On the Ḥadīth Corpus of Mircea Eliade: Preliminary Notes and an Open Gloss

Abstract

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.