Lee Palmer Wandel

Religions in Augsburg, 1450-1750

During her tenure at the Institute she is working on catechisms, which were second only to Bibles in numbers of editions in the sixteenth century, and the construction of religion in the Reformation. Her work explores what the fragmentation of European Christendom meant epistemologically and culturally. Catechisms made Christianity portable: as they claimed, they contained between their two covers all that a person needed to know, in order to be a “Christian.”

Lee Palmer Wandel is Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Visual Culture at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is the author of Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge University Press, 1995); and The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She is the co-editor of Facing Death (Yale University Press, 1996), which won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Communication; and the volume from the Burdick-Vary conference at the Institute, Early Modern Eyes, which is forthcoming. Wandel received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her work has been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, Yale University, and, at the University of Wisconsin, fellowships at the IRH, a Vilas Associate Fellowship and the Kellett Mid-Career Award.