Overview

In 1991, Ioan Culianu was on the precipice of a brilliant academic career. Culianu had fled his native Romania and established himself as a widely admired scholar at just forty-one years old. He was teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he was seen as the heir apparent to his mentor, Mircea Eliade, a fellow Romanian expatriate and the founding father of the field of religious studies, who had died a few years earlier. When Culianu began to receive threatening messages, he asked a colleague to hold onto some papers for safekeeping. A week later someone fired a bullet into the back of his head, killing him instantly. The case was never solved, though the prevailing theory is that Culianu was targeted by the Romanian secret police as a result of critical articles he wrote after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. What was in those papers and what connection might they have to Culianu's death? The papers eventually passed into the hands of Bruce Lincoln, and their story is at the heart of this book. The documents were English translations of articles that Eliade wrote in the 1930s, some of which voiced Eliade's support for the Iron Guard. Bruce Lincoln explores what the articles reveal about Eliade's past, his subsequent efforts to conceal that past, his complex relations with Culianu, and the possible motives for Culianu's shocking murder.

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Bruce Lincoln is Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He received his BA from Haverford College in 1970 with high honors and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1976 with distinction. His publications include Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, 2nd Ed., Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison, and Old Thiess, A Livonian Werewolf (with Carlo Ginzburg). Tom Beyer is a character actor who has appeared in over 100 TV shows, films, and commercials; has performed in innumerable plays and musicals; and has narrated many audiobooks. Grown in New York, fermented in Seattle, and aged in Los Angeles, his passions include Shakespeare, reading, intense physical exercise, and animal rescue. He has won awards for his stage work as both an actor and a director, and has adapted classical literature for the theater. He believes strongly in civic engagement, and volunteers for multiple organizations.

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