Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany (review)

Cornelia Moore's latest monograph draws in its thematic focus upon her previous work on edifying literature of the German Baroque, including numerous articles, a book on prescriptive literature for girls, and several text editions. It treats biographical texts included as part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German Lutheran funeral sermons. Long mined in the Germanophone scholarly world as sources for social history, they reappear here in a fresh, convincing treatment as the substance of an evangelical biographical tradition that emerged upon the heels of the Old Church's interest in vitae and exempla.

By her own account, Moore's work is based on a reading of approximately 4,000 of the estimated 220,000 sermons still extant in German collections: any laborer in this overwhelming vineyard must skillfully select contexts to organize the mass of sources. This is one of Moore's particular successes: in six compact chapters, she treats the form of the funeral sermon and the place of the biography in it, its early sixteenth-century origins, the traces of its employment in three specific contexts — Magdeburg, where she focus on sermons for the cathedral canons; Brunswick, where she discusses sermons for burghers; and Dresden, where she concentrates on the court — and the end of the tradition in the face of the Pietist "silent funeral." The focus here is on close description of the object at hand and each context reveals a single central theme. For Magdeburg, Moore uses the succession of three cathedral preachers — Siegfried Saccus, Philipp Hahn, and Reinhard Bakius — to make clear how both theological principles and local political concerns influenced the development of the genre. For Brunswick, she shows how the greater proximity of the pastor to his civic audience meant that the funeral sermon could be not only a mirror for congregant behavior, but also an occasion for political dispute. This chapter in particular effectively reveals the important role sermons played as part of early modern Öffentlichkeit, a theme as yet largely unexplored in the secondary literature on Germany. For Dresden, Moore adds the funeral sermons as part of the picture of ceremony and pageantry regularly conducted at this most important of German courts. The work is characterized by a pleasantly authoritative, but modest, tone.

The book's conclusions will be of greatest interest to literature scholars and those interested in the developing generic conventions for biographical writing in early modern Europe, although comparative contexts to other national traditions are not explored. In particular, Moore's discussion of formal and content features of sermons is a tremendously helpful orienting contribution, because she takes the time to elucidate and elaborate on matters that other specialized works simply assume the reader is familiar with. While the volume will be a must-read for scholars of theology and piety as well, the focus on generic and literary features happens at the expense of detailed attention to larger contextual concerns that leap briefly into view. For instance, in explaining the preacher's dilemma about describing noble military careers, her discussion would have been illuminated by reference to the nuances of the extensive debates over just war and military participation central to the late Middle Ages and early Reformation; her consideration of the Dresden funeral biographies could have been enhanced by further attention to the political context of the court preacher's position at the Saxon court. Dresden in particular is one of the most familiar sites of early modern preaching, and a comparison to a south German court — like Württemberg, for which numerous extant sources are still unexamined — might have been just as illuminating while covering newer ground. These primarily disciplinary quibbles from a historian do not, however, affect the significance of Moore's work more generally.

Most importantly for her audience, Moore's narrative successfully bypasses the major danger of sermon studies: the tendency to bog down in the often minute, distracting detail of...