The medieval ars moriendi tradition, tracts and sermons which taught Christians how to die a good death, preparing them to contend with the demons of temptation at their deathbed and holding them in tension between spiritual pride and despair by emphasising the uncertainty of salvation, continued with the advent of the Reformation. However, theological and ecclesiastical shifts inevitably had an impact on the way in which it developed. In this clearly-written and thorough review of a neglected but important genre, Reinis charts significant changes within the continuing medieval framework: an increasing emphasis on the assurance of salvation in line with the doctrine of justification by faith, and an accompanying heightened interest in and appeal to the affects. This latter element comprised both acknowledgement of fear in the face of death and exhortation to joyful confidence in Christ's passion. A key text was Luther's Sermon on preparing to die of 1519, although Reinis demonstrates how other, in many cases little-known, writers drew on a variety of works by Luther, especially in the light of his developing stance on the sacraments. Her two-pronged approach to the material attempts to analyse these Reformation ars moriendi publications theologically and rhetorically. That she is more successful in the former than in the latter is due in part to the fact that a rhetorical framework is not fully established for these texts; rhetorical figures are identified diligently, but the underlying theory of affective rhetoric is not elucidated clearly enough.

The study opens with a useful summary of the medieval ars moriendi, although it is a shame that the pictoral ars moriendi booklets, which Reinis discusses, are not illustrated. A comparison of woodcuts from these with the image on the dust-jacket taken from a 1520 edition of Luther's sermon would have been illuminating. From the helpful account of the Sermon on preparing to die, Reinis proceeds to group together other ars moriendi writings by genre, devoting chapters to sermons and expositions on the art of dying, to manuals for both clergy and laity and to discussions of death in more general Reformation publications. Each text is set in context and its arguments and rhetorical competence analysed, and one in each chapter is singled out for more in-depth discussion. Reinis herself highlights at several points a problem with this approach: few of the texts are truly representative of their category in terms of intended audience, means of delivery or confessional position. It also results in a certain amount of repetition, which may have been avoided by adopting a more thematic approach, interspersed with a couple of text-specific excursuses: the section on the anonymous Leipzig Euangelisch lere of 1523, written to advise Lutherans living in a Catholic territory and threatened with burial outside sanctified ground, is fascinating, and could have been developed further. To sum up, this is a useful study that makes accessible to an English-speaking readership a genre which continued to be of great pastoral significance throughout the years of the early Lutheran Reformation and beyond.