374 Book Reviews cal” intrusions. Nor is Wiebe correct to say that assuming the mere distinctiveness of religion or “religion” entails its inexplicability in relation to other aspects of culture (14). A Marxian might reduce religion to economics (explain religion in terms of economics), but Weber stood Marx on his head. Reduction (explanation) may run in many different directions, with religion taking its turn as explicans and explicandum with other dimensions of culture. In this light, it is bizarre that this entire volume continues merrily along using the term “religion” to designate some common reference out there. I leave it to others to decide what kind of “failure” that may be. IVAN STRENSKI University of California, Riverside The Nay Science: A History of German Indology. By VISHWA ADLURI and JOYDEEP BAGCHEE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xviþ494. The Nay Science: A History of German Indology is an extraordinary work. Not for the fainthearted, it is a very detailed history of German Indological scholarship, more particularly at the Schools of Bonn, Berlin, Halle, Heidelberg, and T€ ubingen. It cannot stand as a general history of the discipline of Indology in Germany, admittedly, because various academic developments, at Wurzburg (1821), Marburg (from 1843), and so on, and various authors (Theodor Aufrecht, Gustav Oppert, Karl Seidenst€ ucker, Heinrich Zimmer, etc.) are left undiscussed. It is, however, a brilliant in-depth investigation as to how, from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, German founder figures and consolidators of the emergent Wissenschaft of Indology approached the crucial Sanskrit texts of the Mahābhārata and Bhagavadgı̄tā (the latter being a smaller and more theological dialogue imbedded within the sixth book of the former, the world’s most voluminous epic poem). Because of this chosen concentration, German research on most other Indian texts, ancient or otherwise, naturally had to be left aside. On the estimates of these two gifted Indian authors, German research on these works, from the 1790s to the 1940s, was riddled with hidden agendas. These were mostly neo-Protestant theological in vein, with historico-critical techniques applied to detect Urtexten that showed earlier and powerfully heroic and chivalric values before being corrupted by Brahmin revisers and their ritual concerns. The reconstructed original versions, or a whole Urepos being unveiled behind them, were made analogous to primary texts of the Bible before they were modified and misinterpreted under the influence of Roman Catholicism. Another agenda commonly showing up was the Aryanist one (sometimes patently racist), so that the original Indo-European conquerors of the Subcontinent reflected in the Mahābhārata were paralleled to the Germanic tribes, implicitly legitimating conquest (and in the West this meant the German overcoming of the Roman Empire, the Protestant subversion of Roman Catholicism, and by modern times German expansionism and even the Nazi quest for racial purity). Among scholarly estimates discussed, we find the Berliner von Schegel brothers’ Romantic extolling of ancient India’s poetic sublimity (in the 1810s), yet with the caveat that its epic pantheism bore signs of philosophical and moral enervation (31– 40); Heidelbergers Adolf Holzmann Sr. reading the Mahābhārata (in the 1840s) as a This content downloaded from 146.095.253.017 on February 02, 2016 00:40:46 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). History of Religions 375 cosmic battle within “a dualistic eschatological framework” (65) and his son Adolf Jr. glorying in the Indian epic “pantheism” (in the 1870s) as “the hallmark of the freeubingen’s Richard von Garbe’s thinking crude and passionate Indo-Germans” (174); T€ later nineteenth-century understanding of the original Gı̄tā as purely theistically ethical and unconcerned with ritual efficacy, even with the religious “merit of works” (198); Hermann Oldenburg’s “racialist” celebration from Kiel (around 1900) that places the original Mahābhārata’s north Indian context as “the homeland of Aryan culture” (142); Garbe’s student Rudolf Otto’s assessment of the Gı̄tā (in the 1910s) as a “passionate reaction” toward “faith in God” against “impersonal mysticism” (236–37); T€ubinger Nazi Jakob Hauer’s manipulation of the Gı̄tā (in the 1930s), evoking its “struggle for the unity of forces” to reconsolidate the original Indo-German racial purity and “unique place” in the world’s destiny (275); and G€ ottinger Georg von Simon’s more recent would-be excision of the Gı̄tā from the Mahābhārata as a Brahmanical theological intrusion (280–81). En route we are introduced to T€ubingen great Rudolf von Roth, who should be not only famous for his Sanskrit dictionary (with Otton von B€ ohtlingk, 1856–57) but given more spotlight as a neglected founder figure of Comparative Religion (or the History of Religions) from the 1840s. “Different cultures” express “one and the same religious tendency,” Roth contended, and religion reflects “the history of the human spirit as it develops in the contemplation of nature” and should be studied in a “comparative perspective” with a view to relative degrees of human “advancement” (326–27). Friedrich Max M€uller, also a titular founder of Comparative Religion but slightly Roth’s junior, relied on Roth only as a lexicographer when he was much more. If ever there is a fine specimen of how to do the in-depth history of ideas as it pertains to an academic discipline, this study by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee ranks very, very highly. Sometimes it is overwritten, but this seems because readers need reminding about positions held by scholars previously discussed some way back in the book. Sometimes one is frustrated that one hears no more of certain connections introduced: more, for one example, beyond Hegel’s adverse essay on the Gı̄tā, considering he also thought, without mention of warrior honor, that the Mahābhārata had made Indians plunge into “complete immorality” (Philosophie der Religion, pt. 2, div. uller should or should not be con1.2 finis), and more, for another, as to whether Max M€ sidered part of the authors’ account (even though he migrated to England) and why. But again, we have to admire the persistent and consistently insight-bearing focus of the main trajectory pursued. It turns out, as we have some forewarning in its introduction, that this work is not only a history of ideas as an accurate account of German Indologists’ conclusions; it is a critical judgment, even heavy indictment, of a whole academic enterprise riddled with Protestant-theological, Teuto- or Eurocentric, and “racialist,” even racist, preconceptions. What is more, many of German Indology’s protagonists gloried in their own methodological finesse, but the second half of The Nay Science reveals just how shaky their deployments of text and historical criticism, positivism, and empiricism really were. Their “false” or biased agendas were typically inextricable from their method. No one gets off scot-free: attempts to justify German Indology as liberating the averucker, e.g., in the 1860s) or age Indian from Brahmanical priestcraft (by Theodor Goldst€ as vanguard in the advancement of the critical hermeneutics of ancient texts (by Olden- This content downloaded from 146.095.253.017 on February 02, 2016 00:40:46 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 376 Book Reviews burg in twentieth century’s opening decade) will not wash, and Gadamer is the philosopher most appealed to in lamenting the hubris of privileged objectivity in Enlightenment scholarship. No one who might redeem German Indology today seems to be given much credence—Johannes Bronkhorst most strikingly (413), with Klaus Mylius untouched and contemporary American historian of German Indology Bradley Herling rather dismissed. There is an “anti-Orientalizing,” postcolonial ethos about this book; it is arises from two outstanding “indigenous voices,” and they are offended by the perennial Western scholarly depreciation of the Brahmins and Brahmanical commentaries on the Mahābhārata and Bhagavadgı̄tā. The offense is rightly taken, because how could European research proceed without pundit transmission or Sanskrit studies proceed at all, as in the Von Roth and Max M€uller cases I know, without Sāyaña’s Commentary on the Vedas? The impression quickly gained of Brahmanical texts, of course, is that they are instructional in moral and ritual matters, far from scientific studies, and our authors realize that this is the key reason for their neglect by German Indologists, because they do not come up to the Westerners’ critical scratch. We expect from this book an eventual reason for honoring the Brahmins and their apparently preferable understanding of the Mahābhārata and the Gı̄tā and their respective textual integrities, yet it never comes. All we are left with is the brilliant use of Occidental historical-critical, empirical, and Gadamerian phenomenology, hoisting earlier Western scholars by their own petards. Thinking about my own colleagues, not even Brahmin scholar Arvind Sharma’s The Hindu Gita: Ancient and Classical Interpretations (1986), a companion volume to Eric (wrongly called “Edward”) Sharpe’s The Universal Gita: Western Images (1985), rates a mention. My mental rumblings aside, though, this is a monumental piece of work, and scholars wanting to think through their own presuppositions and conditionings will ignore it at their peril. A spoof on Nietzsche’s Gay Science, “Nay Science” means a “sham branch of science known as higher criticism” “trapped by its own positivist inheritance” (151, 404) that either underappreciates or badly misinterprets the “native” insights of at least two of India’s greatest literary treasures. And all hail to two veritable Indian masters of both German and English. GARRY W. TROMPF University of Sydney Walking Corpses: Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West. By TIMOTHY S. MILLER and JOHN W. NESBITT. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. 243. $35.00 (cloth). The point of this book is to consider medieval Latin responses to leprosy in the West in light of late antique Greek reactions to the disease in the East. This makes sense not only because the famous twelfth-century outbreak of leprosy in western Europe was preceded by a significant fourth-century one in the eastern Mediterranean but also because the writings of Greek scientists and ecclesiastics exercised a great deal of influence, directly or indirectly, over their medieval Latin counterparts. More This content downloaded from 146.095.253.017 on February 02, 2016 00:40:46 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).