Listening and Knowledge in Reformation Europe, 1st ed. 2019 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.

1. Introduction.- 2. Reforming Geneva.- 3. Modes of Verbal Utterance in Calvinist Epistemology.- 4. Hearing Difference and Cultural Construction of Deafness.- 5. Practices of Auditory Memory.- 6. Modes of Child Instruction: Between Church, State, and Family.- 7. Listening in the Genevan Temples.- 8. Conclusion.

Anna Kvicalova is Research Fellow at the Center for Theoretical Study at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic.