Friedrich Max Müller

Independent scholar. https://jeanmacphail.academia.edu/ CHAPTER 2 AND LEVEL II Müller's Science of Religion and Vivekananda's Yoga as a Science Vivekananda's Emphasis on Yoga or Self-transformation Vis à Vis Müller With regard to Müller's influence on Vivekananda, Green asserts (50) that Vivekananda did not carry out a systematic study of religion and that his presentation of the historical development of religions, the essence of religion and its supernatural origins and theory are similar to Müller's. However, he admits that although Vivekananda read Müller's books, it is difficult to prove that Vivekananda borrowed from Müller and concludes that Vivekananda's integration of religion was not passively derivative of Müller's thought. A somewhat ambivalent assessment, as is true of much of what is said about Vivekananda in this book. The cogency of Green's remarks may now be explored in the light of Gayatriprana (2020), a compilation of all of Vivekananda's remarks on the history of Vedanta from its earliest Vedic stages up to the beginning of the twentieth century. In passing, Vivekananda does refer, though often obliquely, to Müller and other Western Orientalists and their theories, which would be in keeping with his respect for their work and his Westernized ability to gladly present some of their seminal ideas. In the same vein, he does not refrain from calling them out when their views simply make no sense in the Indian context. Further, it may be somewhat of a superimposition of Müller's thought on Vivekananda that Vivekananda was primarily moved by conceptual influences rather than by his own experience. These two positions could be further finessed by saying that Vivekananda saw that India desperately needed contemporary social consciousness and modern institutions to support its people if they were to gain independence from Western imperialism and gain a place in the global community. Such institutions were not to be built on Western presuppositions, but on the principles of indigenous thinking, including Vedanta and the practice of traditional yoga. On the other hand, his mission to the West was to introduce the time-tested methods of self-transformation (yoga) so that the West could find its "soul" without necessarily having to kowtow to outmoded religious forms or rejecting science, its crown jewel. Rather than relying on any conceptual analysis, this bipartite program arose more from Vivekananda's personal experience, supporting Green's other suggestion that Vivekananda's worldview was heavily influenced by his spiritual teacher, Ramakrishna. As we already know, it was at Ramakrishna's hands that Vivekananda-vehemently asserting the reality and value of the physical world-had been thrown into the world of pure subjectivity, a rather terrifying samadhi or saltation from the objective physical world to the totality of what Vivekananda would later call the superconscious, where any recognizable features of our material, rationalistic world-including the categories of exegesis by scholars-cease totally to exist, thereby bypassing any quibbles about established criteria of anything. This experience, occurring in what was to the Advaitins the "lowest" step of the chatushpad of "four steps of experiencing the Atman", can be said to throw a first monkey wrench into the apotheosis of Advaita and certainly is an illustration in actual life of the kind of process on which all of Vedanta, including Advaita, is built. Classical Advaita, however, was adamant in its denial of the worth of any practice other than that of intense focus on the meaning of non-dual scriptures and the resultant sudden saltation of the seeker's mind into pure intuitive experience. It therefore supports Müller's quest in the most radical of ways.

Dopo un breve profilo biografico della figura di Angelo De Gubernatis,
il presente lavoro si propone di fornire un’analisi approfondita
sul metodo di indagine da lui utilizzato nello studio dei miti. Fulcro centrale
del suo modus operandi fu senza dubbio la mitologia comparata,
celebrata più volte nei suoi scritti e finalizzata alla ricerca dell’origine
comune dei differenti racconti mitici, sulla scorta di quanto già aveva
proposto Friedrich Max Müller, che conobbe personalmente e di cui fu
amico. Viene dunque analizzata l’influenza esercitata dalle teorie del
celebre indianista tedesco sul pensiero dello studioso italiano che, pur
uniformandosi agli insegnamenti maxmülleriani (soprattutto per quanto
riguarda l’esegesi “meteorologica” dei miti e della cosiddetta “malattia
del linguaggio”), non mancò di evidenziarne alcuni limiti.
Infine, allo scopo di rendere chiaro il procedimento adottato da De
Gubernatis nello studio dei miti, si è fatto spesso riferimento a esempi
tratti da alcune sue opere, delle quali vengono esaminate la struttura e le
intuizioni che ne stanno alla base, alcune delle quali degne di considerazione
in quanto meritevoli di aver sollevato interesse su tematiche sino ad
allora scarsamente trattate, soprattutto in Italia.

After a brief biographical profile of Angelo De Gubernatis, this
work aims at providing a deep analysis of the method he used in the
study of myths. The cornerstone of his modus operandi was undoubtedly
Comparative Mythology, which he often celebrated in his works and
which he directed at the search of a common root for the different
mythic tales, following in this regard Friedrich Max Müller, whom he
knew directly and befriended. My work analyzes the influence that the
popular German orientalist’s theories had on the thought of the Italian
scholar. Even though aligning with his teachings (especially as long as
the “meteorological” exegesis of myths and the so-called “disease of
language” are concerned) De Gubernatis didn’t omit to highlight some
of Müller’s limits.
In the end, in order to clarify De Gubernatis’ proceedings in the study
of myths, examples taken from his works are often referred to and
analyzed in their structure and in the intuitions at their base. Some of
these are very interesting because they concentrate on some issues still
scarcely considered at that time, especially in Italy.

This overview of major contributions to the study of fairy-tale symbolism examines the ideas of Max Müller, the Brothers Grimm, Sigmund Freud and followers, Carl Jung and followers, Joseph Campbell, Alan Dundes, Bengt Holbek, Maria Tatar, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Vladimir Propp. Drawing on insights contributed by these authors, as well as on the ongoing work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, this essay gauges the metaphorical clockwork of fairy tales and suggests a way forward in the study of fairy-tale symbolism.

This entry in the new Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature is free for a limited time.

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. 

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

This essay proposes the idea of incarnation as a key to unlocking Tolkien’s conception of fantasy as set out in the 'Origins' section of On Fairy Stories. Tolkien's intellectual context is explored and his conception of mythology as a blending of imagination and history examined. The essay also establishes the differences between mortal and Elvish fantasy and argues that Tolkien's Elves engage in a different kind of incarnational art than do mortals. In conclusion it is claimed that in ‘Origins’ Tolkien reworked the speculations of mid-Victorian comparative philology into an aesthetic theory of artistic creation grounded upon the notion of incarnation.

["THE MYTH OF DISENCHANTMENT" INCLUDES AN UPDATED VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE] There is already a standard narrative in place about the birth of religious studies as an academic discipline. It is generally imagined by scholars as emerging from the encounter between the trajectory of Enlightenment rationalism and non-European culture. Comparative religion is represented as a self-conscious reaction to theology from which it differentiates itself in the same moment that it is relying on a Protestant conception of religion. It is often regarded as secularizing and Protestant in the same breath. In what follows, I invert much of this narrative and show religious studies as emerging from a very different milieu and in a very different context.I show that the discipline emerged in relation to a Counter-Enlightenment impulse and was connected to a vibrant tradition very different from mainstream Protestantism, namely, Western esotericism.The double of religious studies turns out not to be philology but theosophy.

Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), the influential occultist, transvalued the category of monotheism, abandoning, in The Secret Doctrine (1888) the positive interpretation that it had been given in Isis Unveiled (1877). This reversal of the prevailing Enlightenment-based valuation of monotheism was related to Blavatsky's construction of identity as an esotericist. Her discussions must be situated within a wider 'invention' of monotheism as a category (taking place most significantly from the early nineteenth century), and they can be contextualised in relation to the contemporaneous philological, Egyptological, and Orientalist scholarship on which she drew.

Este estudo apresenta alguns dos problemas relacionados com a significação, nexos conceituais e desdobramentos da noção de pathos na obra do jovem Nietzsche. Existe uma ênfase na relação com sua teoria da tragédia e com certas aproximações do conceito de dionisíaco, que serão desenvolvidos ulteriormente na obra tardia. O privilégio da dimensão etnográfica em detrimento daquela filológica é explorado e reafirmado. O solo crítico, assim como romântico, que permite uma compreensão da linguagem como afecção, sofrimento, receptividade ou padecimento é considerado relevante não somente através de Herder mas igualmente mediado por Max Müller ou pela antropologia social nascente.

This paper argues that Müller combines the comparative etymological method in a scientific spirit conjoined with Romantic Idealism to trace Greek mythology—and, by extension, primitive mythology—back to its origin: personified narration of natural phenomena, especially solar phenomena that evoke religious reverence for higher powers. With the evolution of language and thought in history, this origin later grows (that is, decays) into fully-grown myths of gods, owing to fundamental misunderstandings of originally personified language. In Müller’s term, mythology is a ‘disease of language’; while thus disease of language encroaches humans’ understanding of religious reverence for higher powers, it presupposes a healthy, religious substratum—a ‘perception of the infinite’ intimated by nature and embodied in personified language.

With all its flaws, Müller’s theory of Mythology maintains and develops its above theses, forwarding multi-faceted contributions to British Mythography. In the 1850s and 1860s, it played a pioneering and liberating role. In the early 1870s, with the rise of Cultural Anthropology, his Comparative Mythology reaches its zenith and starts to descend in academic popularity. However, it is worth noting Müller’s cautious open-mindedness to anthropological materials and alternative approaches to primitive myths. In the 1890s, Müller’s Comparative Mythology arrived at its tragic ending, eclipsed by the anthropological study of mythology. Müller is generally portrayed as a defeated enemy of Victorian anthropologists, but Müller’s insightful responses to anthropological conjectures are overlooked. In the finale of Müller’s Science of Mythology, there are the beginnings of a reconsideration of Victorian anthropology in the future. 78

This paper analyses Müller’s concept of metaphor, which he expounded in
the eight of his second series of Lectures on the Science of Language (1863). It highlights the central role that metaphor played in Müller’s theory of mythology, as well as his critical appraisal of the latter as a form of ‘diseased language’. This critical ‘deconstruction’ of metaphors and mythology was, however, no end in itself but an application of the comparative, ‘historical’ philology that had clarified the ‘genealogical’ relationships of (Indo-European) languages and was now to be applied to cultures. Müller’s position in the history of metaphor theory is that of an outsider, but his emphasis on the role of metaphor reinterpretation
in cultural history remains a challenge for philosophy and linguistics.

This is a splendid book on three counts. First, of the many questions it asks, one is theoretically highly productive: ‘How does power convince people to love, respect and even defend cultures they don’t belong to?’ ... Finally, Almond partly answers this question, yet without posing it: how does power convince people to hate and vilify a culture they live
in the midst of, but which belongs to a religion other than their own?

This article traces the history of how modern Western linguistics adopted the term sandhi from the Sanskrit grammatical tradition and adapted it to its theoretical needs. In particular, we will acknowledge the fundamental role played by Müller,1 who combining both Indic (Prakriyā grammars and Prātiśākhyas) and Western approaches (those of Colebrooke and Bopp) to the representation of Sanskrit grammar, coined in 1866 the labels of internal sandhi and external sandhi. Such labels gained momentum thanks to the works of Whitney in the 19th century and Bloomfield in the 20th century and eventually became common parlance in Western linguistics.

Chega ao mercado editorial brasileiro a edição bilíngue das preleções que Friedrich Max Müller ministrou em 1870 no Real Instituto, em Londres. Originalmente publicadas como Lectures on the Science of Religion pelo periódico Fraser's Magazine naquele mesmo ano, são consideradas por alguns autores como o documento de fundação da disciplina ciência da religião, na Europa.

Max Müller 19. yüzyıl İngiltere’sinin önemli din araştırmacılarındandır. Dinler Tarihinin kurucusu olarak kabul edilen Müller Doğu Dinleri araştırmaları ile dikkati çeker. Onun Hinduizmle ilgili araştırmaları İngiltere’nin kolonist anlayışı ile aynı paralellikte devam eder. Dinî araştırmalarda bilimsel disipline önem veren Müller’in Doğu ile ilgili tanımlamaların çoğu yine Batı merkezlidir. İslam ve Türklerle ilgili değerlendirmelerinde de durum böyledir. Türklere dair olumsuz düşünceleri daha çok Osmanlı’nın Anadolu ve Balkanlardaki hâkimiyeti ile ilgilidir. Ancak Müller’in 1893 yılında eşi ile birlikte İstanbul ve Bursa’yı ziyareti tümüyle olmasa da pek çok önyargısını ortadan kaldırır. Bu ziyarette Müller, Sultan Abdülhamid’le görüşür ve sıcak ilişki kurar. Sultana editörlük yaptığı Doğunun Kutsal Kitapları’nı takdim eder ve Sultan Abdülhamid de Müller ailesine çeşitli hediyeler verir. Müller İngiltere’ye döndükten sonra da İstanbul’da yaşadıklarına ve Sultanla ilgili görüşmelerine sıkça yer verir. Osmanlı aleyhine zamanla Batı kamuoyunda değişen ortam Müller’in düşüncelerinde de değişikliğe neden olmaktadır. Ancak bu defaki tahlilleri tamamen siyah veya beyaz değildir. İstanbul’da gördüklerinden dolayı düşüncelerinde gri tonlar oluşmuştur. Bu anlamda Max Müller’in İstanbul ziyareti, oryantalist bakışa ve ötekini anlama açısından sahadan alınan verilerin ne kadar önemli olduğuna büyük katkı yapmaktadır.
İngiliz elçiliğinde görevli oğlunu görme ve gezme amacıyla İstanbul’a gelen Max Müller’in Sultan’la görüşmesi, ona eserlerini takdimi ve sonradan ziyaretine dair yaptığı değerlendirmeler bu gezinin sadece turistik değil, dinî ve kültürel boyutlarıyla da ele alınmasını gerekli kılmaktadır. Şu soruların cevaplarının aranması bu değerlendirmeye önemli katkı sağlayacaktır: Viktorya dönemi İngiltere’sinin sömürgecilik anlayışıyla Müller’in çalışmaları arasında nasıl bir etkileşim vardır? Osmanlı coğrafyasına ziyarette bulunan Dinler Tarihçileri kimlerdir ve Müller’in ziyaretinin onlardan farkı nedir? Osmanlı havzasında yer alan dinî ve tarihî yapılarla ilgili Müller neler düşünmektedir? Osmanlı topraklarında yaşayan farklı dinî gruplara sağlanan özgürlüklere dair gözlemleri nelerdir? Uluslararası alanda yapılan toplantılarda Max Müller ile Osmanlı Devlet yetkilileri arasında nasıl bir etkileşim olmuştur? Müller’in kendi imzasıyla Osmanlı Hükümetine iletmiş olduğu mektubun içeriğinde neler vardır ve Sultan’la görüşmede hangi konular ele alınmıştır? Bu ve buna benzer soruların cevapları aranırken İstanbul’dan Mektuplar  isimli eser başta olmak üzere, Osmanlı Arşiv Belgeleri ve dönemin The Times gazetesinin verileri betimsel olarak ele alınacak ve karşılaştırmalar yapılacaktır.

By setting the texts of George Eliot and Max Müller side by side, this paper
explores how Eliot replicates and comments upon Müller’s philological,
comparative, and historical-critical methodologies. In particular, attention is
drawn to their parallel uses of Herderean Einfühlung as a key and strategic
component of German historicism, and to their corresponding interests in
establishing and pursuing a comparative study of world religions. Through her fiction, Eliot is a clear participant in the emerging discourse on the science of religion in Britain. Her interaction with Müller’s works is a testament to the prevalence of his scholarship and presents an important set of examples of how his theories are developed and refracted as they are transmitted from scholarly translations, articles, essays, and lectures to the Victorian novel.

This article explores the genealogy of the “science of religion” developed by the Bengali intellectual Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899). One of my central aims is to demonstrate that a “science of religion,” or Religionswissenschaft in the sense of Friedrich Max Müller, has emerged within a global context that was actively shaped by “non-Western” actors. To this end, I will focus on exchanges between the Indian reform movement of the Brahmo Samaj, Christian Unitarians, Transcendentalists, orientalist scholars, and members of the Theosophical Society. All these actors were concerned with the origin of religion, its modern meaning, and its function in shaping the future of society. Building on an analysis of the global exchanges revolving around these issues, special attention is paid to the inherent tensions between religious universalism and a nationalist insistence on “true religion,” which directly pertains to contested demarcations between reform and revival, or modernity and tradition.

1784 : des Britanniques en poste au Bengale fondent la Société asiatique de Calcutta et s'instruisent auprès des pandits indiens sur la langue et les textes sanskrits. 1804 Friedrich Schlegel entreprend d'étudier à Paris les manuscrits sanskrits de la Bibliothèque nationale. En vingt ans, un double déplacement s'est opéré : l'apprentissage du sanskrit ne nécessite plus le détour par l'Inde et les philologues allemands ont pris le relais des Britanniques. Les universités allemandes se dotent de chaires d'indianisme, les sanskritistes allemands enseignent même en Grande-Bretagne et en Inde.

« L'Archive des origines » retrace cette histoire et explore le rôle crucial qu'y a joué le comparatisme indo-européen. Dès le romantisme, la connaissance du sanskrit aide à découvrir l'existence d'une famille linguistique indo-européenne. En Allemagne, où la philologie est tournée vers la reconstitution des modes de pensée et de fonctionnement des sociétés anciennes, cette parenté linguistique donne lieu à une réflexion sur le rapport entre langue et peuple. Les sanskritistes qui s'engagent dans l'étude des Védas, textes sacrés de l'Inde antique, ont le sentiment d'avoir entre les mains l'archive des origines communes. Au fil des pages se dévoilent ainsi les ambitions d'une philologie qui se prolonge volontiers en une anthropologie historique et culturelle.

Erschienen in: Ch. Auffahrt/ J. Rüpke (Hrsg): Epitométes oikuménes. Festschrift Hubert Cancik. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2002. S. 237-258. 
-- In diesem Beitrag wird die Entwicklung der Religionswissenschaft in Deutschland und an der Universität von Rom in Italien ('scuola di Roma') in einer kontrastiven Vergleich und in ihrer jeweiligen historischen Entwicklung dargestellt.

This is a transcript of all outgoing letters from Oxford University Press's London Business at Amen House to India, or pertaining to Indian subjects. They are all sent by Henry Frowde, Publisher to the University of Oxford, and span the period 1882-1913. The later letters may have been drafted by Humphrey S. Milford but they are sent over Frowde's hand. The original letterbooks are deposited in the archives of OUP at Oxford and are owned by the Press. I post this here for non-profit academic use.

В статье рассматриваются три аспекта рецепции идей Мюллера, в том числе, их миссионерского измерения, в дореволюционной России: восприятие идей Мюллера духовно-академическими учеными, светскими религиозными философами, представителями формирующейся антропологии.

Max Müller was famous in his time not only for his editions of the Rg Veda and the Sacred Books of the East, but also as the founder of comparative mythology. Emerging from the German scholarly tradition, but developed in the British context, and facing a controversial reception in both countries, Müller’s comparative mythology was often viewed according to prevailing stereotypes about national styles of scholarship. Was Müller’s comparative mythology a representative example, or a betrayal, of German scientific standards? Although Müller himself maintained a decidedly German academic identity, the answers to this question varied according to the commentators. This article examines strategies of national (self)-labelling concerning Max Müller’s work, based on an analysis of his correspondence with Angelo De Gubernatis, his most zealous promoter in Italy.

This article for the Journal of the History of Ideas blog addresses a particularly poignant chapter of the relationship between truth, rationality and language in Western thought: the changing views on metaphor 19th century German thought seen in the influence of Max Mueller on Friedrich Nietzsche. The article pays particular attention to both the political and intellectual-historical relevance of the changing views on metaphor in the 19th century and asks about the relevance of that heritage in political rhetoric today.

This is an intellectual history of the 19th-century reception of Eastern Wisdom and its appropriation in Christian Theology. The focus is on the German philosophical and philological traditions and in particular on the relationship between F.W.J. Schelling and Max Müller.

The radical linguistic, literary and cultural realignment that occurred in the period 1880–1940 emerged from the traumatic changes of the earlier period. Among the most significant events of nineteenth-century Irish history was the gigantic shift from a largely monolingual Irish-speaking population to a largely monolingual English-speaking population. ‘Language shift’, the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon one vernacular for another, is both complicated and multifaceted, and depends on internal recruitment.

Among Ruskin’s body of esoteric writings, the 1866 mid-career work Ethics of the Dust particularly stands out as a hybrid mix of moral instructions, mineralogy, mythology, philology and his own philosophy on organic Life, which to date still feels quite mysterious to Ruskin scholars. This paper suggests a key to this book’s enigma, by elucidating the mechanism of Ruskin’s word games: this involves a full enumeration of Ruskin’s thirteen usages of the word “dust” in the book, and how it is increasingly coupled with a definite article (“the dust”).
Further hints for appreciating Ruskin’s grand design for the book can be found in his deliberate references to Max Müller’s etymological studies, since they function as a body of implications about what Ruskin intends to convey in The Dust; namely, they reveal the term’s semantic shift from the inorganic to the organic, implying the nature of everything as being intrinsically animated, from inert material to “human clay” born of—and returning down to—the earth.
Another work written roughly at the same time by Ruskin, Queen of the Air (1861), further illustrates his conception of Life within the ‘human’ dust, as that which has physical breath—SPIRITVS—in it, and which has a soul by the action of the ‘spiritual wind’ which Athena dominates. Furthermore, the title of his 1872 seminal polemic in political economy, Munera Pulveris—first published a decade earlier as essays in a magazine—is actually a citation from a Horace poem, and is likely the Latin translation from “The Ethics of the Dust”, symbolizing the “Duty of the Doomed Human Being”.
But most surprisingly, his perspective on Life, enunciated most vehemently in the 1860’s, can be traced back to as early as 1849, in the embossed cover of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, which exhibits a similar sort of etymological play. This cover, which displays his seven Latin lamps, shows a Kabbalistic schema of architectural creation that also “breathes” with SPIRITVS.
(Restauro Archeologico, Vol. 27, Ruskin 200 "Memories on John Ruskin" special issue 2, November 2019, pp.244-247.)

The article goes back to the founding document of the “Science of Religion,” Max Müller’s text, Lectures on the Science of Religion (1870). However, it is not a textual analysis, but an investigation of its paratextuality in a longitudinal perspective, where we reconstruct the editorial journey of this work based on its known editions, with information that helps us to (re)think the discipline more precisely in its formative context, in the 19th century, and the implications for research in this area. Operationally, we define the scope of the editorial set with which we work, describing its paratext in detail. In the last section, we present the work abroad translations, concluding some aspects relevant to the discipline’s meta-theory. / O artigo volta ao documento fundante da Ciência da Religião, o texto de Max Müller Lectures on the Science of Religion (1870). Contudo, não se trata de uma análise textual, mas de uma investigação de sua paratextualidade em perspectiva longitudinal, em que reconstituímos o percurso editorial dessa obra com base em suas edições conhecidas, com informações que nos ajudem a (re)pensar a disciplina de forma mais precisa em seu contexto formativo, no século XIX, e as implicações para a pesquisa nessa área. Operacionalmente, definimos o escopo do conjunto editorial com o qual trabalhamos, descrevendo minuciosamente o seu paratexto. Na última seção, apresentamos as traduções da obra no estrangeiro, concluindo com alguns aspectos relevantes para a metateoria da disciplina.

German Indologists are reputed to be armchair philologists. However, this is contradicted by their great mobility. This paper explores their travels, which were of great importance to their formation and even to the rest of their careers, ranging from short stays to real emigration. It analyses the motivation for such travelling, the sociability networks the travellers created or relied on, and their effects on the development of knowledge. The complex and changing distribution of the travels from Germany to France, Great Britain and India reveals the methodological and institutional transformations of German Indology following its recognition as an academic discipline. Paris is a good example for those developments. It was the birthplace of German Indology in the romantic period and drew most German students in Sanskrit till about 1850 (Burnouf’s death), when it became less and less attractive. This changing status throws light on the interplay of international cooperation and rivalry; it is also a good example of cultural transfers persisting in spite of interrupted direct contacts.