{"id":783,"date":"2017-02-04T23:24:38","date_gmt":"2017-02-04T23:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=783"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:37:05","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:37:05","slug":"lee-palmer-wandel-reading-catechisms-teaching-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2017\/02\/04\/lee-palmer-wandel-reading-catechisms-teaching-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Lee Palmer Wandel. Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lee Palmer Wandel. Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion<\/a>.<\/em> Boston: Brill MyBook, 2016. xxiv, 390 p. ill. E-ISBN 9789004305205. US $189.00 (ebook).<\/p>\n

David McKitterick writes in Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order<\/em> (2003) that the rise of print was \u201cprolonged, and like many revolutions its progress was irregular, and its effects were variable, even erratic\u201d (47). Associating the print revolution with other historical developments means reading this unevenness into them, as Lee Palmer Wandel does in Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion<\/em><\/a>. First recouping pre-revisionist ideas, she suggests that the rise of printed catechisms transformed the Christian conception of self, as worshippers\u2019 attention shifted from the \u201cdense visual, haptic, and aural world of medieval Christianity\u201d to a shared set of printed scriptural texts (17). Masterfully nuancing this claim, she then explores how variant printed presentations of these texts in Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist catechisms empowered fracture into differing denominational selves.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s central chapters explore how four popular catechism types \u2013 Peter Canisius\u2019s Catholic Institvtiones<\/em> and Parvvs Catechismvs<\/em>, Martin Luther\u2019s Enchiridion<\/em> and Deudsch Catechismus<\/em>, John Calvin\u2019s Le Cat\u00e9chisme<\/em>, and the Heidelberg Catechism \u2013 vary their presentation of the Apostle\u2019s Creed, the Lord\u2019s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, Baptism, and the Supper. Through the \u201cspatial logic of the codex\u201d (31), these differences in presentation, \u201cthe wording of those texts, their structure, the cadences as they were spoken aloud\u201d (65), cued readers to understand their meaning and theology in different ways. Where Canisius divided the Creed into twelve parts, signaling each Apostle, Luther devised a three-part Trinitarian mode, while Calvin expanded the Creed into questions about faith and justification \u201cover sixteen Sundays, from the second Sunday to the eighteenth\u201d (87). The Ten Commandments shifted textual location based on Luther\u2019s narrative of Law to Grace (coming first), or Calvin\u2019s on living well in the present (coming after the Creed). Wandel makes the interesting observation that virtually no Catholic catechisms came with illustrations, pointing rather to the liveliness of the Mass, while \u201cevangelical\u201d ones offered initial woodcuts that \u201cencapsulated one moment or multiple moments in the biblical narrative\u201d or \u201crendered ideal contemporary practice\u201d (324). In these differences, writers trained readers to understand law, sanctification, and sacrament in specific ways.<\/p>\n

While the study offers generous, almost inclusive descriptions and illustrations for a wide range of catechisms, readers in religious book history and reception may want more complexity to Wandel\u2019s terms. She offers the secondary claim that by blueprinting belief for Christians, the catechism \u201cbound the reader and the page\u201d (74), \u201cblurring the distinction between codex and person\u201d (350), and letting readers \u201cembody\u201d prayer. Yet her arguments never explore what \u201cbound\u201d and \u201cembody\u201d mean. The author might have enhanced these terms through citation to Robert Whalen, Charlotte Scott, and others who explore how book and body conjoin, or sacramental reading practices explored by Kimberly Johnson, Ryan Netzley, or Sarah Beckwith.<\/p>\n

The nature of the book, published in Brill\u2019s series on \u201cIntellectual History,\u201d may account for its scope. Wandel defines clear boundaries, where readers are \u201cnot the focus of this study\u201d (29). Reading Catechisms<\/em> serves a more descriptive interest in Reformation and catechisms, offering a grand tour and broad thesis for histories of ideas. Although it engages the major arguments over past decades in book history through ample footnotes to Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, and David McKitterick, the study focuses less on specific interests like typeface, binding, paper, or marginalia. Nevertheless, Wandel offers a convincing thesis that can inform and shift perceived ambiguities between print and Reformation that have normalized over time.<\/p>\n

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\nFolger Shakespeare Library<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lee Palmer Wandel. Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion. Boston: Brill MyBook, 2016. xxiv, 390 p. ill. E-ISBN 9789004305205. US $189.00 (ebook). David McKitterick writes in Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order (2003) that the rise of print was \u201cprolonged, and like many revolutions its progress was irregular, and its effects were variable, even erratic\u201d (47). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1957],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-religion-theology"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2567,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/2567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}