Benedictines, Church Reform and the State in Austria, 1720-40

For several years, the correspondence and papers of Bernhard (d. 1735) and Hieronymus Pez OSB (d. 1762) have been the subject of scientific inquiry (Austrian Science Fund projects P-16940, Y-390). The two brothers and Benedictine confreres from the Lower Austrian abbey of Melk can justifiably be said to have played a pivotal role in the transformation of knowledge standards in the early 18th century Habsburg lands, both in terms of an evidence-based epistemology of historical scholarship and in terms of new forms of scientific organization, including plans for an imperial academy of sciences. Their importance is documented in part by various conflicts with the Vienna Jesuits, their abbot, the court library and others which reveal the potentiality of dissent raised by issues of knowledge design and application. These aspects shall now be further investigated on the basis of additional sources shedding light on the Austrian Benedictines actual involvement with the political élites in Vienna, Rome, and the Reichskirche. Addressing the tension between the allegedly free exchange of ideas within the Republic of Letters, the specific requirements for a Benedictine history and identity, and the increasing need for expert knowledge displayed by the court and the emerging and gradually centralising state, this project will specifically focus on five areas: the relations of the Benedictines and the Viennese court with the Roman curia; the encounter between Catholic critics of the latter and Protestant state law, equally conceived as a historical discipline; the struggle for a Benedictine and/or imperial academy; the conflict between competing instances of censorship; and finally the Habsburgs need for sound historical expertise on the eve of the Austrian War of Succession. All these topics will be addressed using pieces from the Pez correspondence as well as sources in Vienna, Passau, Rome and Hanover, and the relevant parts of the correspondences of Gottfried Bessel, Johann Benedikt Gentilotti, Oliver Legipont, Anton Steyerer, Wilhelm von Wurmbrand, and others. The outlined research will be connected to the revision and publication of the c. 600 Pez letters after 1719 (that have already been transcribed and summarized within Y-390) as well as to the state-of-the- art digital reworking of the entire Pez correspondence and its integration, together with the digital Pez papers, into a virtual research environment (to be called ePezianum). This effort will help finalize research on the brothers Pez in an updated and sustainable form technologically as well as methodologically.

FWF project Benedictines, Church Reform and the State in Austria, 1720-40 (P-28016) further developed earlier research on Catholic scholarship in Central Europe in the early eighteenth century. Correspondence and papers of the brothers Pez, but now also those of Göttweig abbot Gottfried Bessel, were used to situate Benedictine erudition in its often conflicting intellectual and institutional environments: Deeply rooted in a Catholic reading of Church history, Benedictine scholars nonetheless took their distances from the Church of Rome when it came to imperial politics, and they were part of the discussions about the relation between knowledge and the state. During the project, the editorial work on the Pez letters has been placed in the broader context of digital humanities-related scholarship. Project members contributed to the COST Action Reassembling the Republic of Letters, helped established a dialogue platform for data-oriented projects dealing with early modern Central Europe (Digital Habsburg Platform), and envisioned a workflow for the parallel print and digital publication of the entirety of the Pez material (dQIÖG). Funding is being sought for to bring the editorial efforts to an end during until 2025.