Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Devising Order. Socio-religious 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 circa 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 -- Index.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

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.