Category Archives: Sunday Histories

Roland Barthes and the Question of Territory – Animals, Spaces and Sound

Posted on January 25, 2026 by stuartelden

Roland Barthes only taught at the Collège de France for a short period, from the 1976-77 academic year until shortly before his premature death in early 1980. I was drawn to his lecture courses there for my current work because he sometimes … Continue reading →

Posted in André Leroi-Gourhan, Boundaries, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Emile Benveniste, Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Music, Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Territory, Theory | Leave a comment

Mircea Eliade on alchemy; Marie-Madeleine Davy on mysticism and symbolism

Posted on January 18, 2026 by stuartelden

Among many other topics, the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade wrote about alchemy. His 1937 book Cosmologie Şi Alchimie Babiloniană was translated into French as Cosmologie et alchimie babyloniennes, but only in 1991. A substantial part of this text appeared in English … Continue reading →

Posted in Marie-Madeleine Davy, Mircea Eliade, Simone Weil, Sunday Histories | Leave a comment

Clémence Ramnoux – Mythology, Psychology, Philosophy

Posted on January 11, 2026 by stuartelden

Clémence Ramnoux (1905-1997) was an important French scholar of ancient Greece. She worked mostly on the pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus. Alongside Simone Pétrement she was one of the first two women who entered the philosophy programme of the École Normale Supérieure in 1927. Simone Weil … Continue reading →

Posted in Clémence Ramnoux, Emile Benveniste, Gaston Bachelard, Jacques Lacan, Jean Gottmann, Jean Hyppolite, Kostas Axelos, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Fernand Braudel and the Writing and Teaching of History in Captivity

Posted on January 4, 2026 by stuartelden

In a previous pieces in this series I’ve discussed Étienne Wolff’s work on the biology of monsters, some of which was written during his time in Oflag XVII-A during the Second World War. (An Oflag was a Offizierslager – a German camp for Allied … Continue reading →

Posted in Fernand Braudel, Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My publications in 2025 – on Koyré, Foucault, Lefebvre and some reviews

Posted on December 31, 2025 by stuartelden

Most of this year was spent working on my very long manuscript Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, which is coming together but has been hard work to reach this point. I have shared a few updates on the research and … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam David Morton, Alexandre Koyré, Emile Benveniste, Ernst Kantorowicz, Georges Dumézil, Henri Lefebvre, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

One year of ‘Sunday Histories’ on Progressive Geographies – weekly essays in the history of ideas

Posted on December 30, 2025 by stuartelden

Every Sunday through 2025 I’ve posted a short essay to Progressive Geographies. They are tangential to my main research focus, a home for odd pieces which would not find a more formal place in print, but stories or ideas I … Continue reading →

Posted in Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roger Caillois – Race, Games and a Ceremonial Sword

Posted on December 28, 2025 by stuartelden

Roger Caillois and Claude Lévi-Strauss both spent the war in exile from France. Lévi-Strauss had done fieldwork in Brazil in the 1930s, but when he left France he went through Martinique and was detained in Puerto Rico before going to … Continue reading →

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil, Roger Caillois, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

On the Trail of a Misplaced Reference in Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic

Posted on December 21, 2025 by stuartelden

In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault quotes a passage which he incorrectly references to “S.A.D. Tissot, Avis aux gens de lettres sur leur santé, Lausanne, 1767, p. 28”. As part of the work for the new translation and edition of this text, we are … Continue reading →

Posted in Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Boris Porshnev – from peasant revolts in 17th century France to cryptozoology and the quest for the Soviet Yeti

Posted on December 14, 2025 by stuartelden

I first read the work of the Soviet historian Boris Fyodorovich Porshnev because of Michel Foucault. (His name is sometimes transliterated, especially in France, as Porchnev.) In his 1971-72 Collège de France lectures, Penal Theories and Institutions, Foucault spends the first … Continue reading →

Posted in Boris Porshnev, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Michel Foucault, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Huguette Fugier’s study of the vocabulary of the sacred in Latin, and Giorgio Agamben’s other sources for the notion of the homo sacer

Posted on December 7, 2025 by stuartelden

Huguette Fugier’s 1963 book Recherches sur l’expression du sacré dans la langue latine seems little known today, which is unfortunate given its interest and importance. In the opening lines, she describes it is “a study of historical semantics, applied to the Roman … Continue reading →

Posted in Giorgio Agamben, Roger Caillois, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | Leave a comment