A collection of case-studies on Ritual and Performance spanning four continents, this book offers an insightful travel guide through a thick forest of approaches and methods in a field that has increasingly weighed on the research agenda in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

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