This is all excellent and educational for the whole world to know about depth of indian culture that how old, pious and rich it was....

Mircea Eliade could be reasonably considered as one of the Re-founding Fathers of modern study of religion. His History of Religious Ideas is thus one of the corner stones of modern research in this field. This particular part of his history is as well written as the others. It deals very well with most of the improtant currents in mediaeval Christianity, including the spread of Christianity to Slav tribes, the Cluny rerform, the religious life associated with the rise of mendicant orders, Meister Eckhart, devotio moderna but he does not forget about the rise of neopaganism in Renaissance Italy, about the role of alchemy in religious feeling of the sixteenth century, he even ventures to say that modern physics was created almost unintentionally. This book is truly amazing.

There are also some down sides to the book. One, it cannot be taken as the "state-of-the-art" of religous study. Eliade has been surpassed by new research in the field. It is therefore better to use the book as a general background. Second, it has been shown that Eliade unfortunately developed the habit of sometimes stretching the truth to fit his analysis. He did not use this questionable method to such an extent as to render his whole analysis worthless but it does cast a shadow on his academic honesty.

BTW, I do not feel qualified to comment on his treatment of religious phenomena outside the Judeo-Christian cultural sphere.

An awful atrocity of the literary genre. It was like the personal notebooks of various authors compiled into an uneven mess. Too many articles, too many footnotes & references to page numbers of other books, too little of pictures. Too many irrelevant points of view. I did not enjoy it. It's only a few hundred pages and is entirely black & white, and it was way to high-priced. Like $24.00. If you're looking for any meaning or pictures of the wonderful & elaborate hair dos of Asia, you will find no information in this horrible book.