Mister medieval în trei acte, un interludiu şi un intermezzo liric, cu multe ilustrări din opere ... more Mister medieval în trei acte, un interludiu şi un intermezzo liric, cu multe ilustrări din opere originale
Liviu Bordaş mi-a fost student. L-am simţit, de la început, locuit de o pasiune intelectuală pe cât de intensă, pe atât de discretă. Era tăcut, retractil şi tenace. Plecat pe urmele lui Mircea Eliade, i-a refăcut traseele interioare, itineranţa geografică şi parcursul ştiinţific. Şi-a păstrat discreţia, dar şi-a consolidat competenţele şi profilul academic. Cu lucrarea de-acum, despre Nae Ionescu, m-a luat prin surprindere: e prompt, documentat la sânge, ofensiv fără patimă, exact, fără să fie apologetic. Investigaţia sa polemică aduce, cred, o notă salutară în climatul culturii autohtone, care are nevoie de dezbateri aprinse, dar oneste, de natură să tempereze spiritul partizan, excesul ideologic, idiosincrasiile private sau corectitudinea politică la modă. (Andrei PLEŞU)
Într-o cultură în care judecata critică este înlocuită de afectele dictate de apartenenţa la o partidă literară sau alta, e o bucurie să citeşti cartea unui om liber, bazată pe competenţă şi discernământ. Râsul inteligent al lui Liviu Bordaş şi lipsa de prejudecăţi intelectuale sunt, neîndoielnic, replica cea mai potrivită dată prostiei agresive şi fanatismelor de conjunctură. (Gabriel LIICEANU)
Volum premiat la concursul de debut „Ioan Petru Culianu” pe 2005.
Studiul prezinta diversele a... more Volum premiat la concursul de debut „Ioan Petru Culianu” pe 2005.
Studiul prezinta diversele aspecte ale raporturilor dintre spatiul romanesc si indepartata Indie: de la calatoriile medievale la atractia romantica pentru Orient, de la imaginea Indiei la indologie, de la situarea ambigua a romanilor intre „Orient” si „Occident” la considerarea lor ca obiect al orientalismului, in prima jumatate a secolului al XIX-lea. Pretextul cartii este boierul moldav Alecu Ghica, fugit in India catre mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea si descoperit ulterior ca „bramin” intr-unul dintre cele mai importante centre ale hinduismului.
Cuprins: Cazul „braminului” Ghica • Romanii in istoria drumului spre India • Avatarele unui aventurier: „contele” Alexandru Ghica • Istoria unei ocultari • Imaginea Indiei in cultura romana la inceputul secolului al XIX-lea • Coliba filosofului indian • La portile Orientului
Geography and encyclopaedism. Revisiting Gheorghe Lazăr:
Between 1810 and 1822... more Geography and encyclopaedism. Revisiting Gheorghe Lazăr:
Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe Lazăr (1779/82-1823) composed or compiled four geography textbooks for the use of the Romanian schools of Transylvania and Walachia: a mathematical geography (1810), a geography of Transylvania (1815), an astronomical geography (1820), and a world geography (1822), respectively. The first two were destined for publication in Transylvania, but his superior blocked all attempts. The last two were used in the St. Sava College of Bucharest, and – according to a 1822 manifesto – the world geography was being prepared for publication. Like most of Lazăr’s Nachlass, they have been lost after his death. The present article discusses all the available information about these books and attempts to identify their sources on the basis of contextual data. It also underlines Lazăr’s long lasting interest for the subject matter of geography, which has been neglected by both his biographers and the historiography of geographical studies in Romanian culture. My thesis is that it should be understood as part of Lazăr’s encyclopaedicism, another dimension of his intellectual formation and academic profile which has been neglected. The last section, which places Lazăr in the context of the geographical textbook production during his mature life and the decades following his death, shows that many other manuscript textbooks have met with the same fate: they failed to reach the printing press and – sooner or later – have been lost.
Nicola Nicolau: an Intellectual with an Unfair Posterity:
This is the fi... more Nicola Nicolau: an Intellectual with an Unfair Posterity:
This is the first in a series of three articles discussing the life and work of Nicola Nicolau (1762-1837), a Romanian merchant and scholar from the Transylvanian town of Brașov (Kronstadt, in the Habsburg Empire). Its chapters deal with Nicolau’s family and life, the books published by him, the question of their authorship, their sources, their circulation, and, finally, with Nicolau’s teaching activity. While settling, on the basis of primary sources, a number of earlier hypotheses and debates, it proposes some new hypotheses, which should be checked against further primary evidence.
In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, w... more In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, which remained unaccomplished. On the one hand, he was planning a long return trip to his homeland, which would pass through the United States. On the other hand, he considered obtaining a teaching position in an American university, the first target being Harvard. This early American project – hitherto unexplored – becomes symbolic in the perspective of Eliade’s subsequent evolution and choices. Decades later, as a professor at the University of Chicago, he turned down an invitation to occupy a chair at Harvard, which offered him far better conditions and opportunities than those in Chicago. We present here the first results of an ongoing research that tries to clarify all the details related to the young Eliade’s American project.
Ioan Petru Culianu, Mircea Eliade, and Felix culpa. Supplementa
The article discusses new unpu... more Ioan Petru Culianu, Mircea Eliade, and Felix culpa. Supplementa
The article discusses new unpublished documents which supplement those presented in the earlier articles published in this journal (the issues VIII, IX and X). Appendix 1 contains seven new pieces belonging to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mac Linscott Ricketts. In order to further contextualise them I have added a contemporary exchange between Ricketts and Joseph M. Kitagawa, along with Kitagawa’s unpublished review of Ricketts’ monograph about Mircea Eliade (appendices 3 and 5). Appendix 2 adds three new pieces to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mircea and Christinel Eliade. Again, for a better contextualisation and understanding of them, I added the exchanges of Fernand Schwarz with Mircea and Christinel Eliade (appendix 4). In most of these documents, the main topic of interest for the discussion carried on in the article is Culianu’s attitude towards the accusations of philo-Fascism and anti-Semitism brought to Mircea Eliade.
The image of India in the first books of history and geography printed in Romanian: The Universal... more The image of India in the first books of history and geography printed in Romanian: The Universal geography of Buffier (Jassy, 1795)
The article is part of a series discussing the early books of world history and geography published in Romanian. Until the end of 18th century they circulated in manuscript form and were translations of works coming from Western Europe through various language channels. As some of the translators belong to the Orthodox clergy, it is interesting to note that a great number of authors are Jesuits or students of Jesuit schools (Giovanni Botero, Claude Buffier, Claude François Xavier Millot, Joseph de La Porte, Louis Domairon, etc.). They are also mostly French, although none of the works were translated directly from the French. The first to be printed, in 1795, was a book translated and adapted from Buffier’s Géographie universelle. The first book of world history, translated from Elements d’histoire générale ancienne et moderne of Millot, was printed in 1800 (after an earlier, partial translation, had been published in 1798).
Adapted by bishop Amphilochius of Hotin as a school textbook, Buffier’s work reached various categories of readers and enjoyed wide circulation in all the territories inhabited by Romanians, which were, at that time, separated by multiple borders. In the process of translation, the image of India underwent some changes. While Buffier talked about India and the Indies, Amphilochius made all the “Indies” become “India”, thus extending its image up to Japan. One of the chapters he added as addenda to the book deals with exotic plants, half of which grow on the Indian subcontinent (among other places). Changes and interpolations attest that Amphilochius was already familiar with India, although perhaps with an outdated image of it.
By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga... more By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga, I address in this paper a question that is frequently asked about the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in fields such as the history of religions. Eliade’s interest in Yoga showcases his own personal spiritual quest, of course. But it is also informed by his earlier readings of, and reflections on, two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade, these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Eliade’s thoughts on Yoga and religion then took different paths, reaching their full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the twofold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer plays a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase in his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in terms of understanding the further developments of his ideas on history of religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.
THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (II)
ABSTRACT: The first part of this p... more THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (II)
ABSTRACT: The first part of this paper gave an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopaedic, specialised, etc.). The second part is devoted to a focused discussion of the dictionaries on religion published during the Communist era. As in the first part, three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir”, “yoga”, and “tantra”. The dictionaries discussed here offer – even more than those considered previously – ample material for a discussion of the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras. They illustrate three different theoretical paradigms of approaching religion under Socialism. While “religiology” and “general mythology” were understood as Marxist approaches to the religious phenomenon, and thus ideologically subordinated to scientific atheism, the “materialistic-scientific and humanist-revolutionary education” (a name coined in order to replace the older “scientific-atheistic education”) was conceived as a practical, pedagogical extension of scientific atheism. All of these dictionaries were published late, in the ’80s, and only one – devoted to “general mythology” – was destined for mass consumption. The reasons for which the Party ideologists considered that such dictionaries are not a desirable item of anti-religious propaganda has to be clarified by further inquiry, especially through archival research.
THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (I)
ABSTRACT: The first part of the p... more THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (I)
ABSTRACT: The first part of the paper offers an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopedic, specialized, etc.), while the second part is reserved for a special discussion of the dictionaries devoted to religion during the Communist era.
Three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir” (“fakirism”, “fakiric”, “fakiristic”, etc.), “yoga” (“yogism”, “yogistic”, “yogin” / “yogist”, etc.), and “tantra” (“tantrism”, “tantric”, “tantrist”, etc.). The timeframe covers the 20th century till the end of 1989, with incursions before (for “fakir”, etc.) and after (for “yoga”, “tantra”, etc.) this period.
The survey offers ample material for a discussion on influences between dictionaries and cases of intertextuality, as well as on the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras.
The present paper addresses a frequently-asked question concerning the problematic relation betwe... more The present paper addresses a frequently-asked question concerning the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in such fields as the History of Religions by focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), specifically on his work on Yoga. Eliade’s interest in Yoga, of course, showcases his own personal spiritual quest. But it is also informed by his earlier readings and reflections on two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga. Essais sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Subsequently, Eliade’s thought on Yoga and religion develops along different lines, reaching its full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga. Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the two-fold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer plays a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase of his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in order to understand the further developments of his ideas on History of Religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.
Mister medieval în trei acte, un interludiu şi un intermezzo liric, cu multe ilustrări din opere ... more Mister medieval în trei acte, un interludiu şi un intermezzo liric, cu multe ilustrări din opere originale
Liviu Bordaş mi-a fost student. L-am simţit, de la început, locuit de o pasiune intelectuală pe cât de intensă, pe atât de discretă. Era tăcut, retractil şi tenace. Plecat pe urmele lui Mircea Eliade, i-a refăcut traseele interioare, itineranţa geografică şi parcursul ştiinţific. Şi-a păstrat discreţia, dar şi-a consolidat competenţele şi profilul academic. Cu lucrarea de-acum, despre Nae Ionescu, m-a luat prin surprindere: e prompt, documentat la sânge, ofensiv fără patimă, exact, fără să fie apologetic. Investigaţia sa polemică aduce, cred, o notă salutară în climatul culturii autohtone, care are nevoie de dezbateri aprinse, dar oneste, de natură să tempereze spiritul partizan, excesul ideologic, idiosincrasiile private sau corectitudinea politică la modă. (Andrei PLEŞU)
Într-o cultură în care judecata critică este înlocuită de afectele dictate de apartenenţa la o partidă literară sau alta, e o bucurie să citeşti cartea unui om liber, bazată pe competenţă şi discernământ. Râsul inteligent al lui Liviu Bordaş şi lipsa de prejudecăţi intelectuale sunt, neîndoielnic, replica cea mai potrivită dată prostiei agresive şi fanatismelor de conjunctură. (Gabriel LIICEANU)
Volum premiat la concursul de debut „Ioan Petru Culianu” pe 2005.
Studiul prezinta diversele a... more Volum premiat la concursul de debut „Ioan Petru Culianu” pe 2005.
Studiul prezinta diversele aspecte ale raporturilor dintre spatiul romanesc si indepartata Indie: de la calatoriile medievale la atractia romantica pentru Orient, de la imaginea Indiei la indologie, de la situarea ambigua a romanilor intre „Orient” si „Occident” la considerarea lor ca obiect al orientalismului, in prima jumatate a secolului al XIX-lea. Pretextul cartii este boierul moldav Alecu Ghica, fugit in India catre mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea si descoperit ulterior ca „bramin” intr-unul dintre cele mai importante centre ale hinduismului.
Cuprins: Cazul „braminului” Ghica • Romanii in istoria drumului spre India • Avatarele unui aventurier: „contele” Alexandru Ghica • Istoria unei ocultari • Imaginea Indiei in cultura romana la inceputul secolului al XIX-lea • Coliba filosofului indian • La portile Orientului
Geography and encyclopaedism. Revisiting Gheorghe Lazăr:
Between 1810 and 1822... more Geography and encyclopaedism. Revisiting Gheorghe Lazăr:
Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe Lazăr (1779/82-1823) composed or compiled four geography textbooks for the use of the Romanian schools of Transylvania and Walachia: a mathematical geography (1810), a geography of Transylvania (1815), an astronomical geography (1820), and a world geography (1822), respectively. The first two were destined for publication in Transylvania, but his superior blocked all attempts. The last two were used in the St. Sava College of Bucharest, and – according to a 1822 manifesto – the world geography was being prepared for publication. Like most of Lazăr’s Nachlass, they have been lost after his death. The present article discusses all the available information about these books and attempts to identify their sources on the basis of contextual data. It also underlines Lazăr’s long lasting interest for the subject matter of geography, which has been neglected by both his biographers and the historiography of geographical studies in Romanian culture. My thesis is that it should be understood as part of Lazăr’s encyclopaedicism, another dimension of his intellectual formation and academic profile which has been neglected. The last section, which places Lazăr in the context of the geographical textbook production during his mature life and the decades following his death, shows that many other manuscript textbooks have met with the same fate: they failed to reach the printing press and – sooner or later – have been lost.
Nicola Nicolau: an Intellectual with an Unfair Posterity:
This is the fi... more Nicola Nicolau: an Intellectual with an Unfair Posterity:
This is the first in a series of three articles discussing the life and work of Nicola Nicolau (1762-1837), a Romanian merchant and scholar from the Transylvanian town of Brașov (Kronstadt, in the Habsburg Empire). Its chapters deal with Nicolau’s family and life, the books published by him, the question of their authorship, their sources, their circulation, and, finally, with Nicolau’s teaching activity. While settling, on the basis of primary sources, a number of earlier hypotheses and debates, it proposes some new hypotheses, which should be checked against further primary evidence.
In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, w... more In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, which remained unaccomplished. On the one hand, he was planning a long return trip to his homeland, which would pass through the United States. On the other hand, he considered obtaining a teaching position in an American university, the first target being Harvard. This early American project – hitherto unexplored – becomes symbolic in the perspective of Eliade’s subsequent evolution and choices. Decades later, as a professor at the University of Chicago, he turned down an invitation to occupy a chair at Harvard, which offered him far better conditions and opportunities than those in Chicago. We present here the first results of an ongoing research that tries to clarify all the details related to the young Eliade’s American project.
Ioan Petru Culianu, Mircea Eliade, and Felix culpa. Supplementa
The article discusses new unpu... more Ioan Petru Culianu, Mircea Eliade, and Felix culpa. Supplementa
The article discusses new unpublished documents which supplement those presented in the earlier articles published in this journal (the issues VIII, IX and X). Appendix 1 contains seven new pieces belonging to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mac Linscott Ricketts. In order to further contextualise them I have added a contemporary exchange between Ricketts and Joseph M. Kitagawa, along with Kitagawa’s unpublished review of Ricketts’ monograph about Mircea Eliade (appendices 3 and 5). Appendix 2 adds three new pieces to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mircea and Christinel Eliade. Again, for a better contextualisation and understanding of them, I added the exchanges of Fernand Schwarz with Mircea and Christinel Eliade (appendix 4). In most of these documents, the main topic of interest for the discussion carried on in the article is Culianu’s attitude towards the accusations of philo-Fascism and anti-Semitism brought to Mircea Eliade.
The image of India in the first books of history and geography printed in Romanian: The Universal... more The image of India in the first books of history and geography printed in Romanian: The Universal geography of Buffier (Jassy, 1795)
The article is part of a series discussing the early books of world history and geography published in Romanian. Until the end of 18th century they circulated in manuscript form and were translations of works coming from Western Europe through various language channels. As some of the translators belong to the Orthodox clergy, it is interesting to note that a great number of authors are Jesuits or students of Jesuit schools (Giovanni Botero, Claude Buffier, Claude François Xavier Millot, Joseph de La Porte, Louis Domairon, etc.). They are also mostly French, although none of the works were translated directly from the French. The first to be printed, in 1795, was a book translated and adapted from Buffier’s Géographie universelle. The first book of world history, translated from Elements d’histoire générale ancienne et moderne of Millot, was printed in 1800 (after an earlier, partial translation, had been published in 1798).
Adapted by bishop Amphilochius of Hotin as a school textbook, Buffier’s work reached various categories of readers and enjoyed wide circulation in all the territories inhabited by Romanians, which were, at that time, separated by multiple borders. In the process of translation, the image of India underwent some changes. While Buffier talked about India and the Indies, Amphilochius made all the “Indies” become “India”, thus extending its image up to Japan. One of the chapters he added as addenda to the book deals with exotic plants, half of which grow on the Indian subcontinent (among other places). Changes and interpolations attest that Amphilochius was already familiar with India, although perhaps with an outdated image of it.
By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga... more By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga, I address in this paper a question that is frequently asked about the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in fields such as the history of religions. Eliade’s interest in Yoga showcases his own personal spiritual quest, of course. But it is also informed by his earlier readings of, and reflections on, two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade, these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Eliade’s thoughts on Yoga and religion then took different paths, reaching their full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the twofold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer plays a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase in his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in terms of understanding the further developments of his ideas on history of religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.
THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (II)
ABSTRACT: The first part of this p... more THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (II)
ABSTRACT: The first part of this paper gave an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopaedic, specialised, etc.). The second part is devoted to a focused discussion of the dictionaries on religion published during the Communist era. As in the first part, three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir”, “yoga”, and “tantra”. The dictionaries discussed here offer – even more than those considered previously – ample material for a discussion of the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras. They illustrate three different theoretical paradigms of approaching religion under Socialism. While “religiology” and “general mythology” were understood as Marxist approaches to the religious phenomenon, and thus ideologically subordinated to scientific atheism, the “materialistic-scientific and humanist-revolutionary education” (a name coined in order to replace the older “scientific-atheistic education”) was conceived as a practical, pedagogical extension of scientific atheism. All of these dictionaries were published late, in the ’80s, and only one – devoted to “general mythology” – was destined for mass consumption. The reasons for which the Party ideologists considered that such dictionaries are not a desirable item of anti-religious propaganda has to be clarified by further inquiry, especially through archival research.
THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (I)
ABSTRACT: The first part of the p... more THE RECEPTION AND IMAGE OF YOGA IN ROMANIAN LEXICOGRAPHY (I)
ABSTRACT: The first part of the paper offers an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopedic, specialized, etc.), while the second part is reserved for a special discussion of the dictionaries devoted to religion during the Communist era.
Three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir” (“fakirism”, “fakiric”, “fakiristic”, etc.), “yoga” (“yogism”, “yogistic”, “yogin” / “yogist”, etc.), and “tantra” (“tantrism”, “tantric”, “tantrist”, etc.). The timeframe covers the 20th century till the end of 1989, with incursions before (for “fakir”, etc.) and after (for “yoga”, “tantra”, etc.) this period.
The survey offers ample material for a discussion on influences between dictionaries and cases of intertextuality, as well as on the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras.
The present paper addresses a frequently-asked question concerning the problematic relation betwe... more The present paper addresses a frequently-asked question concerning the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in such fields as the History of Religions by focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), specifically on his work on Yoga. Eliade’s interest in Yoga, of course, showcases his own personal spiritual quest. But it is also informed by his earlier readings and reflections on two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga. Essais sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Subsequently, Eliade’s thought on Yoga and religion develops along different lines, reaching its full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga. Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the two-fold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer plays a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase of his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in order to understand the further developments of his ideas on History of Religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.
YOGA BETWEEN THE MAGICAL AND THE MYSTICAL
- HERMENEUTICAL REFLECTION AND REL... more YOGA BETWEEN THE MAGICAL AND THE MYSTICAL - HERMENEUTICAL REFLECTION AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN THE FIRST ELIADE -
ABSTRACT: The present paper addresses a frequently-asked question concerning the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in such fields as the History of Religions by focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), specifically on his work on Yoga. Eliade’s interest in Yoga, of course, showcases his own personal spiritual quest. But it is also informed by his earlier readings and reflections on two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Subsequently, Eliade’s thought on Yoga and religion develops along different lines, reaching its full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the two-fold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer play a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase of his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in order to understand the further developments of his ideas on History of Religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.
KEYWORDS: Mircea Eliade; Rudolf Otto; Vittorio Macchioro; Ernesto Buonaiuti; Surendranath Dasgupta; Yoga; Tantra; magic; mysticism; religion; ascesis; gnosis; meditation; concentration; religious belief.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Part One: East and South Asia
1. Japan 3
Kyoko Niwa
2... more Table of Contents
Preface ix
Part One: East and South Asia
1. Japan 3
Kyoko Niwa
2. Korea 25
Kim Woo Jo
3. China 38
Tan Chung and Wei Liming
4. Vietnam 57
Do Thu Ha
5. Tibet 69
Françoise Robin
6. Thailand 84
Sawitree Charoenpong
7. Sri Lanka 98
Sandagomi Coperahewa
Part Two: Middle East and Africa
8. Arab Countries 117
Ahmad Rafeeq Awad
9. Egypt 143
Md. Badiur Rahman
10. Turkey 162
Laurent Mignon
11. Jewish Diaspora and the State of Israel 175
Alexander Cherniak and Sergei Serebriany
12. Goa, Angola and Mozambique 192
José Paz Rodriguez
Part Three: Eastern and Central Europe
13. Russia 203
Sergei Serebriany
14. Romania 236
Liviu Bordas
15. Bulgaria 263
Nikolay Nikolaev
16. Yugoslavia and its Successors 275
Ana Jelnikar
17. Latvia 296
Viktors Ivbulis
18. Poland 308
Elzbieta Walter
19. Hungary 320
Imre Bangha
20. Czechoslovakia and its Successors 333
Martin Hríbek
Part Four: Northern and Western Europe
21. Finland 359
Hannele Pohjanmies
22. Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) 374
Mirja Juntunen
23. Germany, Austria and Switzerland 389
Martin Kämpchen
24. The Netherlands and Belgium 411
Victor A. van Bijlert
25. Italy 422
Mario Prayer
26. France 448
France Bhattacharya
27. Spain and Latin America 476
Shyama Prasad Ganguly
28. Portugal and Galicia 499
José Paz Rodriguez
29. United Kingdom 509
Kalyan Kundu
Part Five: The Americas
30. Argentina 545
Paula Savon and Sonia Berjman
31. Brazil 568
José Paz Rodriguez
32. Costa Rica 577
Sol Argüello Scriba
33. Mexico 587
Xicoténcatl Martínez Ruiz
34. United States of America 593
Anna Feuer
35. Canada 610
Kathleen M. O’Connell and M. A. Serhat Unsal
Select Bibliography 631
List of Contributors and Editors 634
Index 643
E un lucru relativ bine cunoscut că, începând din anul 1945, când sosește la Paris, Eliade a înce... more E un lucru relativ bine cunoscut că, începând din anul 1945, când sosește la Paris, Eliade a încercat să fie tot mai puțin “politic”, în sensul propriu al acestui termen. Vedea angajarea politică în primul rând pe plan cultural (și spiritual, cum îi plăcea să spună pe vremuri). După anul 1956, la Chicago, și această poziționare politică prin cultură a evoluat tot mai mult către un echilibru neutral între diversele tabere politice pe care le formau românii: anticomuniștii de diferite nuanțe din exil (de la liberali la legionari), grupurile antagonice de comuniști (și colaboraționiști) din țară, sioniștii emigrați în Israel sau în alte părți ale lumii ș.a.m.d. Această poziție de principiu i-a influențat, fără voia lui, o bună parte dintre atitudinile secundare. În special după “liberalizarea” din România socialistă care a făcut ca, în septembrie 1967, numele lui să fie șters de pe lista persoanelor indezirabile, iar scrierile sale să fie din nou tipărite în mod selectiv.
Un studiu complet și detaliat asupra felului în care Eliade a interacționat sau interferat cu alți actori ai scenei politice și intelectuale românești, atât din România socialistă, cât și din emigrație, va putea fi scris abia atunci când toate sursele primare, în special cele documentare, vor fi publicate. Cum acest moment e încă ireperabil într-un viitor prea apropiat, nu e lipsit de interes să încercăm o anticipare în temeiul a ceea ce putem cunoaște deocamdată. Cei care se impun cu precădere atenției noastre sunt primii “agenți” ai celui mai persistent filon din întreaga receptare politică postbelică a lui Eliade, față de care cercetarea academică a acesteia a manifestat – oare de ce? – puțin interes.
Mircea Eliade and America before America
During his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Elia... more Mircea Eliade and America before America
During his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, which would not come to fruition. On the one hand, he planned a long return journey to his country, which would have passed through the United States. On the other hand, he considered obtaining a Professorship at an American university, the first target being Harvard University. This early American project - unexplored until now - becomes symbolic in light of Eliade’s evolution and subsequent choices. Over decades, while he was a professor at the University of Chicago, he refused an invitation to occupy a chair at Harvard, which offered him better conditions and opportunities than those in Chicago. We present here the first results of ongoing research that seeks to clarify all the details related to the young Eliade’s American project.
Memoriile Secţiei de Ştiinţe Istorice şi Arheologie a Academiei Române, 2023
THE LOST GEOGRAPHY TEXTBOOKS OF GHEORGHE LAZĂR
Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe L... more THE LOST GEOGRAPHY TEXTBOOKS OF GHEORGHE LAZĂR
Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe Lazăr (1779/82-1823) composed or compiled four geography textbooks for the use of the Romanian schools of Transylvania and Walachia: a mathematical geography (1810), a geography of Transylvania (1815), an astronomical geography (1820), and a world geography (1822), respectively. The first two were destined for publication in Transylvania, but his superior blocked all attempts. The last two were used in the St. Sava College of Bucharest, and – according to a 1822 manifesto – the world geography was being prepared for publication. Like most of Lazăr’s Nachlass, they have been lost after his death. The present article discusses all the available information about these books and attempts to identify their sources on the basis of contextual data. It also underlines Lazăr’s long lasting interest for the subject matter of geography, which has been neglected by both his biographers and the historiography of geographical studies in Romanian culture. My thesis is that it should be understood as part of Lazăr’s encyclopaedicism, another dimension of his intellectual formation and academic profile which has been neglected. The last section, which places Lazăr in the context of the geographical textbook production during his mature life and the decades following his death, shows that many other manuscript textbooks have met with the same fate: they failed to reach the printing press and – sooner or later – have been lost.
A lost manuscript book. The world geography copied by Sava Popovici from Rășinari (1785): ... more A lost manuscript book. The world geography copied by Sava Popovici from Rășinari (1785):
The paper discusses a manuscript book – known in a copy made by the priest Sava Popovici (1735-1808) from Rășinari in the year 1785 –, which was described in 1912 and 1915. Its trace was completely lost afterwards and it attracted attention only once, in a marginal way. Our research has led to the identification of the original – a Russian introductory book for the students of the Saint Petersburg academic gymnasium – and to a plausible proposal for its anonymous author: the Prussian astronomer Christian Nicolaus von Winsheim (1694-1751), who was teaching after the famous schoolbook of Johann Hübner. We are also proposing the most probable author of the translation: the schoolmaster Radu Duma (174?-1791) from Brașov. Its final sections discuss the image of India as described in its chapter on Asia and, respectively, its probable use as a textbook in a number of schools from the South-Eastern part of Transylvania: Brașov, Rășinari, and Sibiu.
Mircea Eliade’s Interwar American Project:
In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliad... more Mircea Eliade’s Interwar American Project:
In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, which remained unaccomplished. On the one hand, he was planning a long return trip to his homeland, which would pass through the United States. On the other hand, he considered obtaining a teaching position in an American university, the first target being Harvard. This early American project – hitherto unexplored – becomes symbolic in the perspective of Eliade’s subsequent evolution and choices. Decades later, as a professor at the University of Chicago, he turned down an invitation to occupy a chair at Harvard, which offered him far better conditions and opportunities than those in Chicago. We present here the first results of an ongoing research that tries to clarify all the details related to the young Eliade’s American project.
The article is an introduction to the text of Mac Linscott Ricketts’s research interviews with Mi... more The article is an introduction to the text of Mac Linscott Ricketts’s research interviews with Mircea Eliade, between 1981 and 1984 (with a supplementary conversation with Christinel Eliade dating from 1986). The editor’s note is preceded by an overview of the corpus of Eliade’s interviews and followed by a gloss on two of the less discussed radical criticisms of Eliade during the years 1985–1994, whose authors are referred to in the text of the interviews. In conclusion, it argues that the possibility of such diametrically opposed constructions of a “hidden” Eliade calls for a contextual examination of all the “reconstructions” which claim either to denounce or to annex him.
The four research interviews with Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) were taken by Mac Linscott Ricketts (... more The four research interviews with Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) were taken by Mac Linscott Ricketts (1930–2022), who embarked on the project of writing a massive monograph on the Romanian period (1907–1945) of his former professor’s life and work. For this purpose, he conducted research in Eliade’s own archive in Chicago and travelled to Bucharest to consult the pre-World War II publications. Taken between 1981 and 1984, the interviews aim to clarify less known or contentious aspects of Eliade’s biography and intellectual formation. A fifth interview, planned for 1986, was outrun by the sudden death of the great historian of religions. Ricketts replaced it with a short conversation with his wife, Chistinel. The manuscript of the interviews preserved in Ricketts’s personal archive, now in the library of the New Europe College in Bucharest, was retrieved by Liviu Bordaș, who edited and enriched it with explanatory notes.
Anuarul Institutului de Istorie “A. D. Xenopol”, Iași, 2022
Dora d’Istria and the question of the origin of Ghica family --------------------
The article ... more Dora d’Istria and the question of the origin of Ghica family --------------------
The article addresses the issue of the origin of the founder of the princely family Ghica, which provided ten rulers of the Romanian Principalities (between 1658 and 1858) and a plethora of political, cultural and academic figures. Gheorghe Ghica (ante 1598-1667) came to Moldavia from Constantinople sometime before 1634. In a chronicle written by one of his contemporaries and in several others that followed he is called "Arbănaș" (Albanian). Therefore he was considered Albanian in every sense of the word, including the ethnic one, until later historians questioned the way in which the term was employed in the 17th century. Arguing that it indicated a geographic, regional, not an ethnic identity, some of them have offered circumstantial evidence that Gheorghe Ghica could have been Aromanian.
In a book published between 1871 and 1873, a member of the family who was living in Italy, Elena Ghica (Dora d’Istria, 1828-1888), used the historical tradition regarding the Albanian origin of the first Ghica in order to present the entire family as "the Albanians of Romania" (on the model of the Arbëreshë, the Italo-Albanians), despite the fact that none of his descendants are known to have identified themselves as Albanian (or to speak Albanian, for that matter). This was not only a scholarly project, but also one with personal, very subjective, motivations. Some of these were related to her changed feelings, after 1858, towards the Romanian political class (represented mainly by competing aristocratic families), while others were directly determined by her public advocacy for the political rights of the Albanian people, whose cause she embraced in the early 1860s. Following her book, the Ghica family and especially herself were annexed by the patriotic Albanian literature and remained in the Albanian historiography even after the end of the romantic-nationalist era.
Discussing the primary sources (and their later use), the article concludes that there is no direct evidence regarding the ethnicity of the first Ghica, while the circumstantial evidence gives more support to the Aromanian than to the Albanian hypothesis.
Mircea Eliade’s interviews. Documentary contributions (II)
This is the second instalment in a ... more Mircea Eliade’s interviews. Documentary contributions (II)
This is the second instalment in a series which aims to retrieve the unpublished interviews of Mircea Eliade in preparation for a future corpus of his “oral lore”. Here the first three interviews at Radio Free Europe, in 1967 and 1968, are presented and edited. The first is actually a round table organised by Mihai Cismărescu, with four more participants, on the occasion of Eliade’s 60th birthday. The other two are conversations with Monica Lovinescu which – for unknown reasons – were not included in the book of radio talks which she published in 1992. The interviews were transcribed and edited on the basis of the audio recordings retrieved from two different archives. The introductory article attempts to reconstruct their context – making use of entries from Eliade’s unpublished journal – and discusses the post-war political context which influenced Eliade’s own policy of public exposure.
Echoes of Johann Hübner’s geography textbook in Romanian culture: ... more Echoes of Johann Hübner’s geography textbook in Romanian culture: The paper discusses the reception of Johann Hübner’s popular textbook of geography (first edition, 1693) in the Romanian culture of the 18th century. Its main influence was exerted through a Latin adaptation used in the Jesuit universities of the Habsburg empire, Geographica globi terraquei synopsis (various editions from 1720 to 1755). The history of this book, its sources and its use as liber gradualis are discussed here for the first time. The question of the translator-cum-compiler remains open to research, but the most probable candidate is the professor associated with its first publication, Franz Gross. Its chapter on Moldavia is here identified as the source of one of the addenda to the first handbook of geography printed in Romanian. Published in 1795, De obște gheográfie concluded a tradition of manuscript textbooks, to which it belonged itself for about two decades. Geographica globi terraquei synopsis could have been also used in other chapters of the book – a theme for further research. The fact that De obște gheográfie is based on the work of another Jesuit, Claude Buffier, might not be a coincidence. Its compiler, the Orthodox bishop (en titre) Amphilochius of Hotin, who travelled – and, supposedly, studied – in Italy, could have been in contact with the milieus of the Societas Jesu: Jesuits from Russia, former Jesuits or students of Jesuit schools. This possibility is proposed as another theme for future research.
Emisiune dedicată unei discuții asupra editării și recuperării lui Eliade în România post-comunis... more Emisiune dedicată unei discuții asupra editării și recuperării lui Eliade în România post-comunistă, avându-i ca invitați pe prof. Sorin Alexandrescu și pe Liviu Bordaș.
2nd HEMSEE workshop, “Life Writing and History Writing in Early Modern Southeast Europe, 15th-18th Centuries”, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies, Vienna, 30 September - 1st October, 2021
« L’Inde, ce non-moi mien des penseurs et des écrivains européens », Centre d’études HETEROTOPOS en partenariat avec CEREFREA, Université de Bucarest, 12-13 octobre, 2017
“Hinduism in Europe”. International Conference at Stockholm University, Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender studies, 26-28 April, 2017
“Constructions of Mysticism. Inventions and Interactions Across the Borders”, Conference of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”, Universität Münster, 5-8 December, 2013
By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga... more By focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), and specifically on his work on Yoga, I address in this paper a question that is frequently asked about the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in fields such as the history of religions. Eliade’s interest in Yoga showcases his own personal spiritual quest, of course. But it is also informed by his earlier readings of, and reflections on, two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade, these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Eliade’s thoughts on Yoga and religion then took different paths, reaching their full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the twofold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer plays a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase in his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in terms of understanding the further developments of his ideas on history of religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.
International conference “G. Ivănescu - 100 years from his birth”, Faculty of Letters, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University & “A. Philippide” Institute of Romanian Philology, Romanian Academy, Iaşi, 1-2 November, 2012
Conference "Dora d'Istria, the Balcans and the Orient", Romanian Academy of Sciences, Institute of South-East European Studies, Bucharest, 26 September, 2012
International Conference, ””Rabindranath Tagore - His Writings and Art beyond Bengal””, Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Indo-European Studies, Budapest, 19-20 March, 2012
Conference "Continuity and discontinuity in East-West relationships", Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, Romanian Academy, Târgu-Mureş, 25-26 May, 2007
British Comparative Literature Association Workshop Conference "Literature Travels: Literature and Cross-Cultural Exchange", University of Wolverhampton, Telford Campus (U.K.), 12-14 September, 2005
Mircea Eliade şi “tradiţionalismul”.
Bibliografie cronologică
Am reţinut aici numai scrierile ca... more Mircea Eliade şi “tradiţionalismul”. Bibliografie cronologică
Am reţinut aici numai scrierile care se ocupă în mod direct de tema bibliografiei, indiferent de perspectiva sau calitatea lor. Nu am inclus recenziile cărţilor (numeroase mai ales în cazurile lui D. Dubuisson, S.M. Wasserstrom şi M.J. Sedgwick), care nu aduc contribuţii la cunoaşterea chestiunii, deşi adesea ele reprezintă poziţii interesante pentru istoria intelectuală. Am acordat însă atenţie republicărilor şi traducerilor, căci ele arată – în alt fel decât recenziile – răspândirea şi posibila influenţă a respectivelor scrieri.
The article addresses the recent growth in interest for the Transylvanian adventurer and amateur ... more The article addresses the recent growth in interest for the Transylvanian adventurer and amateur scientist Johann Martin Honigberger (1795-1869). He has come into the focus of both historians and Indologists dealing with XIXth century India as well as of those interested in the hermeneutics of Mircea Eliade's novel The Secret of Dr. Honigberger. The occasion is offered by the publication of the Romanian translation of Honigberger's travelbook: Thirty-Five Years in the East. Foreword by Arion Rosu. Edition, Introduction, notes and Postface by Eugen Ciurtin. Translation by Eugen Ciurtin, Ciprian Lupu and Ana Lupascu, Polirom, Bucharest-Jassy, 2004. Emphasizing the importance and interest of such a translation into Romanian together with a commentary on Honigberger's activity and writings, the article criticizes the poor quality of the work done by the editorial team. The edition falls short of being a scholarly contribution to Asian studies and to their historiography in Romania. Neither does the postface, in which a detailed Indological reading of Eliade's novel is attempted, provide a more convincing approach.
Under this title the author studies the penetration and spreading of theosophic ideas in Romania,... more Under this title the author studies the penetration and spreading of theosophic ideas in Romania, as well as the role played in this respect by journalist D. Stoica.
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Books
Notă asupra ediției ................................................................... 5
I. Prieteni și cunoscuți interbelici
Ionel Jianu .................................................................................. 11
Mircea Lungu ............................................................................ 61
Mihail Rinea ............................................................................... 71
Peretz Reiter ............................................................................. 79
Sergiu Dan ................................................................................. 83
Nicu Steinhardt ........................................................................ 93
Miron Grindea ......................................................................... 121
Edgar Papu .............................................................................. 127
Beno Sebastian ...................................................................... 133
Lucian Boz ................................................................................ 141
Berthe Dominic ....................................................................... 149
II. Elevi și discipoli postbelici
Marcel Leibovici ...................................................................... 155
Nicolae Morcovescu .............................................................. 189
Anton Zigmund-Cerbu .......................................................... 237
Arion Roșu ................................................................................. 263
Adriana Berger ......................................................................... 295
Abrevieri ..................................................................................... 409
Liviu Bordaş mi-a fost student. L-am simţit, de la început, locuit de o pasiune intelectuală pe cât de intensă, pe atât de discretă. Era tăcut, retractil şi tenace. Plecat pe urmele lui Mircea Eliade, i-a refăcut traseele interioare, itineranţa geografică şi parcursul ştiinţific. Şi-a păstrat discreţia, dar şi-a consolidat competenţele şi profilul academic. Cu lucrarea de-acum, despre Nae Ionescu, m-a luat prin surprindere: e prompt, documentat la sânge, ofensiv fără patimă, exact, fără să fie apologetic. Investigaţia sa polemică aduce, cred, o notă salutară în climatul culturii autohtone, care are nevoie de dezbateri aprinse, dar oneste, de natură să tempereze spiritul partizan, excesul ideologic, idiosincrasiile private sau corectitudinea politică la modă. (Andrei PLEŞU)
Într-o cultură în care judecata critică este înlocuită de afectele dictate de apartenenţa la o partidă literară sau alta, e o bucurie să citeşti cartea unui om liber, bazată pe competenţă şi discernământ. Râsul inteligent al lui Liviu Bordaş şi lipsa de prejudecăţi intelectuale sunt, neîndoielnic, replica cea mai potrivită dată prostiei agresive şi fanatismelor de conjunctură. (Gabriel LIICEANU)
Studiul prezinta diversele aspecte ale raporturilor dintre spatiul romanesc si indepartata Indie: de la calatoriile medievale la atractia romantica pentru Orient, de la imaginea Indiei la indologie, de la situarea ambigua a romanilor intre „Orient” si „Occident” la considerarea lor ca obiect al orientalismului, in prima jumatate a secolului al XIX-lea. Pretextul cartii este boierul moldav Alecu Ghica, fugit in India catre mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea si descoperit ulterior ca „bramin” intr-unul dintre cele mai importante centre ale hinduismului.
Cuprins: Cazul „braminului” Ghica • Romanii in istoria drumului spre India • Avatarele unui aventurier: „contele” Alexandru Ghica • Istoria unei ocultari • Imaginea Indiei in cultura romana la inceputul secolului al XIX-lea • Coliba filosofului indian • La portile Orientului
Book chapters
Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe Lazăr (1779/82-1823) composed or compiled four geography textbooks for the use of the Romanian schools of Transylvania and Walachia: a mathematical geography (1810), a geography of Transylvania (1815), an astronomical geography (1820), and a world geography (1822), respectively. The first two were destined for publication in Transylvania, but his superior blocked all attempts. The last two were used in the St. Sava College of Bucharest, and – according to a 1822 manifesto – the world geography was being prepared for publication. Like most of Lazăr’s Nachlass, they have been lost after his death. The present article discusses all the available information about these books and attempts to identify their sources on the basis of contextual data. It also underlines Lazăr’s long lasting interest for the subject matter of geography, which has been neglected by both his biographers and the historiography of geographical studies in Romanian culture. My thesis is that it should be understood as part of Lazăr’s encyclopaedicism, another dimension of his intellectual formation and academic profile which has been neglected. The last section, which places Lazăr in the context of the geographical textbook production during his mature life and the decades following his death, shows that many other manuscript textbooks have met with the same fate: they failed to reach the printing press and – sooner or later – have been lost.
This is the first in a series of three articles discussing the life and work of Nicola Nicolau (1762-1837), a Romanian merchant and scholar from the Transylvanian town of Brașov (Kronstadt, in the Habsburg Empire). Its chapters deal with Nicolau’s family and life, the books published by him, the question of their authorship, their sources, their circulation, and, finally, with Nicolau’s teaching activity. While settling, on the basis of primary sources, a number of earlier hypotheses and debates, it proposes some new hypotheses, which should be checked against further primary evidence.
The article discusses new unpublished documents which supplement those presented in the earlier articles published in this journal (the issues VIII, IX and X). Appendix 1 contains seven new pieces belonging to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mac Linscott Ricketts. In order to further contextualise them I have added a contemporary exchange between Ricketts and Joseph M. Kitagawa, along with Kitagawa’s unpublished review of Ricketts’ monograph about Mircea Eliade (appendices 3 and 5). Appendix 2 adds three new pieces to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mircea and Christinel Eliade. Again, for a better contextualisation and understanding of them, I added the exchanges of Fernand Schwarz with Mircea and Christinel Eliade (appendix 4). In most of these documents, the main topic of interest for the discussion carried on in the article is Culianu’s attitude towards the accusations of philo-Fascism and anti-Semitism brought to Mircea Eliade.
The article is part of a series discussing the early books of world history and geography published in Romanian. Until the end of 18th century they circulated in manuscript form and were translations of works coming from Western Europe through various language channels. As some of the translators belong to the Orthodox clergy, it is interesting to note that a great number of authors are Jesuits or students of Jesuit schools (Giovanni Botero, Claude Buffier, Claude François Xavier Millot, Joseph de La Porte, Louis Domairon, etc.). They are also mostly French, although none of the works were translated directly from the French. The first to be printed, in 1795, was a book translated and adapted from Buffier’s Géographie universelle. The first book of world history, translated from Elements d’histoire générale ancienne et moderne of Millot, was printed in 1800 (after an earlier, partial translation, had been published in 1798).
Adapted by bishop Amphilochius of Hotin as a school textbook, Buffier’s work reached various categories of readers and enjoyed wide circulation in all the territories inhabited by Romanians, which were, at that time, separated by multiple borders. In the process of translation, the image of India underwent some changes. While Buffier talked about India and the Indies, Amphilochius made all the “Indies” become “India”, thus extending its image up to Japan. One of the chapters he added as addenda to the book deals with exotic plants, half of which grow on the Indian subcontinent (among other places). Changes and interpolations attest that Amphilochius was already familiar with India, although perhaps with an outdated image of it.
ABSTRACT: The first part of this paper gave an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopaedic, specialised, etc.). The second part is devoted to a focused discussion of the dictionaries on religion published during the Communist era.
As in the first part, three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir”, “yoga”, and “tantra”. The dictionaries discussed here offer – even more than those considered previously – ample material for a discussion of the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras. They illustrate three different theoretical paradigms of approaching religion under Socialism. While “religiology” and “general mythology” were understood as Marxist approaches to the religious phenomenon, and thus ideologically subordinated to scientific atheism, the “materialistic-scientific and humanist-revolutionary education” (a name coined in order to replace the older “scientific-atheistic education”) was conceived as a practical, pedagogical extension of scientific atheism. All of these dictionaries were published late, in the ’80s, and only one – devoted to “general mythology” – was destined for mass consumption. The reasons for which the Party ideologists considered that such dictionaries are not a desirable item of anti-religious propaganda has to be clarified by further inquiry, especially through archival research.
KEYWORDS: Romania, lexicography, religion, scientific atheism, fakir, fakirism, yoga, yogism, tantra, tantrism, mysticism, spirituality, religiology, mythology, atheistic education, Communism, Mircea Eliade, Transcendental Meditation
ABSTRACT: The first part of the paper offers an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopedic, specialized, etc.), while the second part is reserved for a special discussion of the dictionaries devoted to religion during the Communist era.
Three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir” (“fakirism”, “fakiric”, “fakiristic”, etc.), “yoga” (“yogism”, “yogistic”, “yogin” / “yogist”, etc.), and “tantra” (“tantrism”, “tantric”, “tantrist”, etc.). The timeframe covers the 20th century till the end of 1989, with incursions before (for “fakir”, etc.) and after (for “yoga”, “tantra”, etc.) this period.
The survey offers ample material for a discussion on influences between dictionaries and cases of intertextuality, as well as on the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras.
KEYWORDS: Romania, lexicography, neology, indology, fakir, fakirism, yoga, yogism, tantra, tantrism, hypnosis, suggestion, mysticism, Communism, Post-Communism, Mircea Eliade, Transcendental Meditation
Notă asupra ediției ................................................................... 5
I. Prieteni și cunoscuți interbelici
Ionel Jianu .................................................................................. 11
Mircea Lungu ............................................................................ 61
Mihail Rinea ............................................................................... 71
Peretz Reiter ............................................................................. 79
Sergiu Dan ................................................................................. 83
Nicu Steinhardt ........................................................................ 93
Miron Grindea ......................................................................... 121
Edgar Papu .............................................................................. 127
Beno Sebastian ...................................................................... 133
Lucian Boz ................................................................................ 141
Berthe Dominic ....................................................................... 149
II. Elevi și discipoli postbelici
Marcel Leibovici ...................................................................... 155
Nicolae Morcovescu .............................................................. 189
Anton Zigmund-Cerbu .......................................................... 237
Arion Roșu ................................................................................. 263
Adriana Berger ......................................................................... 295
Abrevieri ..................................................................................... 409
Liviu Bordaş mi-a fost student. L-am simţit, de la început, locuit de o pasiune intelectuală pe cât de intensă, pe atât de discretă. Era tăcut, retractil şi tenace. Plecat pe urmele lui Mircea Eliade, i-a refăcut traseele interioare, itineranţa geografică şi parcursul ştiinţific. Şi-a păstrat discreţia, dar şi-a consolidat competenţele şi profilul academic. Cu lucrarea de-acum, despre Nae Ionescu, m-a luat prin surprindere: e prompt, documentat la sânge, ofensiv fără patimă, exact, fără să fie apologetic. Investigaţia sa polemică aduce, cred, o notă salutară în climatul culturii autohtone, care are nevoie de dezbateri aprinse, dar oneste, de natură să tempereze spiritul partizan, excesul ideologic, idiosincrasiile private sau corectitudinea politică la modă. (Andrei PLEŞU)
Într-o cultură în care judecata critică este înlocuită de afectele dictate de apartenenţa la o partidă literară sau alta, e o bucurie să citeşti cartea unui om liber, bazată pe competenţă şi discernământ. Râsul inteligent al lui Liviu Bordaş şi lipsa de prejudecăţi intelectuale sunt, neîndoielnic, replica cea mai potrivită dată prostiei agresive şi fanatismelor de conjunctură. (Gabriel LIICEANU)
Studiul prezinta diversele aspecte ale raporturilor dintre spatiul romanesc si indepartata Indie: de la calatoriile medievale la atractia romantica pentru Orient, de la imaginea Indiei la indologie, de la situarea ambigua a romanilor intre „Orient” si „Occident” la considerarea lor ca obiect al orientalismului, in prima jumatate a secolului al XIX-lea. Pretextul cartii este boierul moldav Alecu Ghica, fugit in India catre mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea si descoperit ulterior ca „bramin” intr-unul dintre cele mai importante centre ale hinduismului.
Cuprins: Cazul „braminului” Ghica • Romanii in istoria drumului spre India • Avatarele unui aventurier: „contele” Alexandru Ghica • Istoria unei ocultari • Imaginea Indiei in cultura romana la inceputul secolului al XIX-lea • Coliba filosofului indian • La portile Orientului
Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe Lazăr (1779/82-1823) composed or compiled four geography textbooks for the use of the Romanian schools of Transylvania and Walachia: a mathematical geography (1810), a geography of Transylvania (1815), an astronomical geography (1820), and a world geography (1822), respectively. The first two were destined for publication in Transylvania, but his superior blocked all attempts. The last two were used in the St. Sava College of Bucharest, and – according to a 1822 manifesto – the world geography was being prepared for publication. Like most of Lazăr’s Nachlass, they have been lost after his death. The present article discusses all the available information about these books and attempts to identify their sources on the basis of contextual data. It also underlines Lazăr’s long lasting interest for the subject matter of geography, which has been neglected by both his biographers and the historiography of geographical studies in Romanian culture. My thesis is that it should be understood as part of Lazăr’s encyclopaedicism, another dimension of his intellectual formation and academic profile which has been neglected. The last section, which places Lazăr in the context of the geographical textbook production during his mature life and the decades following his death, shows that many other manuscript textbooks have met with the same fate: they failed to reach the printing press and – sooner or later – have been lost.
This is the first in a series of three articles discussing the life and work of Nicola Nicolau (1762-1837), a Romanian merchant and scholar from the Transylvanian town of Brașov (Kronstadt, in the Habsburg Empire). Its chapters deal with Nicolau’s family and life, the books published by him, the question of their authorship, their sources, their circulation, and, finally, with Nicolau’s teaching activity. While settling, on the basis of primary sources, a number of earlier hypotheses and debates, it proposes some new hypotheses, which should be checked against further primary evidence.
The article discusses new unpublished documents which supplement those presented in the earlier articles published in this journal (the issues VIII, IX and X). Appendix 1 contains seven new pieces belonging to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mac Linscott Ricketts. In order to further contextualise them I have added a contemporary exchange between Ricketts and Joseph M. Kitagawa, along with Kitagawa’s unpublished review of Ricketts’ monograph about Mircea Eliade (appendices 3 and 5). Appendix 2 adds three new pieces to the correspondence of I.P. Culianu with Mircea and Christinel Eliade. Again, for a better contextualisation and understanding of them, I added the exchanges of Fernand Schwarz with Mircea and Christinel Eliade (appendix 4). In most of these documents, the main topic of interest for the discussion carried on in the article is Culianu’s attitude towards the accusations of philo-Fascism and anti-Semitism brought to Mircea Eliade.
The article is part of a series discussing the early books of world history and geography published in Romanian. Until the end of 18th century they circulated in manuscript form and were translations of works coming from Western Europe through various language channels. As some of the translators belong to the Orthodox clergy, it is interesting to note that a great number of authors are Jesuits or students of Jesuit schools (Giovanni Botero, Claude Buffier, Claude François Xavier Millot, Joseph de La Porte, Louis Domairon, etc.). They are also mostly French, although none of the works were translated directly from the French. The first to be printed, in 1795, was a book translated and adapted from Buffier’s Géographie universelle. The first book of world history, translated from Elements d’histoire générale ancienne et moderne of Millot, was printed in 1800 (after an earlier, partial translation, had been published in 1798).
Adapted by bishop Amphilochius of Hotin as a school textbook, Buffier’s work reached various categories of readers and enjoyed wide circulation in all the territories inhabited by Romanians, which were, at that time, separated by multiple borders. In the process of translation, the image of India underwent some changes. While Buffier talked about India and the Indies, Amphilochius made all the “Indies” become “India”, thus extending its image up to Japan. One of the chapters he added as addenda to the book deals with exotic plants, half of which grow on the Indian subcontinent (among other places). Changes and interpolations attest that Amphilochius was already familiar with India, although perhaps with an outdated image of it.
ABSTRACT: The first part of this paper gave an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopaedic, specialised, etc.). The second part is devoted to a focused discussion of the dictionaries on religion published during the Communist era.
As in the first part, three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir”, “yoga”, and “tantra”. The dictionaries discussed here offer – even more than those considered previously – ample material for a discussion of the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras. They illustrate three different theoretical paradigms of approaching religion under Socialism. While “religiology” and “general mythology” were understood as Marxist approaches to the religious phenomenon, and thus ideologically subordinated to scientific atheism, the “materialistic-scientific and humanist-revolutionary education” (a name coined in order to replace the older “scientific-atheistic education”) was conceived as a practical, pedagogical extension of scientific atheism. All of these dictionaries were published late, in the ’80s, and only one – devoted to “general mythology” – was destined for mass consumption. The reasons for which the Party ideologists considered that such dictionaries are not a desirable item of anti-religious propaganda has to be clarified by further inquiry, especially through archival research.
KEYWORDS: Romania, lexicography, religion, scientific atheism, fakir, fakirism, yoga, yogism, tantra, tantrism, mysticism, spirituality, religiology, mythology, atheistic education, Communism, Mircea Eliade, Transcendental Meditation
ABSTRACT: The first part of the paper offers an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopedic, specialized, etc.), while the second part is reserved for a special discussion of the dictionaries devoted to religion during the Communist era.
Three words, with their derivates, have been taken into consideration: “fakir” (“fakirism”, “fakiric”, “fakiristic”, etc.), “yoga” (“yogism”, “yogistic”, “yogin” / “yogist”, etc.), and “tantra” (“tantrism”, “tantric”, “tantrist”, etc.). The timeframe covers the 20th century till the end of 1989, with incursions before (for “fakir”, etc.) and after (for “yoga”, “tantra”, etc.) this period.
The survey offers ample material for a discussion on influences between dictionaries and cases of intertextuality, as well as on the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras.
KEYWORDS: Romania, lexicography, neology, indology, fakir, fakirism, yoga, yogism, tantra, tantrism, hypnosis, suggestion, mysticism, Communism, Post-Communism, Mircea Eliade, Transcendental Meditation
- HERMENEUTICAL REFLECTION AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
IN THE FIRST ELIADE -
ABSTRACT: The present paper addresses a frequently-asked question concerning the problematic relation between personal belief and scholarship in such fields as the History of Religions by focusing on Eliade’s early life and writings (1921–1936), specifically on his work on Yoga. Eliade’s interest in Yoga, of course, showcases his own personal spiritual quest. But it is also informed by his earlier readings and reflections on two polar aspects of the religious experience: the magical and the mystical. For Eliade these two categories provide not only a key to unlocking the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of Yoga, but also the impetus for charting a systematic theory of religion. The last major expression of these early ideas can be seen in Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne (1936). Subsequently, Eliade’s thought on Yoga and religion develops along different lines, reaching its full expression in works published in Paris after 1945. In his later books on Yoga – Techniques du Yoga (1948), Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté (1954) – the two-fold schema of the magical and the mystical no longer play a key hermeneutical role. Nonetheless, understanding this early phase of his work is crucial if we are to provide a comprehensive account of the development of his thought on Yoga. This early phase of his scholarly career and experiential transformation, marked by his trip to India, is also very important in order to understand the further developments of his ideas on History of Religions, as well as to evince the ground on which Eliade built his own – never confessed – private religious belief.
KEYWORDS: Mircea Eliade; Rudolf Otto; Vittorio Macchioro; Ernesto Buonaiuti; Surendranath Dasgupta; Yoga; Tantra; magic; mysticism; religion; ascesis; gnosis; meditation; concentration; religious belief.
Preface ix
Part One: East and South Asia
1. Japan 3
Kyoko Niwa
2. Korea 25
Kim Woo Jo
3. China 38
Tan Chung and Wei Liming
4. Vietnam 57
Do Thu Ha
5. Tibet 69
Françoise Robin
6. Thailand 84
Sawitree Charoenpong
7. Sri Lanka 98
Sandagomi Coperahewa
Part Two: Middle East and Africa
8. Arab Countries 117
Ahmad Rafeeq Awad
9. Egypt 143
Md. Badiur Rahman
10. Turkey 162
Laurent Mignon
11. Jewish Diaspora and the State of Israel 175
Alexander Cherniak and Sergei Serebriany
12. Goa, Angola and Mozambique 192
José Paz Rodriguez
Part Three: Eastern and Central Europe
13. Russia 203
Sergei Serebriany
14. Romania 236
Liviu Bordas
15. Bulgaria 263
Nikolay Nikolaev
16. Yugoslavia and its Successors 275
Ana Jelnikar
17. Latvia 296
Viktors Ivbulis
18. Poland 308
Elzbieta Walter
19. Hungary 320
Imre Bangha
20. Czechoslovakia and its Successors 333
Martin Hríbek
Part Four: Northern and Western Europe
21. Finland 359
Hannele Pohjanmies
22. Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) 374
Mirja Juntunen
23. Germany, Austria and Switzerland 389
Martin Kämpchen
24. The Netherlands and Belgium 411
Victor A. van Bijlert
25. Italy 422
Mario Prayer
26. France 448
France Bhattacharya
27. Spain and Latin America 476
Shyama Prasad Ganguly
28. Portugal and Galicia 499
José Paz Rodriguez
29. United Kingdom 509
Kalyan Kundu
Part Five: The Americas
30. Argentina 545
Paula Savon and Sonia Berjman
31. Brazil 568
José Paz Rodriguez
32. Costa Rica 577
Sol Argüello Scriba
33. Mexico 587
Xicoténcatl Martínez Ruiz
34. United States of America 593
Anna Feuer
35. Canada 610
Kathleen M. O’Connell and M. A. Serhat Unsal
Select Bibliography 631
List of Contributors and Editors 634
Index 643
Un studiu complet și detaliat asupra felului în care Eliade a interacționat sau interferat cu alți actori ai scenei politice și intelectuale românești, atât din România socialistă, cât și din emigrație, va putea fi scris abia atunci când toate sursele primare, în special cele documentare, vor fi publicate. Cum acest moment e încă ireperabil într-un viitor prea apropiat, nu e lipsit de interes să încercăm o anticipare în temeiul a ceea ce putem cunoaște deocamdată. Cei care se impun cu precădere atenției noastre sunt primii “agenți” ai celui mai persistent filon din întreaga receptare politică postbelică a lui Eliade, față de care cercetarea academică a acesteia a manifestat – oare de ce? – puțin interes.
During his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, which would not come to fruition. On the one hand, he planned a long return journey to his country, which would have passed through the United States. On the other hand, he considered obtaining a Professorship at an American university, the first target being Harvard University.
This early American project - unexplored until now - becomes symbolic in light of Eliade’s evolution and subsequent choices. Over decades, while he was a professor at the University of Chicago, he refused an invitation to occupy a chair at Harvard, which offered him better conditions and opportunities than those in Chicago.
We present here the first results of ongoing research that seeks to clarify all the details related to the young Eliade’s American project.
Between 1810 and 1822, Gheorghe Lazăr (1779/82-1823) composed or compiled four geography textbooks for the use of the Romanian schools of Transylvania and Walachia: a mathematical geography (1810), a geography of Transylvania (1815), an astronomical geography (1820), and a world geography (1822), respectively. The first two were destined for publication in Transylvania, but his superior blocked all attempts. The last two were used in the St. Sava College of Bucharest, and – according to a 1822 manifesto – the world geography was being prepared for publication. Like most of Lazăr’s Nachlass, they have been lost after his death. The present article discusses all the available information about these books and attempts to identify their sources on the basis of contextual data. It also underlines Lazăr’s long lasting interest for the subject matter of geography, which has been neglected by both his biographers and the historiography of geographical studies in Romanian culture. My thesis is that it should be understood as part of Lazăr’s encyclopaedicism, another dimension of his intellectual formation and academic profile which has been neglected. The last section, which places Lazăr in the context of the geographical textbook production during his mature life and the decades following his death, shows that many other manuscript textbooks have met with the same fate: they failed to reach the printing press and – sooner or later – have been lost.
The paper discusses a manuscript book – known in a copy made by the priest Sava Popovici (1735-1808) from Rășinari in the year 1785 –, which was described in 1912 and 1915. Its trace was completely lost afterwards and it attracted attention only once, in a marginal way. Our research has led to the identification of the original – a Russian introductory book for the students of the Saint Petersburg academic gymnasium – and to a plausible proposal for its anonymous author: the Prussian astronomer Christian Nicolaus von Winsheim (1694-1751), who was teaching after the famous schoolbook of Johann Hübner. We are also proposing the most probable author of the translation: the schoolmaster Radu Duma (174?-1791) from Brașov. Its final sections discuss the image of India as described in its chapter on Asia and, respectively, its probable use as a textbook in a number of schools from the South-Eastern part of Transylvania: Brașov, Rășinari, and Sibiu.
In his first year spent in India, 1929, Mircea Eliade nurtured two projects related to America, which remained unaccomplished. On the one hand, he was planning a long return trip to his homeland, which would pass through the United States. On the other hand, he considered obtaining a teaching position in an American university, the first target being Harvard. This early American project – hitherto unexplored – becomes symbolic in the perspective of Eliade’s subsequent evolution and choices. Decades later, as a professor at the University of Chicago, he turned down an invitation to occupy a chair at Harvard, which offered him far better conditions and opportunities than those in Chicago. We present here the first results of an ongoing research that tries to clarify all the details related to the young Eliade’s American project.
The article addresses the issue of the origin of the founder of the princely family Ghica, which provided ten rulers of the Romanian Principalities (between 1658 and 1858) and a plethora of political, cultural and academic figures. Gheorghe Ghica (ante 1598-1667) came to Moldavia from Constantinople sometime before 1634. In a chronicle written by one of his contemporaries and in several others that followed he is called "Arbănaș" (Albanian). Therefore he was considered Albanian in every sense of the word, including the ethnic one, until later historians questioned the way in which the term was employed in the 17th century. Arguing that it indicated a geographic, regional, not an ethnic identity, some of them have offered circumstantial evidence that Gheorghe Ghica could have been Aromanian.
In a book published between 1871 and 1873, a member of the family who was living in Italy, Elena Ghica (Dora d’Istria, 1828-1888), used the historical tradition regarding the Albanian origin of the first Ghica in order to present the entire family as "the Albanians of Romania" (on the model of the Arbëreshë, the Italo-Albanians), despite the fact that none of his descendants are known to have identified themselves as Albanian (or to speak Albanian, for that matter). This was not only a scholarly project, but also one with personal, very subjective, motivations. Some of these were related to her changed feelings, after 1858, towards the Romanian political class (represented mainly by competing aristocratic families), while others were directly determined by her public advocacy for the political rights of the Albanian people, whose cause she embraced in the early 1860s. Following her book, the Ghica family and especially herself were annexed by the patriotic Albanian literature and remained in the Albanian historiography even after the end of the romantic-nationalist era.
Discussing the primary sources (and their later use), the article concludes that there is no direct evidence regarding the ethnicity of the first Ghica, while the circumstantial evidence gives more support to the Aromanian than to the Albanian hypothesis.
This is the second instalment in a series which aims to retrieve the unpublished interviews of Mircea Eliade in preparation for a future corpus of his “oral lore”. Here the first three interviews at Radio Free Europe, in 1967 and 1968, are presented and edited. The first is actually a round table organised by Mihai Cismărescu, with four more participants, on the occasion of Eliade’s 60th birthday. The other two are conversations with Monica Lovinescu which – for unknown reasons – were not included in the book of radio talks which she published in 1992. The interviews were transcribed and edited on the basis of the audio recordings retrieved from two different archives. The introductory article attempts to reconstruct their context – making use of entries from Eliade’s unpublished journal – and discusses the post-war political context which influenced Eliade’s own policy of public exposure.
Bibliografie cronologică
Am reţinut aici numai scrierile care se ocupă în mod direct de tema bibliografiei, indiferent de perspectiva sau calitatea lor. Nu am inclus recenziile cărţilor (numeroase mai ales în cazurile lui D.
Dubuisson, S.M. Wasserstrom şi M.J. Sedgwick), care nu aduc contribuţii la cunoaşterea chestiunii, deşi adesea ele reprezintă poziţii interesante pentru istoria intelectuală. Am acordat însă atenţie republicărilor şi traducerilor, căci ele arată – în alt fel decât recenziile – răspândirea şi posibila influenţă a respectivelor scrieri.