religious practices and traditions of the Lapps and the Finns—just a portion
of his wide-ranging work. But Edsman founded no school, and he defended
theology and religion against a dominant positivism (e.g. Edsman 1974).
In Stockholm anthropological approaches dominated. For almost three
decades, from 1958 to 1986, the Stockholm department was headed by Åke
Hultkrantz (1920–2006), a renowned scholar of North American Indians and
circumpolar religion, who also attempted to establish the field of the ecology
of religion (1966, 1987), which has now taken off on an international scale
(Tucker and Grim 2005). Hultkrantz (1973) is the only book on methodo-
logical approaches in the study of religion by a single author in Europe since
Pinard de la Boullaye (1925).
After Raffaele Pettazzoni obtained the newly created chair in Rome (1923),
he dominated the non-confessional study of religion in Italy. His main works
discussed, in comparative perspective, topics such as concepts of God (1922),
the confession of sins (1929–1936), and divine omniscience (1955). He power-
fully emphasized the historical formation and genesis of religious phenomena
(cf. Pettazzoni 1954).
Pettazzoni himself did not live to see the lasting institutional expansion of
the discipline he devoted his life to, but his former pupils were appointed to
all the relevant chairs. The so-called School of Rome, above all Angelo Brelich
(1913–1977), reinforced Pettazzoni’s reservations about the phenomenological
approach. Brelich emphasized the plurality of religions and their inseparability
from their surrounding cultures. Pettazzoni, Brelich, and Ernesto De Martino
(1908–1965) (cf. Angelini 2005), a scholar of magic and South Italian popular
religion, had pronounced anti-clerical attitudes and explicit left-wing, even
communist, political sympathies, otherwise quite unusual among European
scholars of religion. Another member of the School of Rome, the ethnologist
Vittorio Lanternari, became known internationally for his (1960) study The
Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults. Studies on
the contemporary religious history of Southern Italy and popular religion have
also been continued by Alfonso Di Nola (1926–1997) and folklorists as well
as sociologists of religion (Cipriani and Mansi 1990; Prandi 2002).
Unlike Pettazzoni and most of his school, Ugo Bianchi was firmly rooted
in Catholicism. Somewhat to Pettazzoni’s distress, Bianchi developed a
methodologically controlled historical typology that aimed at idiographic
analysis. Unlike his disciples, such as Sabbatucci, Bianchi always attached great
importance to a high level of philological, historiographical, and bibliographical
accuracy (Casadio 2002, 2005). According to his student Giovanni Casadio
(2005: 864), ‘the problem of destiny, evil, salvation—in other words, the
problem of humanity’s relationship with God, or theodicy’ was the main
concern of Bianchi’s work in the history of religions.
In the UK, Ninian Smart (1927–2001) emerged in the 1960s as the towering
figure, especially because he chaired the large Department of Religious Studies30
MICHAEL STAUSBERG