Reforming the Art of Dying
The Ars Moriendi in the German Reformation (1519-1528)
Description:... The Reformation forced Christians to reconsider virtually every aspect of their faith, and those who embraced Luther's teachings had to find new ways of dealing with the many aspects of their lives. Nowhere is this more true than with death. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church had an established and sophisticated mechanism for dealing with death and its consequences, all of which were rejected by the Protestant reformers. In order to fill this gap and offer comfort to the dying, they produced new church orders and published handbooks on dying. This study focuses on the earliest of these Protestant handbooks, beginning with Luther's Sermon on Preparing to Die in 1519 and ending with Jakob Otter's Christlich leben vnd sterben in 1528.
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