Devising Order: Socio-religious Models, Rituals, and the Performativity of Practice(60 Brill's Series in Church History)

In the past two decades, scholarship in the Humanities and in the Social Sciences has witnessed the synchronic and often tangled rise of Ritual and Performance Studies. This interdisciplinary collection of essays in disciplines ranging from Theology to Antropology to Business Administration offers an insightful guide to assumptions, approaches and methods that underpin much of cutting-edge research in the field, with the help of case-studies spanning four continents and covering a long-haul period from the High Middle Ages to the Present.

Table of Contents:
Note on Contributors List of Figures Introduction: Devising Order. Socioreligious Models, Rituals, and the Performativity of Practice Bruno Boute and Thomas Småberg The Priest, the Sexton, and the Weaver: A Flemish Dinner Play Performing Biblical Theology (c. 1539-1565) Wim François Death as the Guest of Honour: The Social Constructions of Funeral Rites in Southern Sweden, 1880-1949 Anna Stark Giving Public Space a Face: the Agency of Monuments and Portraits, Thailand and the Netherlands compared Irene Stengs Making space for performativity: publics, powers, and places in a multi-register town festival (Bondoukou, Côte d’Ivoire) Karel Arnaut Place, Power, and Prophecy: Ritual Space and Speech among the Yucatec Maya from Colonial Time to Present Time. Bodil Liljefors Persson Reinventing the apostolic tradition: transition and appropriation in the medieval commemoration of the apostles Els Rose Affirming Papal Supremacy – Shaping Catholicism: The Readjustment of Symbolic Resources at the Post-Trent Roman Court. Julia Zunckel The Ritual Battle of Tournament: Tornej, Dust, and Bohord in Medieval Sweden ca. 1250-1320 Thomas Småberg European and Chinese Controversies over Rituals: A Seventeenth-Century Genealogy of Chinese Religion Eugenio Menegon Engineering the Sacred: Perspectives for Research into Sacramental Practice and Conflicts over Sacraments in the seventeenth Century Bruno Boute The Jesuit ordering: In between the imaginative force of the art of memory and the organizational power of accounting practices Paolo Quattrone Concluding Remarks: Rituality, performativity, history, and religion Joris Van Eijnatten Bibliography List of Referenced Authors

About the Author :
Bruno Boute, PhD in History (2003), Catholic University of Leuven, is a researcher at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster, Seminar fur Mittlere und Neuere Kirchengeschichte, Germany. He publishes on religious history, history of the papacy, and the history of universities in Early Modern Europe Thomas Smaberg, PhD in History, (2004), Goteborg University, is Lecturer in History and History Teaching at Malmo University, Sweden. He has published on social networks and friendship in the Middle Ages, and is currently conducting research on Swedish medieval ritual and gender.