Erin Lambert

Erin Lambert is a Ph.D. student in Early Modern European History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include the German Reformation, visual culture, and the history of music. She holds degrees in history (BA) and music performance (BFA) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Through an individual genre of sixteenth-century print culture, the illustrated hymnal and song sheet, my dissertation project explores the verbal, visual, and musical expression of theologies of resurrection in the German Reformation. Ranging from single-sheet prints to elaborate editions containing hundreds of hymns and dozens of woodcuts, illustrated music proliferated as reformed teachings took hold. From the juncture of cultural history, musicology, and visual studies, I ask how image, music, and text responded to and explicated the mystery of resurrection, and how the use of these sensory objects in the practices of devotion prompted patterns of thought about the relationship between humanity and divinity. In this way, the depiction of resurrection in mixed media helps us to approach religious identity as an intimate relationship between believers and Christ constructed within the cultural languages of sight, sound, and word.