Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (review)

Luise Klein’s Göttingen dissertation in theology, Die Bereitung zum Sterben: Studien zu den frühen Reformatorischen Sterbebüchern (Göttingen, 1958), called attention to the centrality of the preparation for death (especially in the final hour) in the propagation of a Lutheran theology of consolation. An opening quotation from Melanchthon said as much. Klein observed that almost every Lutheran theologian in the first decades of the Reformation promised a cure for the terrors evoked by a late-medieval religion of works. Since Klein’s study, the early-modern preparation for death—Protestant and Catholic—has received much attention, as Austra Reinis’s ample bibliography attests.

Reforming the Art of Dying continues this research with a detailed study of a selection of literature from Lutheranism’s first decade. Like Klein, she argues that while the reforming authors preserve features of the late-medieval artes, they consistently offer a radically different evangelical belief and practice. Underlying the study, once again like her predecessor, is a sound appreciation of the importance of printing and the campaign to propagate devotional literature and teaching to a wide audience—beginning in the late Middle Ages and dramatically expanding in the sixteenth century. Reinis is attentive to the individual biographies of her authors and their political and social settings, but her most original contribution is the analysis of classical rhetorical structures and techniques, and her attempt to find in them the reasons for these works’ persuasive force.

While admitting the ambiguities inherent in classifying early modern literature, Reinis identifies three genres, selecting sixteen works by fourteen authors: (1) sermons on preparation for death (Luther, Johannes Oecolampadius, Agricola, Georgius Mohr, Georg Spalatin, Johannes Bugenhagen, and Thomas Venatorius; (2) manuals for use at the deathbed (Oecolampadius, Wenzel Linck, and Johannes Odenbach); and (3) catechetical instruction (Johannes Diepold, Kaspar Güttel, Johannes Borner, and Jakob Otter). In each group one work is selected for extensive analysis, while the others are treated more briefly. Her careful literary and doctrinal analysis of these works, along with some attention to their particular historical settings (pp. 47–242) is a considerable contribution to our understanding of the appeal of Protestant theology and practice. For those pages alone this expensive volume would be a useful addition to a Reformation historian’s library.

How much rhetorical analysis adds to the appreciation of the message and power of these parenetic works will probably depend on the interpretive preferences of the reader. Reinis’s insistence that the authors in question were trained in rhetorical arts seems indisputable, and most historians will profit from an introduction to a different and more technical way of evaluating these texts.

More important for historians is her documentation in Protestant literature of the massive presence of theological commonplaces—medieval and evangelical. Especially welcome is her brief attention to Wenzel Linck’s approval of shouting in the ear of the dying—a medieval custom that Luther noted and one that makes evangelical sense. Not surprisingly, however, Reinis’s main concern is to show that markers of evangelical authenticity dominate all genres: constant reiteration of a justification pro me; exaltation of Baptism and the Last Supper; a reduced role for a thoroughly transformed confession; an attack on superfluous, “legalistic” conditions for forgiveness; and a general recourse to a language of passivity and salvation extra nos.

But aside from a few specific disagreements with Luise Klein, Susan Karrant-Nunn, and Craig Koslofsky (whom she misreads), Reinis’s argument is familiar. She begins with a recapitulation of what she accepts as “the late medieval death culture” (p. 2). Europe is in crisis—angst pervades—medieval religion makes things worse. After describing the contents of the late-medieval artes moriendi (the picture Ars, the longer prose Ars, Gerson’s Opus tripartitum, Stefan von Landskron, the anonymous Versehung leib sel er vnnd gutt...