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.

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