Listening Techniques in Post-Reformation Geneva: Evidence from the Registers of the Consistory (1542-1555)

The objective of this research project is to investigate new modes of preaching, listening and remembering as they appear in mid-16th century Geneva in the context of religious reform. In this respect the consistory of Geneva – its church discipline and policy – shall be studied in connection with a more general “acoustic turn” in the Calvinist period. In this period spectacular means of communication were rejected in favour of verbal instruction in the vernacular, which was marked as a primary means for communicating religious knowledge to the population. The project aims at studying this shift from visually to orally/aurally transmitted knowledge against the background of a cultural history of hearing and the gradual emergence of acoustics as a scientific discipline.