The odd family name, originally Höll, was apparently too close to the German for “hell” (Hölle) for Maximilian's father, who by changing it (from an Anglophone point of view) jumped from the frying pan into the fire. The elder Hell was, in fact, well acquainted with the infernal: he was a specialist in deep-shaft mining and the father of twenty-two children. Maximilian, the youngest of them all, grew up German-speaking in the thriving mining town of Banská Stiavnica (Schemnitz), now in Slovakia, though he identified himself as “Hungaricus” when he found it convenient. His main allegiances, however, were to the Society of Jesus, through which he rose to prominence as a mathematician, and to the Habsburgs, who maintained him as the head of the observatory of the University of Vienna. He achieved this position in 1755 and retained it through and after the disestablishment of the Jesuit order. There was also a Jesuit university in Vienna. Hell did not get along well with its director, Joseph Liesganig, or with the leading Jesuit mathematician Roger Boscovich, who spent some time in the capital. Hell suffered from arrogance, self-promotion, and affectation of omniscience, which no doubt complicated his relations with competitors.

As a man of science, Hell's reputation rests primarily on the Ephemerides astronomicae ad meridianum vindoboniensem, which he issued annually from 1757; secondarily on his observation of the transit of Venus (the passage of the planet across the sun's disk) of 1769; and tertiarily on miscellaneous pieces of natural philosophy. As Aspaas and Kontler demonstrate, the Ephemerides gained a reputation rivaling that of its French counterpart, the Connaissance du temps, for its reports of observations from central and eastern Europe and Scandinavia; and Hell gained a position among the main astronomers of Europe for his encouragement of astronomy on its periphery. His fruitful connection with Scandinavia climaxed in an invitation from the king of Denmark-Norway to view the transit of 1769, which began before sunrise in civilized latitudes in Europe, from the island of Vardø just above the 70th parallel.

Despite the philosophy of wide disclosure of observations that made his Ephemerides, Hell and his Jesuit associate, János Sajnovics, did not publish their findings quickly, as other observers did, and so gave rise to a suspicion that they had botched their observations and had to concoct or plagiarize their data. Aspass and Kontler carefully follow the long life of this suspicion through to the vindication of Hell and Sajnovics in the mid-nineteenth century. Their observations, in fact, were quite good, owing, it appears, to divine intervention—“like a miracle,” Hell wrote—since clouds that otherwise obscured the sun at Vardø dissolved at critical moments during the transit. But the controversy, coming at the same time as the suppression of the Jesuits, depressed Hell and brought out the less attractive features of his personality.

Hell's miscellaneous contributions to science ran from domestic hygiene (how to treat bedbugs) to novel theories (the cause of the aurora borealis). Between these extremes he experimented with electricity and magnetism and furnished hardware for Mesmer's trials of animal magnetism. He also offered medical advice, some quite bad, like the use of sugar against scurvy. Aspass and Kontler do not give the reasons for his sugar cure or the details of his way of beating bed bugs. These omissions may not be regrettable, but merely to mention the heterodoxy of Hell's theory of the aurora and his claim to be able to predict the weather is to say too little. As in the authors’ treatment of Hell's investigations of electricity and magnetism, we learn no more than that he worked on them.

The authors’ primary interest in Hell is not his science but his roles in the organization of astronomical study and observation in the Jesuits’ Austrian Province as well as in the careers of people who crossed his path. Much of their book reads as a collection of encyclopedia entries for people little known west of Vienna. This material has its value since the combined linguistic competences of the authors open to them sources in Hungarian, Slavic, and Scandinavian languages beyond the reach of most European historians. Rendering institutional history in this way has a tendency to clutter the narrative. There is a good story here, and some of it is well told, but the authors made this reviewer work hard to follow all of it.

The emphases of the book reflect the institutional positions of its authors. Per Pippin Aspass is senior academic librarian at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, where Hell and Sajnovics made their last preparations before wintering over in Vardø. Aspass is a classical philologist with a command of neo-Latin, a specialism unfortunately not widely enough distributed among historians of early modern science. For a decade or so he has been studying Hell's career, especially Hell's adventures in Vardø and new theory of the aurora, the texts of which he has published elsewhere.

Lásló Kontler is professor of history at the Central European University in Budapest/Vienna. His expertise in Habsburg intellectual and cultural history informs a discussion in the present book of the enlightened government of Emperor Joseph II and the agitation caused by Hell and Sajnovics's theory, developed during their stay at Vardø, that Hungarians and Lapps spoke a similar language. Magyar zealots, then striving to derive their ancestry from ancient noble Scythians, interpreted the insinuation of an association with the nomads of the north as a Habsburg plot aimed at subverting their political aspirations. During the last two decades of his life, Hell found himself under attack by zealous Magyars and nobler-than-thou astronomers without the support that in happier times the Society of Jesus had given him.

The English of the polyglot authors, which was reviewed by a native speaker, is clear and competent with few lapses from idiom. To be sure, the frivolous reader might smile at captions of two of the few but well-chosen figures, “The Ship of Hell” and “The House of Hell,” and at the description of his disorientation by the suppression of his order as “the decentering of Hell.” And the captious reader might wonder how the authors could treat Hell on bedbugs and scurvy, and his preposterous claim to be able to forecast the weather, with the same seriousness with which they handle Hell on Venus. Aspaas and Kontler are not biographers and do not try to present their protagonist's peculiar mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime. Their book is a careful and valuable source for historians of science interested in ways in which the Enlightenment affected the practice of science in the more remote lands of the Habsburg empire. For a biography of Hell, should one be desired, there is still an opening.