Lee Palmer Wandel, who has an impressive track record as a professor of history, arrived in Aarhus on September 5 and will remain here until the end of November. Her stay has been made possible by a visiting researcher grant from Aarhus University Research Foundation.

Her response to the question about her current research project is a good example of her innovative and interdisciplinary approach.

“My current research grows out of a book I have just finished: The Reformation of Liturgy: Matter and Time Reconceived.  I had found that the medieval liturgical commentator William Durand held the created world to be integral to the liturgy: from stones of the walls of churches to the colors of vestments, each was a scriptural res, connecting human experience, worship, and Creation.  Sixteenth-century Protestants sundered that connection, rejecting matter as itself a medium of divine revelation and construing the liturgy as largely verbal.  That book left me with the question: what happens to Creation in the Reformation?  To begin to answer that question, I have begun reading Luther’s Lecture on Genesis, as well as other commentaries; collecting images of Creation from churches and Bibles.  I shall also return to Gerard Mercator’s Atlas, in which he sees his work as representing the traces of divine acts of Creation.

We asked her why she thought it was relevant to spend three autumn months at Aarhus University, and she answered:

“I first visited Aarhus University in 2019, when I was invited to share my work on the Eucharist.  I found there a wonderfully rich community of scholars who share my own intellectual commitments to interdisciplinary thinking and approaching Christianity as lived by diverse individuals in distinctive places.  I therefore enthusiastically accepted the opportunity to return and spend more time, to begin this next question thinking interdisciplinarily and with a sense of Christianity’s protean power to shape human lives.”

During her stay at LUMEN, Lee Palmer Wandel will work on her new research project and participate in everyday life at the Department of History and the Department of Theology. She will take part in a number of activities, including giving a public lecture at a seminar on confessional societies on November 24.