Listening and Knowledge in Reformation Europe

Hearing, Speaking and Remembering in Calvin's Geneva

Anna Kvicalova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783030038373
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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.

© The Author(s) 2019

Anna KvicalovaListening and Knowledge in Reformation Europehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03837-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anna Kvicalova¹

(1)

Center for Theoretical Study, Charles University, Praha 1, Czech Republic

Anna Kvicalova

Parts of this chapter were published in Anna Kvicalova, “Sensing the Reformation: How Media-Historical Narratives Constrain the Study of Religious Change,” Religio: Revue pro religionistiku 26 (2018): 31–48.

End Abstract

Françoise, widow of the Genevan butcher Claude Loup and better known in the city under her sobriquet La Drobliere, was first summoned to appear before the Genevan Consistory on Thursday, August 10, 1542. After climbing the hill to the cathedral of Saint Pierre , where the weekly meetings of the Consistory took place, she had to wait for quite a while before the tribunal finished interrogating eight other people that afternoon. When it was finally her turn to face the board, Françoise, like the others, entered the room without knowing for certain why she had been summoned. We know a little more: the record of her visit informs us that the Consistory was concerned about her supposedly poor attendance at church services, as well as her reportedly frequent swearing and blaspheming. Françoise was quick to assure the board that she liked the Reformed sermons much better than she had ever liked the Catholic Mass (abolished in the city seven years earlier), ¹ and that she went to hear the preaching twice a week. In spite of her proclaimed religious zeal, however, the credibility of her testimony was somewhat undermined by the fact that she was unable to say almost anything about the sermon she had attended the day before. She could not recall a single detail from the service, neither the topic of the homily nor the Bible passage commented on by the preacher. Moreover, when she was asked to demonstrate her knowledge of the Lord’s Prayer and the Confession of Faith in her mother tongue, it was soon discovered that she was not capable of reciting any of the texts, except to repeat them after the pastor at church or say the Pater Noster in Latin. Françoise Loup was instructed to learn the prayers and pay better attention to the preaching, but when the Consistory summoned her again one week later, she showed no progress at all, nor had she made any noticeable advance after another six weeks. When she appeared before the Consistory again on 16 November, three months after her first visit, she performed as poorly as at the first hearing. She complained that she had a “poor head” (maulvayse teste) and it was too late to teach her anything, since there was little chance she would ever learn how to pray in a fashion different from that taught her by her parents. ²

In the course of the sixteenth century, most of the areas controlled by the recently established Reformed churches ³ experienced the emergence of a special kind of institution designed to oversee the religious discipline of their members. ⁴ The most prominent and powerful among these was the Consistory of Geneva, through which ministers exercised their control over the city population’s religious manners more directly and freely than in other Reformed regions. In the initial post-Reformation years, one of the Consistory’s main concerns was to inspect the general state of people’s religious knowledge ⁵ in the new confessional context, where faith was believed to come by hearing (ex auditu) ⁶ and the vernacular sermon became the primary medium of religious instruction.

One of the central issues of the sixteenth-century Reformation, regardless of region, language, and confession, was an epistemological concern about the human capacity to gain knowledge of God. It was not just a theoretical debate, but—as argues this book—one of the central questions of the period’s religious upheavals, which had far-reaching cultural, social, as well as material implications. People’s religious allegiance became linked to their knowledge of faith, the sum of which was to be found in Reformed and Lutheran catechisms, which required that people could recite the Lord’s Prayer , the Creed, and the Ten Commandments from memory . The equation of faith with knowledge was most explicitly formulated in the Genevan Catechism , which reflected a specific epistemological paradigm propounded by Calvinism, one that located spiritual knowledge primarily in the domain of language, and called for a profound reassessment of the religious value of sensory experience. This book narrates and reconstructs the social, religious, and material relations at the heart of the Genevan Reformation by attending to various facets of its auditory culture. Such an approach, I argue, contributes to a better understanding of both the theoretical and practical aspects of the Reformed epistemology: it not only illuminates the new “epistemology of the senses,” which redefined the role of sensory perception in religious communication, but it also reveals much about the way the Calvinists conceptualized the relationship between matter and spirit, and, consequently, between mediation and reference. We shall see that the Calvinist notion of an intimate connection between hearing and spiritual knowledge entailed a crucial material and corporeal dimension and left a deep imprint in the contemporary modes of learning and communication, and in the realm of everyday experience.

The registers of the Genevan Consistory are full of examples of people who, like Françoise Loup , encountered considerable difficulty in adopting the new religious standards promoted by the Reformation. Even though the Consistory was established only at the end of the first Reformation decade in the city, most of those it summoned were still not able to give an account of the tenets of their religion and did not remember the sermons they had attended. The people recorded in the registers knew almost nothing about the recently introduced doctrines; they failed to retain virtually any details from the services (often not even the names of the ministers or the topics of the homilies); they did not remember the basic vernacular prayers despite these being repeated during every church service; and they complained that they could not follow the preaching, either on account of its incomprehensibility, because they could not hear it well enough, or because they had problems concentrating on the spoken instruction for long stretches of time. Many churchgoers continued to practice the rituals associated with the Catholic faith and found it difficult to understand why the behavior that used to be considered most pious—invoking the Virgin Mary , raising one’s arms during prayer, clutching the rosary , or dipping one’s fingers in holy water—was now found superficial and even despicable. It seems that for the common Genevans, religious revolution consisted not primarily in theological and doctrinal differences, but in novel forms of religious worship that demanded radically new forms of both mental and bodily participation from the churchgoers. They were now required to sit still on the newly installed benches and listen attentively to the verbal instruction given from the pulpit , which they were not only to comprehend but also to remember in such a way that they would be able to repeat it to the Consistory. The new ideal of active participation in the liturgy involved silent listening and concentration, on the one hand, and communal praying and singing, on the other.

The prime argument of this book is that the inability of many people to benefit from the religious instruction delivered to them in church stemmed from a transformation in the manner of lay participation in the worship, specifically one in which the sensorium was exercised in a way substantially different from that of the Catholic service. In order to receive the necessary religious knowledge, the ears of the Genevans had to be trained to listen silently and attentively to spoken instruction—a requirement that many found very difficult to fulfill. The objective of this study is to examine historical arrangements of different disciplinary and educational practices, media technologies, and objects of material culture that came together in the articulation of new sensory habits in mid-sixteenth-century Calvinist Geneva. The reformation of sensory relations with the world was characterized by a heightened interest in the auditory dimension of communication and a gradual fashioning of new techniques of listening (“attentive listening”), speaking (“plain” and “sincere speech”) and remembering (“word memory”). Such topics will be explored in individual chapters, dealing with Calvinist linguistic ideology (3); hearing disabilities (4); memory practices (5); child education (6); and acoustics of the worship spaces (7). By highlighting the performative dimension of sensory perception, I show that practices such as communal listening to the sermon , praying aloud after the pastor , reciting the Confession of Faith from memory, and keeping silent during the service were not only products and mirror images of the new religious order, but actively contributed to the process of constructing a Calvinist community in Geneva. ⁷

1.1 New Perspectives on the Reform

Looking at the popular reactions to the Reformation throughout Western Europe, some scholars concluded that the degree of popular understanding and adoption of the tenets of the Reformed doctrines was in fact so low that the reformation of religious manners can, in many respects, be interpreted as a failure. ⁸ Such a view is occasionally prefigured by the reformers themselves. When John Calvin reflected on the impact of the first decade of his preaching in Geneva in 1551, he found “there is nothing to be seen [in the city] but blasphemies, scandals and ruin.” ⁹ Yet Calvinist Geneva, which was to become an exemplary Protestant community of the sixteenth century, remains one of the most successful, and one of the most radical, examples of the implementation of the Reformed manners, in terms of the degree of religious and social control, the level of unity and relative homogeneity, and the remarkable changes in patterns of everyday experience that it required from its members. I would argue that the debate on the success or failure of the Reformation is grounded equally in a particular, historical understanding of religion—as an individual belief in a set of theological assertions—and in the subsequent Weberian notion of the “disenchantment” and de-sensualization of the magical and mysterious world of medieval Christianity and its replacement by the supposedly abstract, cerebral faith of Protestantism. ¹⁰ This book leaves aside the questions of success or failure. Instead it explores, on the one hand, how new religious knowledge was created and communicated in the first two decades of the Calvinist Reformation in Geneva and, on the other, what occurred from the point of view of the individual actors, how their habits of mind and bodily attitudes were changed in the process, and how these changes were mirrored in other domains of both public and private life.

In recent years, Reformation historians have increasingly abandoned the traditional account of the Reformation as a primarily doctrinal and political controversy, and attended more to its practices and religious experience. ¹¹ This mirrors a more general trend in the study of religion that places a growing emphasis on material religious practices, without imagining them as secondary to beliefs and ideas. ¹² The “material turn” in the humanities does not signal a unified or homogenous approach, but encompasses different strands of research in anthropology, art history, science studies, feminist theory, and the neurosciences. What most of these approaches have in common, however, is that they call into question what is sometimes labeled as a representationalist notion of culture, one that posits a hierarchical relationship between “reality” and its descriptions, representations, and—what is especially relevant for the present discussion—mediations. ¹³ The focus on performance and various aspects of the materiality of cultural actions promises to offer a more complex and nuanced picture of the nature of historical practices, discourses and material phenomena, which are always informed by one another. ¹⁴ In this vein of thought, media and mediation are no longer seen as something external to religion, but as an essential component that is not ontologically inferior or derived from meaning. Scholars such as Birgit Meyer and Hent de Vries propose to study religion and culture as mediation ¹⁵ : by focusing on practices of material mediation, they argue, we can study the processes by which particular cultures or communities are made, performed, and changed. ¹⁶ In this avenue of research, most attention has been paid to the inspections of visual cultures and modes of representation: hence the term “pictorial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 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
• Back Matter