The Reformation of the Dead

"The Protestant Reformation transformed the funeral more profoundly than any other ritual of the traditional Church. Luther's doctrine of salvation 'by faith alone' led to the death of Purgatory in the Protestant tradition and forced Reformers to re-establish the funeral on a new theological basis. By drawing on anthropological interpretations of death ritual, this study explores the changing relationships between the body, the soul, the living and the dead that shaped the daily encounter with death in Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the rise of Pietism, concluding with a discussion of the spread of honourable nocturnal burial at the end of the seventeenth century."--BOOK JACKET.