell and Lalande,
Wargentin, Lexell, and others are referred to or quoted in the Ephemerides, among which the long letter of
Lexell in Hell 1773, pp. 15-67 merits particular mention; a series of letters from Fixlmillner to Hell were
likewise published in their entirety in the Ephemerides, cf. Rabenalt 1986, pp. 180-203.
4 See Section I.2.3 above.
5 See for example Chr. Mayer 1769b, p. 317; Lexell 1772, pp. 116-131; Bernoulli 1772, p. 15, 1777c, pp. 44-56,
1778, p. 15; etc. I have not had access to Joseph Stepling, Litterarum commercium eruditi cumprimis argumenti,
Wratislavae 1782, which – according to Smolka and Šolc 2008 – contains six letters from Hell to Stepling in
Prague, dated Vienna 9 February & 5 July 1757, 15 August & 9 September 1758, 4 January 1760, 8 January
1762, and 23 July 1777, and one letter from Stepling to Hell in Vienna, dated Prague 30 August 1758.
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