independent status. One aspect that has been particularly important for this
shifting frame was the discovery of the religious world of the pre-Christian
Mediterranean region, a topic that continues to be important for comparative
religious work in the region.
The emergence of the study of religions
During the nineteenth century, the study of regional religious history, that is,
of Eastern forms of Christianity, was not the major factor that led to the
development of religious studies in Eastern Europe. To the contrary, conflict
between the different Christian confessions, Orthodox, Catholic, and
Protestant, played a major ideological role in defining national or regional
identities and thus served to postpone the development of a non-confessional
history of religions. But although other religions than Christianity and the
classical, humanistic background of Greco-Roman heritage contributed more
to the emergence of global worldview of religious history, a few churchmen
did contribute to the emergence of the field. Particularly notable was the
Russian Orthodox archimandrite, Iakinf Biãurin (1777–1853), who, after
spending some twelve years in Beijing as a missionary (Walravens 1988),
became a Sinologist and Mongolist, known in Europe with the help of Julius
Klaproth (1829–1830). In 1841 he published ‘The Exposition of Buddhist
Religion’ (Russkyi Vestnik, no. 3).
More consequential were the contributions of Russian philologists to the
study of Buddhism. In St Petersburg, the Sinologist and Buddhologist Vasili
P. Vasiliev (1818–1900) wrote a three-volume history of Buddhism (1857,
1860, and 1865), the first volume of which was soon translated into German
and French. By 1868 Ivan Pavlovich Minaev (1840–1890), professor of Sanskrit
at the University of St Petersburg, had completed a catalogue of Pali
manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale(still unpublished). His Russian Pali
grammar, published in 1872, was quickly translated into French (1874) and
English (1882), and his research on Buddhism appeared in 1887 (French trans.
1894). Especially significant for his energy in acquiring religious manuscripts
was Nikolai F. Petrovsky (1837–1908), the Tsarist consul in Kashgar (Kashi),
who brought a wealth of new Buddhist material from Eastern Turkestan for
Russian libraries. A valuable Petrovsky collection is now in the St Petersburg
Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies (Dabbs 1963; Tyomkin 1997).
Meanwhile, scholars from elsewhere in Eastern Europe found an academic
home in France. The forty-eighters triad at the Collège de France, Jules Michelet
(1789–1874), Edgar Quinet (1803–1887) and the Pole Adam Mickiewicz
(1798–1855), played a magnificient role especially for Polish and Romanian
émigrés. All three had a strong influence on shaping religion in the public
discourse (Breazu 1927; Reychman 1957; Schwab 1984). Particularly notable
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
EASTERN EUROPE
55
