Projects

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Staging the supernatural. The role of theatre, science and media in the rise and fall of spiritualist performances in Belgium, 1830-1930. University of Antwerp

Nele Wynants
Research Centre for Visual Poetics, Research centre Ruusbroec Institute, Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA)
The proposed study will map and analyze the way spiritualism, popular entertainment, science and religion was dynamically interconnected in Belgium between 1830 and 1930. It departs from the hypothesis that performative and theatrical aspects of spiritualism were essential in its rise and popularity, and yet at the same time contributed to its downfall. This focus on performance will place the known actors in the field of spiritualism in a new ...

Performances of the Otherworldly : Supernatural Science at the Fair in North-Western Europe (1850-1930). University of Antwerp

Nele Wynants
Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA)
This PhD project will investigate areas of exchange and confrontation between scientists and fairground entertainment in the realm of the supernatural such as mediums communicating with the dead, electric girls, sleepwalkers and seers. Initially introduced as entertainment, by the end of the 19th century the practice aroused the interest of religious and scientific authorities alike. It is well known that spiritualists frequently used ...

Beatitudo Imperfecta: An Anthology of the Concept in Aquinas and Renaissance Thomism (c. 1550 – c. 1650) KU Leuven

Andrea Robiglio
De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) famously distinguishes between perfect and imperfect happiness. Both types of happiness lie in the perfection of human nature, but perfect happiness is possible only in the afterlife through the vision of God’s essence, whereas imperfect happiness is possible even in this life, be it through intellectual virtue and the contemplative life or moral virtue and the active life. This life’s imperfect happiness is the ...

The political weight of carrying Christ's wounds. Stigmatics in Europe, c.1800-1950. University of Antwerp

Tine Van Osselaer
Research centre Ruusbroec Institute
Rather than analyzing medical and theological expert discourses and single cases, this project focuses on the popular response to stigmatics in Europe in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century and studies their 'cluster moments', reception radius and impact. This project draws attention to the politico-religious context in which stigmatics were reported and the political meaning some of them were given. We believe that by analyzing the ...

Miracles of the Mind. Evolutions in the representation of religious behaviour and the perception of the sacred in the Low Countries (1350-1750). University of Antwerp

Veerle Fraeters
Centre for Urban History, Research centre Ruusbroec Institute
I wish to strengthen the theoretical component that was only germinally present in the original project outline. It is my opinion that a more elaborated theoretical framework will toughen the original research question, even though it obliges me to reformulate the research question. The initial intention to investigate evolutions in the visionary perception of the supernatural by lay people can be drawn open toa broader inquiry for evolutions in ...

The Historical Development of the Concept of Natural Beatitude in the Salamanca School of the Sixteenth Century (1500–1620) KU Leuven

Andrea Robiglio
De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
My project examines the development of the view that human nature must reach its complete happiness or beatitude by purely natural means, without supernatural grace, among thinkers at the University of Salamanca in the sixteenth century. Contemporary scholars have argued that Suárez, Medina, and Báñez, three of the most eminent Salamanca School writers, posited that human nature reaches its complete end by natural agency as a response to Baius, ...

'Trembling Curiosity': The Naturalizing of Religion in the Early Modern Period University of Antwerp

Walter Van Herck
Center for Ethics, Center for European Philosophy
This research project examines the shifting relationship between curiosity and religion and argues for curiosity's centrality in new 'naturalized' accounts of religion in the early modern period (1500- 1800). At once seen as a natural human propensity, central to scientific knowledge, and a sin by some theological thinkers, British philosopher Thomas Hobbes puts curiosity to new and transformative use, making it the foundation of his ...

Social Cognition and the emergence of institutions KU Leuven

Filip Buekens
Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science

John Searle has famously developed a theory of institutions, of which money, property and marriage are prime examples. The order of explanation in his theory is that a codified institution helps generating particular institutional facts which are usually marked out by status markers: public signs (‘status markers’) indicate that this is my property, or that this counts as money, or that they are married. The problem is ...

'A modern mental epidemic'. Marian apparitions in Belgium in the 1930s. KU Leuven

Patrick Pasture
Modernity & Society 1800-2000, Leuven
This project intends to take on Robert Orsis challenge to historians and focus on encounters with the supernatural, rather than writing them out of history or reducing them to their socio-political impact. Focusing on a Belgian series of Marian apparitions in the nineteen thirties, this research project aims not only at shedding some new light on the interpretation of these religious experiences, but also at gaining insight into the devotional ...