The contributions develop the papers presented at the “Omaggio a Ugo Bianchi e Ioan Petru Culianu. Una stagione ‘milanese’ della Storia delle religioni”, held at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan; 3^rd May 2011), to honour the memory of two illustrious historians of religions, Ugo Bianchi and Ioan Petru Culianu, the Master and his then pupil, who met at the Università Cattolica in a particularly fertile season for their respective scientific experiences.  The subject of History of Religions started with Ugo Bianchi in the academic year 1972/73 in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan) where he taught until 1991. Ugo Bianchi spent the longest period of his university teaching, about twenty years, at the Università Cattolica and this period was particularly fertile due to the extent and methodological depth of the scientific meetings, inter-disciplinary seminars and international conferences held there, the thematic richness and scientific importance of his teaching and research and, lastly, due to the number of students he initiated to historical-religious research.

They included Ioan Petru Culianu, who was at the Università Cattolica from 1973 to 1976, first as a scholarship holder of the Department of Religious Studies and then as contract researcher in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. Culianu found in Ugo Bianchi the teacher who helped him to clarify and study in greater depth the wide historical-religious interests he had already matured in Romania.

Whilst other important international conferences held in various venues, and their respective Proceedings, have honoured the memory of the two scholars, retracing their respective scientific experiences, the one-day workshop held at the Università Cattolica in May 2011, twenty years after the tragic death of I.P.Culianu, murdered in Chicago on 21^st May 1991, together with the contributions that we are offering here, aim to concentrate on the “milanese” period of the existential and scientific experiences of the two historians of religions, aware that, if the rigid segmentation of every trajectory of human life is always artificial and improper, that “milanese” period nevertheless – which never until then had been the subject of an adequate scientific study – was for the two scholars, and for the reasons that the articles offered here illustrate, particularly significant and fertile.

Neither the one-day workshop nor the papers published here aim to be merely, although due, in memoriam of the two historians of religions, U.Bianchi and I.P.Culianu. They aim to be an occasion and an instrument for a wider scientific reflection on the history of religions, on its historical-comparative method and on its subject, religion and religions. This reflection is all the more opportune as the current season of studies sees, at international level, the traditional methodological approaches to religion and religions, and specifically historical and historical-comparative approaches, to which attention is paid in these articles, being joined by methods of investigation of a different epistemological structure, which at times lead to a deconstruction or even a dissolution of the religious “subject” itself.

 

Maria Vittoria Cerutti

Associate Professor of History of Religions

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Catholic University of the Sacred Heart

Largo A.Gemelli 1, I-20123 Milano

Phone +39.02.72342652