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Engineering the Sacred. The Performativity of Sacramental Practices in the Low Countries (17th Century)
| This paper aims at highlighting the relevance of science and technology studies for research into performative practices in Early Modern Europe. Recurrent conflicts between Jesuits and secular clerics over sacramental practices indicate that methodological, not merely social or symbolical, concerns were central to the rifts within the Catholic Church’s clergy. The central question to be addressed is one of credibility: how could different groups within the Church believe that their sacramental models were efficient, while those of their opponents were not? This basic question leads to a new definition of performance and the performativity of practice, in which rituals become cognitive methods that did not only generate what they described, but that moreover did so in an anything but ‘merely symbolical’ way. A symmetrical approach to ritual and contemporary scientific practices is the only way out of the crisis of representation provoked by the Enlightenment
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