Lee Palmer Wandel

This book explores the languages of theology, law, and visual art as they articulated relations between the Christian community of Zurich, as it was being shaped by Huldrych Zwingli, and its poorest members. It takes up sermons, pamphlets, laws, woodcuts, all of which sought to shape how the people of Zurich perceived and treated the poor.

This book takes up the mode by which hundreds of ordinary Christians entered into "Reformation" in three centers of Evangelical Christianity. It seeks to recover the agency of people who often left no other record of their belief and to discern their theology in their acts. It suggests ways of excavating the meaning of acts of those who did not have access to more protected and fixed forms of communication. In so doing, it also reveals the complex meaning of the material culture of late medieval Christianity.

It takes up the words, "this is my body," "this do," and "remembrance of me," that divided Christendom in the sixteenth century. It traces the different understandings of these simple words and the consequences of those divergent understandings in the delineation of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic traditions: the different formulations of liturgy with their different conceptualizations of the cognitive and collective function of ritual; the different conceptualizations of the relationship between Christ and the living body of the faithful; the different articulations of the relationship between matter and divinity; and different epistemologies.