{"title":"The 1769 Transit of Venus as a Springboard for Jesuit Ministries among the Learned","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/22141332-10020001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nThis article examines how two Jesuit astronomers made use of a rare celestial phenomenon in attempts at winning the favor of intellectual and ruling élites outside of Catholic regions. The Heidelberg professor Christian Mayer (1719–83) went to Saint Petersburg, where he observed the transit of Venus in 1769 from the observatory of the prestigious Imperial Academy of Sciences. The imperial and royal astronomer of Vienna, Maximilian Hell (1720–92) went to Vardø in northeastern Norway, where he built a small observatory and successfully observed the same transit. The scientific works they published under the auspices of the leading scientific academies in Orthodox Russia and Lutheran Denmark–Norway are analyzed as examples of missionary texts, in an enlarged sense of the word.","PeriodicalId":41607,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jesuit Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Jesuit Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-10020001","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article examines how two Jesuit astronomers made use of a rare celestial phenomenon in attempts at winning the favor of intellectual and ruling élites outside of Catholic regions. The Heidelberg professor Christian Mayer (1719–83) went to Saint Petersburg, where he observed the transit of Venus in 1769 from the observatory of the prestigious Imperial Academy of Sciences. The imperial and royal astronomer of Vienna, Maximilian Hell (1720–92) went to Vardø in northeastern Norway, where he built a small observatory and successfully observed the same transit. The scientific works they published under the auspices of the leading scientific academies in Orthodox Russia and Lutheran Denmark–Norway are analyzed as examples of missionary texts, in an enlarged sense of the word.
期刊介绍：
This is a full Open Access journal. All articles are available for free from the moment of publication and authors do not pay an article publication charge. The Journal of Jesuit Studies (JJS) is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal dedicated to the study of Jesuit history from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. It welcomes articles on all aspects of the Jesuit past and present including, but not limited to, the Jesuit role in the arts and sciences, theology, philosophy, mission, literature, and interreligious/inter-cultural encounters. In its themed issues the JJS highlights studies with a given topical, chronological or geographical focus. In addition there are two open-topic issues per year. The journal publishes a significant number of book reviews as well. One of the key tasks of the JJS is to relate episodes in Jesuit history, particularly those which have suffered from scholarly neglect, to broader trends in global history over the past five centuries. The journal also aims to bring the highest quality non-Anglophone scholarship to an English-speaking audience by means of translated original articles.
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