oa The First ‘Vienna School’ of Numismatics. A New Research Project on the Study of Ancient Coinage in Enlightenment Austria

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This paper presents a current research project, led by Bernhard Woytek at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, aiming at the publication of the scholarly correspondence of the numismatists Erasmus Frölich (1700–1758) and Joseph Khell (1714–1772). It is a follow-up project to the study of the correspondence of Khell’s student Joseph Eckhel (1737–1798), the most celebrated numismatist of the Enlightenment period. In the seventeenth century, research on ancient coinage had come to a near standstill in Austria; from the 1730s onwards, by contrast, the extraordinary activity of these three Jesuit scholars in numismatic research and teaching turned Vienna into an international centre of the discipline and led to the development of what may be termed a ‘Vienna School’ of ancient numismatics.