Bruno Boute – författare

Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element for understanding early modern science as a whole. Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself and never objected to the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore safe from human manipulation. This book investigates how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, despite the increasing uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from the history of science to theology and the history of ideas analyses a number of practices that were central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth. Through such an interdisciplinary research the book shows how certainty about truth could be achieved, and how early modern society recognized the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.

Delving into the tangled involvement of academic institutions with the benefice system in the Early Modern Period, this book focuses on an anomaly: medieval privileges that provided academics at Louvain, the self-declared storm-troopers of Catholic and dynastic restoration in the Netherlands, with access to the Post-Tridentine clerical job market. Despite their anachronistic flavour in a regional job market characterised by its openness for graduates, these privileges were considered vital for the survival of the university and of Catholicism. This conundrum, addressed via the analysis of the privileges and the conflicts they provoked in Louvain colleges, local church administrations, Brussels secretariats and Roman palaces during the archducal period (1588/1598-1621/1625), leads to refreshing explorations of a fabric of Academia in the making and of the multiple worlds of early modern Catholicism.

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.