Lecture | Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History
‘Disenchantment of the World’ or Fragmentation of the Sacred?
- Philip Gorski (NIAS / Yale University)
- Date
- Friday 14 March 2025
- Time
- Series
- Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History academic year 2024 - 2025
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Max Weber’s theory of disenchantment remains one of the most influential accounts of Western modernity. Unfortunately, it has proven conceptually and historically inadequate as a description of modern Western culture and an explanation of the Western trajectory. What really set the West apart was the Western Church’s monopoly over the legitimate forms of the sacred during the High Middle Ages, an outcome that was highly contingent and highly improbable. In world-historical terms, the collapse of this monopoly and the fragmentation of the sacred was simply a reversion to the mean.
Philip Gorski (NIAS / Professor of Sociology at Yale University) is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods. His current project ‘The Fragmentation of the Sacred: An Alternative Narrative of Western Modernity’ studies Medieval religious “unity” to better understand western contemporary culture.
Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History
The seminars are informal and intended to foster discussion. There are drinks afterwards. Everyone is welcome to join.
If you would like to join a session, and/or receive invitations for the upcoming sessions, you can send an e-mail to: ngassistent@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Further information can be obtained from the organizers Marlisa den Hartog, Judith Pollmann, Jeroen Duindam and Philippe Buc.