Listening and Knowledge in Reformation Europe : Hearing, Speaking and Remembering in Calvin’s Geneva

This book investigates a host of primary sources documenting the Calvinist Reformation in Geneva, exploring the history and epistemology of religious listening at the crossroads of sensory anthropology and religion, knowledge, and media. It reconstructs the social, religious, and material relations at the heart of the Genevan Reformation by examining various facets of the city's auditory culture which was marked by a gradual fashioning of new techniques of listening, speaking, and remembering. Anna Kvicalova analyzes the performativity of sensory perception in the framework of Calvinist religious epistemology, and approaches hearing and acoustics both as tools through which the Calvinist religious identity was constructed, and as objects of knowledge and rudimentary investigation. The heightened interest in the auditory dimension of communication observed in Geneva is studied against the backdrop of contemporary knowledge about sound and hearing in a wider European context.-- Provided by publisher Front Matter ....Pages i-xv Introduction (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 1-35 Reforming Geneva (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 37-67 Modes of Verbal Utterance in Calvinist Epistemology (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 69-103 Hearing Difference and Cultural Construction of Deafness (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 105-132 Practices of Auditory Memory (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 133-181 Modes of Child Instruction: Between Church, State, and Family (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 183-213 Listening in the Genevan Temples (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 215-255 Conclusion (Anna Kvicalova)....Pages 257-261 Back Matter ....Pages 263-267