Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade
Christian Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger
Abstract
This book brings together an international group of leading scholars of religion to reflect in concert on the lives, works, and legacies of two of the twentieth century’s most influential historians of religions: Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. Both men taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the “Chicago School” they are thought to have forged has had enormous impact on the way religion has been studied and written about ever since. While the extent of their influence is beyond question, the scholarly world has been deeply divided not only about the value of their work but al ... More
This book brings together an international group of leading scholars of religion to reflect in concert on the lives, works, and legacies of two of the twentieth century’s most influential historians of religions: Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. Both men taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the “Chicago School” they are thought to have forged has had enormous impact on the way religion has been studied and written about ever since. While the extent of their influence is beyond question, the scholarly world has been deeply divided not only about the value of their work but also about its proper interpretation. In particular, scholars have been at odds over whether or to what extent the circumstances of their lives bear a significant relationship to their intellectual output. As this volume make clear, their perspectives on religion and their ways of articulating their understanding cannot be properly understood without reference to the circumstances of their lives, the political and cultural movements that dominated their early years in Germany and Romania, and their own idiosyncratic scholarly and personal agendas. The chapters in this volume—the proceedings of a 2006 conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of Wach’s death (2005) and the hundredth anniversary of Eliade’s birth (2007)—shed new light on a growing body of work on these two figures, the controversies they have generated, and their legacies in the scholarly study of religion.
Keywords:
Joachim Wach,
Mircea Eliade,
history of religions,
Chicago School,
University of Chicago Divinity School,
Germany,
Romania,
religion
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195394337 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2010 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195394337.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Christian Wedemeyer, editor
History of Religions, University of Chicago Divini
Author Webpage
Wendy Doniger, editor
History of Religions, University of Chicago Divini
Author Webpage
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