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The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450–1800
Contested Ideals, Controversial Spaces, and Suspicious Objects
Series: - Intersections, Volume: 89
Both in our time and in the past, death was one of the most important aspects of anyone’s life. The early modern period saw drastic changes in rites of death, burials and commemoration. One particularly fruitful avenue of research is not to focus on death in general, but the moment of death specifically. This volume investigates this transitionary moment between life and death. In many cases, this was a death on a deathbed, but it also included the scaffold, battlefield, or death in the streets.
Contributors: Friedrich J. Becher, Benedikt Brunner, Isabel Casteels, Martin Christ, Louise Deschryver, Irene Dingel, Michaël Green, Vanessa Harding, Sigrun Haude, Vera Henkelmann, Imke Lichterfeld, Erik Seeman, Elizabeth Tingle, and Hillard von Thiessen.
Contributors: Friedrich J. Becher, Benedikt Brunner, Isabel Casteels, Martin Christ, Louise Deschryver, Irene Dingel, Michaël Green, Vanessa Harding, Sigrun Haude, Vera Henkelmann, Imke Lichterfeld, Erik Seeman, Elizabeth Tingle, and Hillard von Thiessen.
Benedikt Brunner is a Research Associate at the Leibniz-Institute for European History in Mainz. He received his PhD from the University of Münster in 2017 with a conceptual history of the term “Volkskirche” in German Protestantism. Since then, he worked on several aspects of early modern Protestantism in Europe and beyond. He is currently finishing a book about coping practices among Protestants in the cities of Nuremberg, Basel, London and Boston.
Martin Christ is a Junior Fellow and post-doctoral researcher in the project “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations,” based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has worked on religious coexistence in early modern central Europe, conversions to Lutheranism, and urban history. He is currently working on a project about death and burials in Munich and London, c. 1550–1870. He is the author of Biographies of a Reformation (Oxford, 2021).
Martin Christ is a Junior Fellow and post-doctoral researcher in the project “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations,” based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has worked on religious coexistence in early modern central Europe, conversions to Lutheranism, and urban history. He is currently working on a project about death and burials in Munich and London, c. 1550–1870. He is the author of Biographies of a Reformation (Oxford, 2021).
List of Figures
Notes on the Editors
Notes on the Contributors
1 Introduction: the Moment(s) of Death in Early Modern Europe
Benedikt Brunner and Martin Christ
Part 1: Approaching the Last Moments
2 Ambiguity and Authenticity: the ‘Good Death’ on the Scaffold
Hillard von Thiessen
3 Privacy in Death? Early Modern French Accounts of Death and Huguenots’ Last Hours
Michaël Green
4 Urbanity around the Deathbed: Considerations from Early Modern London
Martin Christ
Part 2: Ideal Deathbeds
5 Deathbed Scenes in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Erik R. Seeman
6 Confessing in the Contexts of Dying and Narratives of Death
Irene Dingel
7 The Catholic Reformation and the Dying: Confraternities and Preparations for Death in France 1550–1700
Elizabeth Tingle
8 Dying in Communities: the Ideal Death between Individual and Communal Requirements in Early Modern Protestantism
Benedikt Brunner
Part 3: Objects and the Moments of Death
9 Candles of Death and the Death of the Virgin Mary as a Model of the Ideal Death on the Threshold of the Early Modern Era
Vera Henkelmann
10 Contested Kingship – Controversial Coronation: York’s Paper Crown
Imke Lichterfeld
11 Miseraciones eius super omnia opera eius: Lucas Cranach the Elder’s ‘Der Sterbende’ on the Brink of Reformation?
Friedrich J. Becher
Part 4: Violence and Diseases
12 The Moment of Death during the Thirty Years’ War
Sigrun Haude
13 Death Disrupted: Heresy Executions and Spectators in the Low Countries, 1550–1566
Isabel Casteels
14 Deaths in Hospitals and Care Institutions in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century London
Vanessa Harding
15 Fleeing the Deathbed: Sensory Anxieties and the Persecution of Non-Catholic Dying Practices in Antwerp, 1560s–1570s
Louise Deschryver
Index Nominum
Scholars of death from all kinds of disciplines. Also for libraries, students and research institutes. Keywords: Deathbed, Norms, Resilience, Contingencies, Violence, Religion, Communities, Dying, Fear, Funeral Sermons, War, Urbanity, Theology.