Book contents
5 - Reforming Perception
The Institutes’ Latin Rhetoric as Straightedge Prose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2026
Summary
Extending Calvin and Perception’s argument to the level of form, this chapter asks how the vivid and severe stylistic features of Calvin’s prose address the imaginative and thus perceptual dysfunction Calvin attributes to his readers. By connecting Renaissance rhetorical theory to early modern premises about language’s ability to create vivid phantasms upon the imagination, it presents Calvin’s “straightedge prose” as an intervention in unconscious perception – a way not only to persuade the reader of doctrinal content, but to counteract delusion while stimulating the accurate perception of accommodations that elicits piety.
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- Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture , pp. 234 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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