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.
Bruno Boute, PhD in History (2003), Catholic University of Leuven, is a researcher at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Kirchengeschichte, Germany. He publishes on religious history, history of the papacy, and the history of universities in Early Modern Europe
Thomas Småberg, PhD in History, (2004), Göteborg University, is Lecturer in History and History Teaching at Malmö 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.
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 dâIvoire)
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 â 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
All those interested in Ritual Studies, Religious History, European and Chinese History, African Studies, Meso-American Studies, Management History.