The Reformation of the Dead:
Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany

by Craig M. Koslofsky xiii + 223 pp.

The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany. By Craig M. Koslofsky. Early Modern History: Culture and Society Series. London: Macmillan Press, Ltd.; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 223. Illustrations, notes. $59.95 cloth.

Funerals and other rituals concerning the dead are among the most important rituals in most cultures. The treatment of the dead has great symbolic and emotional value, and thus rituals surrounding the dead take on a special importance in regard to interrelationships in the family, community, and between the living and the dead. Perhaps the greatest change in any such rituals in European folk culture came as a result of the Reformation and the Protestant redefinition of these relationships. In The Reformation of the Dead, Craig Koslofsky describes the processes though which the Lutheran reformers redefined these key rituals.

Redefinition of the rituals of dead required that the reformers address issues on all levels of thought, from theological disputations to popular conceptions of the proper time and form of burial. Koslofsky separates his book into two parts in order to examine these dimensions in time and space. In the first part, "Separating the Living from the Dead," he looks at how the disputes and reforms of the sixteenth century changed the way that death and the idea of death were imagined. For instance, the idea of Purgatory was one of the great late medieval innovations in Catholic theology and popular thought concerning death and the afterlife, but even during the late Middle Ages many Catholic theologians had difficulty with the concept. As Koslofsky shows in his first chapter, the roots of Lutheran dissatisfaction with the concept of Purgatory were in this late medieval Catholic dissent, a dissatisfaction that also affected the role imagined for saints as intercessors for the living.

But if in this Koslofsky's work by necessity emphasizes theological dispute, in his next chapter he takes up an issue with both theological and popular cultural significance: just where were the dead to be buried? The graveyards of the Middle Ages were usually associated with local churches, whether in rural or urban communities. The increasing urbanization of Germany in the late Middle Ages, combined with the fear of epidemic, called this location into question, with many Lutheran reformers arguing for the removal of the cemeteries to the outside of the cities. Catholics and Lutheran reformers vehemently debated the issue, because it concerned more than the role of hygiene or the proper use of urban space. Reformers proposed to alter fundamental cultural ideas of propriety regarding the treatment of the dead and the physical and spiritual relationships of the dead to the living. Here, too, Koslofsky shows that elements of these disputes preceded the Reformation, but--and this is most significant in understanding the impact on folk culture--the new Lutheran distancing of the dead from the ritual and daily life of people was a major cultural and theological break with the past.

The second section of this book looks at the evolution of the new Lutheran funeral rituals from the sixteenth century to 1700. As Koslofsky demonstrates, even though the Lutherans argued for greater simplicity in the rituals associated with the dead, they too recognized the need for ceremony. Lutheran funeral rituals, though far simpler than their Catholic counterparts, thus originate from the same cultural and emotional needs for rites of transition. Here, as elsewhere, Koslofsky is strongly influenced in his ideas about ritual by the work of Robert Hertz and Arnold van Gennep.

Some years ago, Rudolf Schenda argued that folklorists should consider the Reformation as a key problem for the study of folk culture. Historians seem to have been far more influenced by his call, but it is always good to read works like this one that take the work of folklorists and other students of popular culture into account. It is certainly useful for those interested in the study of religion and folk culture.

David Elton Gay
Indiana University, Bloomington