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.
