I’ve previously shared some of the many tributes to Ginzburg, who died in June. I hadn’t seen that this early seminar was now translated. I’m writing a short piece on Ginzburg for the ‘Sunday Histories‘ series, which I’ll share soon.
A seminar, a sixteenth-century heretical text, and the art of slow reading—this is historical research as you’ve never seen it before.
Patience Games: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ’ invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a seminar held forty years ago at the University of Bologna, where students wrestled with The Beneficio di Cristo, the incendiary sixteenth-century text that questioned Church authority and championed salvation through grace alone. This is not a neatly packaged historical study, however—it is an unfiltered look at the errors and insights that emerge in the collective process of reading and debating a text.
Through shifting hypotheses and the sheer unpredictability of research, Patience Games dismantles the illusion of scholarship as a sterile pursuit, revealing instead a messy, deeply human endeavor. Blending sharp analysis with wit and self-irony, the book makes a compelling case for the continued importance of slow reading—even in an age where knowledge is just a click away.
(I’ve taken the description above from the University of Chicago Press website, the distributor for Seagull, which has a different title for the book, Patience Games, despite what appears elsewhere on that page.)
In Infrastructured Landscapes, Elvan Cobb reveals how the arrival of railways originating from the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir reshaped the very fabric of space and experience in western Anatolia during the transformative decades of the late 19th century in the Ottoman Empire. The author argues that trains were significant not only in modernizing the region but also in altering how people perceived and practiced Ottoman spaces. Foregrounding the inherently spatial nature of railways, she examines issues such as how they shifted the sensory geographies of the region, facilitated emergent practices such as tourism and archaeology, and acted as performative spaces where the Ottoman Empire’s modernizing ambitions were put on display.
Cary Wolfe, Jagged Ontologies – University of Minnesota Press, July 2026
Rethinking life, justice, and the biosphere through the sharp edges of jagged ontology
In this groundbreaking book, Cary Wolfe dismantles some of the most entrenched assumptions in contemporary interdisciplinary thought, foremost among them the idea that “flat” ontologies are adequate to the challenge of a robust, posthumanist pluralism. Against the fantasy of nature as an interconnected, egalitarian web, Wolfe proposes a “jagged ontology” in which species and systems intersect not through seamless cooperation but through friction, contestation, and uneven exchange. Wolfe pushes back equally, however, against the reductive tendencies of neo-Darwinian competitive individualism, insisting that what separates us from the world is also what binds us to it—a paradox at the core of all living systems, where autopoietic closure unexpectedly creates environmental openness.
Through a combination of systems theory, deconstruction, theoretical biology, and biopolitical philosophy, Wolfe develops a radically posthumanist framework for addressing the ethical, social, and political stakes of life in the biosphere. Extending his approach across disciplines and practices—from ecological theory and continental philosophy to law, public policy, and contemporary art—he lays bare the contradictions embedded in even the most progressive attempts to account for the imbrication of the human and the more-than-human. Through a detailed and long-overdue examination of the popular notion of sympoiesis and a skeptical reading of the anthropomorphism of the “new forestry,” Wolfe reveals how well-intentioned theories can undermine the very posthumanist pluralism that they claim to champion.
More than a critique, Jagged Ontologies opens onto new philosophical terrain for understanding multispecies justice, environmental responsibility, and the structural dynamics of individuation and creativity in the biosphere. Here, Wolfe offers a crucial rethinking of what it means to live and think ethically in a shared yet jagged world.
The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives offers the most comprehensive collective overview of Locke’s political thought in over fifty years. It brings together research essays by political theorists, historians of political thought, and intellectual historians to survey Locke’s political writings in their immediate historical and intellectual contexts and in the longer perspective of the history of their reception up to the present. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is now one of the most widely taught texts in the canon of political theory. Discussions of this work also provide important touchstones for methodological discussions in multiple disciplines, beginning with John Dunn’s germinal monograph, The Political Thought of John Locke (1969). This volume traces the long shadow of Dunn’s book, while in dialogue with other interventions since. The chapters shed fresh light not only on Locke’s Two Treatises (its publication, its international dimensions, and its resistance theory, for example) but also his writings on toleration, on his relationship with contemporary theology and with Thomas Hobbes, and on his contributions to the histories of liberalism, colonialism, and post-colonial theory. Taken together, they offer a timely and much-needed opportunity for conversation among historical, critical, and theoretical approaches to Locke’s thought as well as stimulating resources for scholars, teachers, and advanced students concerned with Locke’s political thought and with political theory more broadly.
Through wide-ranging thematic chapters, this book offers students a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of monarchy across Europe in the Middle Ages.
The volume is separated into four themes: Concepts of Rulership, Exercising Authority, Dynasty and Succession, and Ritual and Representation. Each theme has four chapters that give the student an overview of key concepts supported by rich examples taken from monarchies across Europe, both in the text and in the Spotlight and Source Studies. The textbook offers an examination of areas which are frequently overlooked, such as the Balkan region, the Scandinavian kingdoms, and the Crusader States in the Latin East. In addition, a prologue, written by Rutger Kramer, discusses the legacy of the Carolingians on medieval rulership, and an epilogue places the monarchies of medieval Europe in context with their global counterparts. Further reading suggestions at the end of each chapter will help students develop their knowledge of medieval monarchy and the history of rulers and realms of the period.
Exploring Monarchy in Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 is a foundational text for courses on medieval monarchy as well as a useful supplementary text for students of medieval European history.
This book offers a bold reinterpretation of Michel Foucault’s late work, reconstructing him as an ethical philosopher whose account of antiquity provides crucial resources for understanding contemporary forms of power. Bringing Foucault into original dialogue with Habermas, Beck, and Giddens, the book develops a genealogical reading that bridges Foucault’s analyses of self‑formation, governmentality, and modernity. It shows how key democratic and globalisation‑related theories—often assumed to stand apart from neoliberal modes of rule—can themselves reproduce subtle forms of governmentality.Through a sustained engagement with ancient ethical practices, cognitive ethics, reflexive modernisation, and global third‑way politics, the book demonstrates how Foucault’s late thought offers both a critique of modern Western societies and a heuristic framework for creative self‑care in the present.
Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice. Border Afterlives offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices, critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and calls for a reimagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that insists on remembering the dead.
Environments of power provides unique case studies of environmental inclusion and exclusion across the Americas, Africa, Japan, India, and the South-Pacific. Using more-than-human and Indigenist approaches, chapters focus on Indigenous environmental resistance, marginalisation across social and physical environments, ecology as art, and how local communities are caught up in and resist development and infrastructure projects. The book demonstrates how environments influence which bodies and other matter belong (or not) in certain places.
The mythologist Georges Dumézil and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade had a long-term correspondence and several of their letters have been published. They met during the Second World War, and when Eliade’s links to the Iron Guard meant he could not return to Communist Romania, Dumézil provided a lot of support to him. Eliade spent almost a decade in Paris before relocating to the University of Chicago. The story of that decade, and Dumézil’s support is something I hope to discuss in detail elsewhere. What is here are simply the documentary traces of which I am aware.
Eliade had good French and they corresponded in that language. Most of the published letters are in French, but a few letters have been translated into Romanian and the French remains unpublished. Many more have not been transcribed. Eliade seems to have kept more of Dumézil’s letters than Dumézil did of Eliade’s, though it’s possible there are others elsewhere in his archives – some letters were filed by year with Dumézil’s courses or book manuscripts instead of by correspondent. One postcard from Dumézil quoted by Florin Țurcanu in his biography of Eliade has not been found – his archival reference is to an old version of the Eliade archive, and the postcard is not in the new folders of correspondence from Dumézil.
The list below was made for my research use, but perhaps someone else will find it helpful. A few years are inferred from context. The published letters are in French unless otherwise noted. Many thanks to Alin Constantine for his help in locating some of these letters, especially in Romanian sources, and to the archivists of the Collège de France and Hanna Holborn Gray special collections, University of Chicago.
I’ll try to follow up with a listing of the Foucault-Dumézil letters in a future post.
Published Sources
Mircea Eliade, Europa Asia America… Corespondenta, ed. Mircea Handoca, Bucuresti: Humanitas, three volumes, 1999-2004. The volumes are divided as A-H; I-P; R-Z – Dumézil’s letters are in the supplementary part of the in the third.
Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, ed. Mircea Handoca, Bucuresti: Minerva, five volumes, 2006. The volumes are divided as A-E; F-J; K-P; R-S; Ș-V – Dumézil’s letters are in Volume I and V.
Florin Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil: «une amitié dans la liberté»”, Historia Religionum: An International Journal 5, 2013, 109-33.
Archival Abbreviations
DMZ Fonds Georges Dumézil, Collège de France
ME Mircea Eliade papers, Hanna Holborn Gray special collections, University of Chicago
Letters
Eliade to Dumézil, 4 January 1947 [Romanian in Corespondenta R-Z, 534-35]
Eliade to Dumézil, 24 January 1947, with five pages of comments on Mitra-Varuna [in DMZ 75.21, Mircea Eliade]
Eliade to Dumézil, 2 April 1951 [in DMZ 75.21, Mircea Eliade]
Eliade and others to Dumézil, 25 Aug 1951 [in DMZ 75.21, Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 2 March 1952 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol I, 265-66]
Dumézil to Eliade, 17 March 1952 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol I, 266; in ME, box 81, folder 26]
Eliade to Dumézil, 5 April 1957 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 124-25; Romanian in Corespondenta R-Z, 536-38; in DMZ 75.21, Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 9 May 1958 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 125-26]
Eliade to Dumézil, 10 December 1958 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 126-27; Romanian in Corespondenta R-Z, 538-40; in DMZ 75.21, Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 30 December 1958 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil, 21 April 1959 [in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 26 April 1959 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 15 January 1961 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 127-28; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil 25 March 1962 [in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 17 June 1965 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil, 9 December 1966 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 128-29; Romanian in Corespondenta R-Z, 540-41; in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 12 February 1967 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 338-39; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 28 June 1967 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 129; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 20 November 1967 [in ME, box 81, folder 26]
Dumézil to Eliade, 7 April 1968 [draft in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Eliade to Dumézil, 8 July 1968 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 130; Romanian in Corespondenta R-Z, 541-42; in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 13 July 1968 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 7 December 1968 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 130-31; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil, 27 December 1968 [Romanian in Corespondenta R-Z, 542-43; in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Eliade to Dumézil, 19 January 1969 [in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 22 January 1969 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 5 March 1969 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 2 May 1969 [in ME, box 82, folder 1; draft in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Eliade to Dumézil, 19 May 1969 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 131; in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 22 May 1969 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 339-40; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 24 May 1969 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 340-41; in ME, box 82, folder 1; draft in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 4 June 1969 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 341; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil 6 June 1969 [in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 13 June 1969 [in ME, box 82, folder 1; draft 13 June and 14 June in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 30 June 1969 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil, 12 July 1969 [Romanian in Corespondenta R-Z, 543-44; in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 15 July 1969 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 341-42; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 22 July 1969 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 24 Dec 1969 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 21 March 1970 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 131-32; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, Christmas 1970 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 342-43; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 5 February 1971 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 6 March 1971 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 9 [March 1971, from Los Angeles] [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 29 March [1971, from Los Angeles] [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 17 April 1971 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil, 16 June 1971 [in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 30 April 1971 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 343-44; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 17 June 1971 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 344; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 24 June 1971 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 28 July 1971 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 344-45; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 15 December 1971 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 18 May 1973 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 16 December 1973 [quoted in Florin Ţurcanu, Mircea Eliade: Le prisonnier de l’histoire, Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 2003,351.]
Dumézil to Eliade, 4 January 1975 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 28 December 1975 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Eliade to Dumézil, 5 June 1977 [in DMZ 75.21 Mircea Eliade]
Dumézil to Eliade, 25 December 1977 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 23 April 1978 [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, New Year, 1979 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 345-47; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 1 October 1979 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 347-48; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 29 December 1979 [in Mircea Eliade şi corespondenții sǎi, Vol V, 348; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 2 March 1982 [in ME, box 81, folder 26]
Dumézil to Eliade, 1 April 1982 [in Țurcanu, “Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil”, 132; in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Undated Letters
Dumézil to Eliade, 20 August [no year] [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 23 September [no year] [in ME, box 82, folder 1]
Dumézil to Eliade, 31 March [no year: 1971?] [in ME, box 94, folder 7]
Although more of a research resource than a history, this is the 81st post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm throughout 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
The second volume in Lucien Sève’s Thinking with Marx Today series explores Marx’s revolution in anthropology. Instead of abstract “man,” Marx argued that there is an ensemble of societal relations that underpins social formations of various kinds as well as a variety of forms of individuality. Sève deftly analyzes the philosophical preconditions and the fundamental concepts of this anthropology. This is followed by critiques of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary primatology coupled with borrowings from Freud, Politzer, Vygotsky, and contemporary literature on biography. The book’s aim, then, is nothing less than to outline a science of human individuality.
