Introduction

THIS ESSAY FOCUSES ON A highly popular and specifically German mass phenomenon from the early modern period that helped establish stereotypes for the representation of ordinary women confronting death: the “Leichenpredigt” or funeral book. In the following, I want to examine what models of women dying these texts provided and how women themselves embraced these stereotypes and engaged in their construction, thereby gaining a degree of agency in the way in which they were represented to posterity. Their reading and writing played a role in forming those representations. The need to bear witness, which dominated accounts of confrontations with sickness, pain, and death, allowed women’s voices to be recorded. The heroic nature of the struggle for salvation depicted in these texts leads to the use of military imagery: exemplary women are described as soldiers of Christ and even as Christian Amazons.

The German Funeral Book

Throughout Europe, publications concerned with meditations on death as a devotional practice reached a peak in the seventeenth century. It was, however, in the German-speaking Protestant territories that the funeral book became one of the most popular and widespread genres of devotional reading materials on death. Funeral books contained representations of men’s and women’s lives and deaths that shaped individual and collective expectations and perceptions of proper Christian behavior, both in long-term preparation for death and in facing the actual process of dying. In an age when biography was not yet an established genre in the vernacular, these religious texts, with their sometimes expansive accounts of the life of the deceased, provided representations of Christian lives as a continual battle for salvation, in which women could figure as prominently as their male counterparts. Accounts of illness and death were central to these narratives, carefully crafted by the preachers who wrote them, in order, wherever possible, to present the deceased as a model of holy living and holy dying that would exhort listeners or readers to examine their own consciences and prepare for their own deaths. Funeral sermons were, of course, only printed for those sections of society who could afford to pay for them, or when the preachers or printers who published them at their own expense could hope for some form of recompense from the deceased’s family.