The 1769 Transit of Venus as a Springboard for Jesuit Ministries among the Learned

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.