Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture

Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture is the first monograph to return John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) to its original visual culture. AnnMarie Bridges draws on early modern optics, art theory, rhetoric, psychology, and religion to reconstruct the perceptual assumptions of Calvin's earliest readers. Her study reveals the Institutes' unrecognized concern with 'perception'-pre-conscious processing believed to occur in the imagination, capable of distorting sense experience before conscious thought could even occur. Illuminating Calvin's most striking visual metaphors-from the spectacles of scripture to the factory of idols-and through close readings of topics like accommodation, idolatry, faith, and Calvin's Latin prose, Bridges advocates a paradigm shift in how we read Calvin's most cited work, displacing 'knowledge' in favor of 'perception versus delusion.' In so doing, her study invites reflection on perceptual instability in our own cultural moment, where the challenge is not only to know what is true, but even to perceive what is real.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: seeing perception in the Institutes; 1. How to see in early modern Europe; 2. True spectatorship: accommodation, piety, and the Institutes' perceptual ideal; 3. Blind idolatry: imagination and the perceptual effects of sin; 4. Corrective lenses: faith, doctrine, and perceiving God after the fall; 5. Reforming perception: The Institutes' Latin rhetoric as straightedge prose; Conclusion: against delusion, for perception; Select bibliography.

About the Author :
AnnMarie M. Bridges earned her Ph.D. in religious studies from Harvard University. She has held fellowships at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, the University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, and McGill University's Early Modern Conversions project.

Review :
'The study radically reorients readers to the meaning of Calvin's Institutes, shifting from issues of the knowledge of God to perception. Bridges is making the kind of argument that forces a conceptual re-envisioning of the manner in which Calvin's thought works. This is rare. Everyone seeks to accomplish this feat, but Bridges seems to have done it. The scholarship is excellent, and brings a whole new set of issues to the interpretation of Calvin's work.' R. Ward Holder, Professor, Theology and Politics, Saint Anselm College 'This is an almost compulsively readable book for anyone interested in Calvin or the Institutes… The originality of Calvin and Perception lies in the nuanced argument it makes about the connection between perception and imagination… This study does not give us a sensory Calvin to replace the anti-material reformer some traditional interpreters might have prepared us to meet. It instead gives us a Calvin who cannot be categorized according to this binary.' Constance Furey, Professor, Religious Studies, Indiana University 'In this deeply learned but readily accessible historical inquiry, the author interprets Calvin's Institutes in the context of the understanding of the nature of perception current in Calvin's day – an understanding very different from ours today. What emerges, for those of us like myself who knew nothing of 16th century visual culture, is a Calvin we knew not. It turns out that Calvin's aim in the Institutes was not to produce correct belief in his readers but to open their eyes and ears to a world 'charged with the grandeur of God' (G. M. Hopkins) – not to teach correct doctrine but to cultivate awareness of God's benevolent manifestations in creation and history. Fascinating! Eye-opening!' Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University