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Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe ed. by Elizabeth C. Tingle and Jonathan Willis

2017; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2017.0028

1534-0708

Claudia Resch,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Reviewed by: Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe ed. by Elizabeth C. Tingle and Jonathan Willis Claudia Resch Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe. Edited by Elizabeth C. Tingle and Jonathan Willis. [St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2015. Pp. xi, 219. $124.95. ISBN 978-1-472-43014-4.) During the past few years, cultural practices and beliefs associated with the passing of life, and the ways in which they have been accepted, adapted, or rejected [End Page 131] have been identified as being of importance in assessing the impact of the Reformation. Scholarly research on death and dying, particularly in the Reformation period, has seen a number of new studies published as edited collections. Readers of the recently published Preparing for Death, Remembering the Dead (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) will also be interested in this volume entitled Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe. It provides the reader with a series of another ten in-depth studies on this broad theme characterized by a multidisciplinary approach, with contributions from different research perspectives, such as history, literature, musicology, and theology. The collection opens with a profound overview of the key areas of the topic (e.g., dying well, funeral and burial, memorials and commemoration) reflecting the current state of the research in this area. The editors justifiably give weight to the fact that investigations in these fields reveal a series of important insights in terms of the ways “in which the Reformation itself was negotiated by individuals and communities” (p. 2). While the introduction states the intention to follow a broad geographical perspective within a European context, readers will notice that the contributions are dominated by the (Post-) Reformation period in England. The first case study examines church orders of the Palatinate to show how the process of dying, death, burial, and commemoration was accompanied not only with pastoral care and consolation for the sick and dying, but also an opportunity to offer instruction (some inaccuracies in the footnotes, e.g., Eike Wolgast as “Eika” or “Wolfgast,” do not diminish the relevance of this contribution). Subsequently, the following chapter emphasizes the importance of being well prepared for a godly deathbed in post-Reformation England. Godly deaths provided useful exemplars for the edification of audiences, whose prayers could no longer traverse the gulf between living and dead. By investigating death-related pieces of music in Reformation England, the third contribution describes how these compositions became a vehicle for delivering subjective feelings associated with death and burial by means of the modes and tunes that were thought to correspond to feelings. The following case study reports on measures against the Catholic minority in early modern England, and focuses on families who had been denied the right to bury the deceased in the parish churchyard, and in spite of the persecution by local authorities sought to sustain Catholic beliefs and customs surrounding death and burial. A chapter about the London Company of Drapers gives insight into the corporate traditions of a fraternity which found a way to recast their former rituals and continued to commemorate their brethren throughout the sixteenth century by creating cultural practices that met the needs of their members. The following contribution studies the change of commemorative practices during the Reformation through the medium of French funerary monuments by outlining the development of different types of tombs (with six black-and-white illustrations), and traces religiously motivated violence targeting these religious status symbols. A series of “Livres des Martyrs” is the subject of another contribution. The authors of this genre of martyrology stressed commonalities between the martyrs and contemporary victims of religious massacres (members of the Reformed Church in France and the Low Countries), which is why they [End Page 132] included and commemorated those who had died in such killings alongside martyrs. The chapter “Ghost stories” examines the role of accounts of apparitions from beyond the grave in debates about the afterlife in sixteenth-century France. By returning and bearing witness to the reality of the doctrine of purgatory, ghosts and spirits also had become useful agents in the war for souls, before the clerical ghost narrative as a...