Unterprojekt von Anna Kvíčalová

Anna Kvíčalová’s project explores 16th century practices of auditory remembering from the perspective of her current book project on the sensory economy and practices of auditory communication in early Calvinism. Drawing on recent studies of Protestant preaching (esp., Hunt 2010), it further problematizes the historiographical notion associating the Reformation with text-based memory and technologies of reproduction (Ong, Yates, Eisenstein). It does so by offering a fine-grain analysis of the principal role of auditory attention and remembering in the Calvinist epistemology, which has not been sufficiently surveyed so far. The research investigates a creation of a complex new memory system in Geneva, in which mnemonic work was distributed across the preacher, his audience, the physical environment, and practices of reading and writing, which were supported by an unprecedentedly elaborate system of surveillance and disciplinary control.