Publicaties

Monasteries have represented a unique quest to balance daily life and sacredness for more than AQ1 1,500 years. The subject of this paper is their community 10 life through rituals, and rhythm in time and space. We start with Philip Gröning’s movie, ‘Die Große Stille’ (2005), a poetical and intimate portrait of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks in Grande Chartreuse, high up in the French Alps. The movie shows great respect for rituals in ...

Secular humanism is often associated with atheism and materialism. As
Dennett (2006) point out, materialism might be explained in one of the two
following ways: primo, the more popular (populist?) sense, denoting an attitude
that only cares for mere material possessions (i.e. money, wealth, fame) or,
secundo, as a scientific stance (i.e. the explanation of natural phenomena without
recourse to anything immaterial like ...

Organizations are affected top-down by the overarching societies and bottom-up by foundational face-to-face encounters: societies provide norms, values, laws, institutions, beliefs, markets, political structures, and knowledge bases. What happens within organizations is done by people interacting with other people, arguing, discussing, convincing each other when preparing and making decisions. Organizations operate within social environments ...

This paper seeks to elaborate the dynamics through which food acquires potency in shaping human life and organisation as it takes shape in enacting ritual transformation. I argue that whereas life and various existential concerns get condensed from the fringes of the social order into ritual, food further holographically condenses the existential concerns of life with which it is entangled as an assemblage. As such, it turns into a centripetal ...

Since the turn of the century, many Dutch cemeteries have witnessed new rituals as part of a project called 'Allerzielen Alom' (All Saints Everywhere). Artists and not the churches usually design these rituals. This article identifies the characteristics of these new rituals and confronts them with the biblical views on mourning rituals that are the foundation for the traditional Christian repertory. In some ways the new rituals seem ...

This paper examines the ‘Theutberga Gospels’, a ninth-century gospelbook recently sold at auction at Christie’s in London, in light of questions about literate practices, ritual scripting and aristocratic patronage of female religious communities in Lotharingia between the middle decades of the ninth century and the beginning of the eleventh. While an estate list entered into the manuscript c. 1000 likely refers to property management at the ...

Re-centering late-fifteenth-century diplomacy on King Ferrante i of Naples (r. 1458–
94), this essay reconstructs a resilient Anglo-Neapolitan axis that subtly rebalanced
power against France across two thousand nautical miles. Engaging the manifesto
“Provincializing ‘New’ Diplomatic History,” it applies three injunctions – geographical
decentering, scalar analysis, and sub-elite agency – through a combined micro-macro ...

Through diseases, war and religious violence, the experience of death was omnipresent in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. At the same time, the Reformation deeply divided lay believers on theological conceptions of death, afterlife and the Last Judgement, as well as on the appropriateness of traditional sensory funerary rituals. Studies on theological treatises and liturgical texts in the Holy Roman Empire have documented how Catholic, ...

This article explores how Tongeren was reimagined as a Heavenly Jerusalem during the septennial relic displays. More specifically, it argues that both the ostension and its reproduction in print (1517) enabled the imagination of divine presence, or the proximity of grace. By examining a variety of sources – namely, a pilgrim’s journal, an ordinal, account books, a relic sheet, and the reliquaries themselves – the article attempts a ...