The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450–1800

Benedikt Brunner is a Research Associate at the Leibniz-Institute for European History in Mainz. He received his PhD from the University of Münster in 2017 with a conceptual history of the term “Volkskirche” in German Protestantism. Since then, he worked on several aspects of early modern Protestantism in Europe and beyond. He is currently finishing a book about coping practices among Protestants in the cities of Nuremberg, Basel, London and Boston. Martin Christ is a Junior Fellow and post-doctoral researcher in the project “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations,” based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has worked on religious coexistence in early modern central Europe, conversions to Lutheranism, and urban history. He is currently working on a project about death and burials in Munich and London, c. 1550–1870. He is the author of Biographies of a Reformation (Oxford, 2021).

List of Figures


Notes on the Editors


Notes on the Contributors





1 Introduction: the Moment(s) of Death in Early Modern Europe


 Benedikt Brunner and Martin Christ





Part 1: Approaching the Last Moments


2 Ambiguity and Authenticity: the ‘Good Death’ on the Scaffold


 Hillard von Thiessen





3 Privacy in Death? Early Modern French Accounts of Death and Huguenots’ Last Hours


 Michaël Green





4 Urbanity around the Deathbed: Considerations from Early Modern London


 Martin Christ





Part 2: Ideal Deathbeds


5 Deathbed Scenes in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Cross-Cultural Perspectives


 Erik R. Seeman





6 Confessing in the Contexts of Dying and Narratives of Death


 Irene Dingel





7 The Catholic Reformation and the Dying: Confraternities and Preparations for Death in France 1550–1700


 Elizabeth Tingle





8 Dying in Communities: the Ideal Death between Individual and Communal Requirements in Early Modern Protestantism


 Benedikt Brunner





Part 3: Objects and the Moments of Death


9 Candles of Death and the Death of the Virgin Mary as a Model of the Ideal Death on the Threshold of the Early Modern Era


 Vera Henkelmann





10 Contested Kingship – Controversial Coronation: York’s Paper Crown


 Imke Lichterfeld





11 Miseraciones eius super omnia opera eius: Lucas Cranach the Elder’s ‘Der Sterbende’ on the Brink of Reformation?


 Friedrich J. Becher





Part 4: Violence and Diseases


12 The Moment of Death during the Thirty Years’ War


 Sigrun Haude





13 Death Disrupted: Heresy Executions and Spectators in the Low Countries, 1550–1566


 Isabel Casteels





14 Deaths in Hospitals and Care Institutions in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century London


 Vanessa Harding





15 Fleeing the Deathbed: Sensory Anxieties and the Persecution of Non-Catholic Dying Practices in Antwerp, 1560s–1570s


 Louise Deschryver





Index Nominum