Storia delle religioni(1994–1997), five large volumes, containing chapters
written mostly by Italian scholars. In 1998 Filoramo, together with Marcello
Massenzio, Massimo Raveri, and Paolo Scarpi, edited a one-volume handbook
of religious history. He has also recently published a 400-page overview of the
study of religion (Filoramo 2004), discussing the history of the discipline,
questions of definition and comparison, social scientific approaches, issues of
typology, functions of religion, and religious violence and politics.
Kohlhammer in Germany has published a substantial book series, Die
Religionen der Menschheit (34 vols to date, 1960– ). Most authors are German,
but the editors were able to recruit some outstanding specialists from other
European countries.
The great age of the phenomenological treatises
In the two decades after World War II many imposing phenomenological
handbooks were published, starting with Mircea Eliade (1949) and including
books by Gerardus van der Leeuw (1956), Gustav Mensching (1959), and
Friedrich Heiler (1961). In 1960, Heiler’s younger colleague in Marburg, Kurt
Goldammer (1916–1997), published Formenwelt des Religiösen, in which he
attempted to combine the phenomenological heritage with Joachim Wach’s
program for a ‘systematic study of religion’.
In the Netherlands Bleeker continued the phenomenological tradition in a
series of articles, many assembled in Bleeker (1975). His longtime associate,
the Swedish scholar Geo Widengren (cf. Ciurtin 2005), also published a
massive handbook (1969) on the phenomenology of religion. In this book
Widengren attempted to ground phenomenology better with respect to the
historical contexts of the phenomena described. The German Orientalist
Annemarie Schimmel (1922–2003), who served as IAHR president from 1980
to 1990, partly positioned herself in the phenomenological tradition in her
work on Islam (cf. esp. Schimmel 1994).
Leading figures
Some of the towering figures of the post-war period had pupils who filled the
chairs created in the course of the field’s expansion. Appointments at Swedish
universities up to the present can be read as the scholarly legacy of Widengren,
who taught in Uppsala for more than three decades (1940–1972). Even in
Uppsala, however, the so-called Uppsala School was not unopposed. Carl-
Martin Edsman, from 1948 associate professor (from 1959 full professor) of
the history of religions in the Faculty of Philosophy, increasingly dissociated
himself from Widengren and the assumptions underlying the Uppsala School
(Edsman 2001). While the Uppsala School centered on myth-ritual complexes
in the Ancient Near East, Edsman dealt with Hellenism, Christianity, and the
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