The genre of funeral sermons flourished in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany: over 220,000 of them survive in printed form. They were intended as edifying devotional literature for the literate public. Cornelia Moore is less interested in the sermon portion per se – a clergyman's development of a scriptural text – than she is in the biographical segment, summarising the life, virtues and faith of the deceased. Deriving from classical, rhetorical and hagiographical traditions, these brief vitae had to be prepared by the subject before death (and to the extent that they were, could be seen as autobiographical [p. 299]) or by family members; they were probably modified by the cleric who had attended the Christian in extremis. Variously, this material was integrated into the sermon, or it formed an appendage, or it was omitted. The debate over the propriety of praising but not criticising the dead is well known. Calvinists rejected the funeral sermon except for persons of highest rank, for whom it was inevitable. This book studies ‘the funeral work’ (whatever its parts) in three contrasting settings: the cathedral chapter (where the canons were noblemen) of Magdeburg, urban and bürgerlich Brunswick and the Wettin electoral court in Dresden. It clearly links the content with the social and political values of the elites. It devotes sections to the salient preachers in each context, for these homileticians did bring their personalities and theology to bear on the rituals of death. Siegfried Saccus (Magdeburg) neglected biblical exegesis in favour of depicting the pious demise as an example to his audience. Jakob Weller von Molsdorff (Brunswick) applied a carefully selected sacred text to the deceased individual without attention to biography as such. As Saxon court preacher, Polycarp Leyser ‘ranked himself as the ultimate advisor in … religion and morals’ (p. 238). Court preachers bore the burden of speaking nothing but good about the sometimes spectacularly sinful dead. Sermons and biographical summaries rendered on the death of women were more severely stereotyped. Moore reveals her consciousness of the limitations of such purported biography (pp. 71, 202, 267–8, 312–14).

This fine work by a specialist in early modern literature shows much historical awareness. Nevertheless, it does not take up the use of funeral sermons (with or without biography) in the countryside, too, as an educational and disciplinary measure; and, until the advent of Pietism at the end of the period (p. 309), it does not treat the tension between moral prescription, including the performance of a Christian death, and the prevailing doctrine of justification by faith. On into the eighteenth century, writers such as Johann Gottfried Schnabel, David Fassmann and Christian Gerber compiled for a swelling body of readers, inspiring testimony to the pious living and dying of their forebears. Salvation, it seemed, was still to be earned through imitation. The increasing preference of the elites for silent funerals, often held at night, finally curtailed oral ritual in favour of published and even fictional model deaths.