Listening and Knowledge in Reformation Europe

Download or read book Listening and Knowledge in Reformation Europe written by Anna Kvicalova and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.