Institute of History
Topic
Franz Wagner – educator, philologist, historiographer
PhD. program
World History
Year of admission
2026
Name of the supervisor
Svorad Zavarský, PhD.
Contact:
Receiving school
Faculty of Arts, Comenius University Bratislava
Annotation
Franz Wagner (1675–1748), a Jesuit of German origin, after a brief period of activity in Krems, Bratislava, and Trnava, spent almost his entire professional life in Vienna, at the center of the Austrian Province of the Society of Jesus, which also included the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary. The bibliographer J. N. Stöger wrote of him in the mid-19th century that he brought the Latin spirit back into the Austrian Province (“Latium in provinciam revexit”). Wagner began his literary career in Trnava, where, as a teacher of rhetoric, he wrote his first work entitled De vera eruditione (On True Education, 1701), which he himself later characterized as an “appetizer” (promulsio) to all his subsequent literary activity. Already in this first work, the young Wagner revealed himself as a talented educator, offering a constructive critique of the state of education of his time. Three decades later, again in Trnava, he published an instructional guide for teaching in the six humanities classes of Jesuit schools. As a philologist, Wagner distinguished himself chiefly through two works, Syntaxis ornata and Phraseologiae Latinae corpus, both of which went through numerous editions, attesting to their wide popularity. As a historiographer, he treated the histories of the reigns of Leopold I and Joseph I and prepared a series of history textbooks for the needs of Jesuit schools. In addition, Wagner devoted considerable attention to geography. The aim of the dissertation will be, for the first time, to map the life and work of this important figure, who left a lasting mark on the intellectual history of Central Europe and to whom scholars have so far devoted insufficient attention. Applicants are expected above all to have an excellent command of Latin, as well as the ability and willingness to work with Latin literature from the first half of the eighteenth century, and a passive knowledge of German.