Death and ritual in Reformation Germany.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the human encounter with death in Lutheran Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism in the late seventeenth century, focusing on the territories of Saxony and Brandenburg. Drawing on interpretations of ritual from Robert Hertz, Marshall Sahlins, and Maurice Bloch, and relying on sources including theological tracts, popular pamphlets, public health legislation, funeral sermons, diaries, church visitation records and parish registers, it argues that the German Reformation arose from a radical challenge to the traditional closeness of the living and the dead. Before the Reformation, death marked a passage into another social group: the ecclesia dolens of suffering souls in Purgatory. These souls were the object of clerical intercession: prayers, masses and (since 1475) indulgences for the dead. The traditional Catholic funeral summed up the close relationship between the living and the dead by bringing the body of the deceased to rest in a churchyard at the center of a village or town. The Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional church. Funeral prayers for the dead had been a central part of the Christian economy of salvation since the second century; Protestant salvation by faith alone proclaimed that intercession by the living for the dead was either useless or impossible. This dissertation examines the theological and topographical separation of the living from the dead in the German Reformation and the subsequent development of the Lutheran funeral. Part one establishes the importance and consistency of the Reformation's challenge to the traditional relationships between the living and the dead. It considers first the death of Purgatory, which irrevocably severed the theological relationships between the living and the souls of the dead. It then traces the parallel removal of the bodies of the dead from the space of the living in the development of extramural burial. Part two describes the origins, development and decline of Lutheran funeral ritual from the Reformation through the early eighteenth century. From its inception, the Lutheran funeral was caught in an uneasy balance between Christian ritual and social display. This tension promoted the extraordinary growth of the funeral sermon after 1550, and finally the decline of the communal funeral and the rise of baroque nocturnal burial in the late seventeenth century.