Introduction: Divided by Death? Staging Mortality in the Early Modern Low Countries

The early modern Low Countries formed a multilingual region where Latin and several vernaculars lived in symbiosis. It is often forgotten, however, that Ancient Greek was also cultivated among the cultural and intellectual elite, so intensely that a vast corpus of Greek texts was produced in this region. This article offers a first exploration of the reasons behind this cultural phenomenon. It starts with a general introduction, including a state of research in the field and a first survey of the source materials. The main body of the article is divided into two parts. The first situates the so-called New Ancient Greek literature of the early modern Low Countries in historical perspective by introducing first Greek studies and then Greek composition in this region. Against this background, the second part explores what motivated and inspired this Greek literary production in four sections, each discussing an important aspect of the phenomenon under study: language learning, cultural distinction, networks and communities, and aesthetic appreciation. The article thus demonstrates that writing in Greek in the early modern era had uses far beyond showing off one’s literary talent and erudition.

Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the SupernaturaL Edited by Barbara Walker. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995. Pp. x+ 218, selected bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth, $19.95 paper) Until now, most edited collections on the have been written from a historical, anthropological, or sociological perspective. Folkloristic work on this theme has for the most part been tucked away in journals, making it inaccessible to the general reader and cumbersome for class use. This collection of essays is therefore particularly welcome, as it puts ten articles on various aspects of folk belief and practice regarding the at the disposal of the folklore instructor and the general reader. The book is in part a result of Utah State University's 1991 Fife Conference on folklore and the supernatural, with some articles derived from faculty presentations, plus additional articles the editor solicited from other scholars of the subject. The word supernatural has multiple meanings. As James McClenon explains in his essay Supernatural Experience, Folk Belief, and Spiritual Healing, it emerged from the Enlightenment's separation of reproducible, testable phenomena (part of the natural world) from those that were considered above and beyond nature, and thus not testable or reproducible according to scientific methodology; but in general parlance, it is often used to discredit the beliefs and practices of others. Editor Barbara Walker rightly points out, however, that many things we take for granted are in fact inexplicable-the number pi for example (1). And what is inexplicable according to natural laws in one cultural context is perfectly understandable in another. In other words, what is is culture-specific. This is where this volume excels; it presents a wide range of practices and beliefs from a variety of different cultures: from Native American perceptions of time, space, and interpersonal connections to Taiwanese seances involving ancestor spirits, to the nightmare experience and folk beliefs surrounding it in Hmong immigrant communities in the United States. In all of the articles, the is presented as part of everyday life, not as some mysterious, disconnected, or esoteric force. The beliefs and practices are well contextualized to make sense in the cultural milieus in which they exist. This, along with breadth of cultures covered, makes the book ideal for classroom use in courses on folk religion, folk belief, and the anthropology or sociology of religion. The book is loosely organized into three sections, each consisting of three or four articles: Perception, Belief and Living; Supernatural Power and Other Worlds: Making Contact; and Demons and Gods: Cultural Adaptations and Incorporations-although at times the inclusion of a particular article in one section rather than another seems somewhat arbitrary. One of the most important contributions in this volume is David J. Hufford's essay, Beings Without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Theory of the Belief in Spirits. Here Hufford lays out his experience-centered approach to so-called phenomena. Following his research on the nightmare experience in Newfoundland, Hufford hypothesized that certain supernatural experiences are in fact cross-cultural, somatic experiences which arise independently of preexisting cultural notions and beliefs, though folk beliefs may develop to explain the phenomena. He calls these core experiences, and in this essay he attempts a taxonomy, including the near death experience, or NDE, and the alien abduction experience. Hufford examines the clash and convergence of folk and scientific beliefs in the context of contemporary UFO contact and abduction reports, and notes that scientific knowledge and folk interpretation need not be at odds in attempting to explain this phenomenon. Once again, as in much of his earlier work, he makes a plea for the examination of the phenomenology of belief-the experiences around which beliefs cluster-as a key to understanding belief in spirits and other seemingly experiences. …

Religious buildings are representatives of the cultural and ritual dimensions of ancient civilization, contributing to city morphology and systems. Their architecture provides interpretations and information about past societies’ experiences of place, space, and everyday social and cultural practices. Therefore, this paper focuses on the city of Ugarit, the capital city of a Bronze Age civilization that occupied the northwest part of present-day Syria, and explores the relationship between Ugaritic people’s ritual and cultural dimensions and the architecture of their central and local religious building (temples and sanctuaries). Through an in-depth investigation of archeological reports and text excavated in the city, as well as onsite architectural analysis and observation, this article investigates how the architectural forms and planning of large and small religious buildings in Ugarit were informed by Ugaritic people’s religious practices and cults. The work points out that the Ugaritic people carefully planned their religious buildings on both architectural and urban scales. To fulfill their rituals, the Ugaritic people designed the architecture, structure, and form of their religious buildings based on their religious practices and beliefs rather than being influenced by temple design principles shared in the region. This approach resulted in building forms and architectural/interior arrangements that are distinctive from those of surrounding civilizations and regions.

This chapter addresses the question of the thowt of the love of children. It aims to establish whether deaths of children can be understood a priori as losses, or whether such a view is always already predetermined by our modern interpretive frame. From a historical perspective, in contrast, death must be conceptualized not as a secular but as a predominantly spiritual incident to which meaning is assigned largely through religious beliefs. To date, the history of childhood has been examined mainly by social historians who have studied the lives of farm laborers, maids, and servants. The chapter focuses on other children, precisely those from learned households that belonged to the academic elite. It discusses two principal forms of love in funeral sermons for children: the love of God and the love that children owe their parents. Keywords: Augustinian love of God; children; funeral sermons; Platonic self-love

In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays written by experts in the field explores the full range of material culture in the long eighteenth century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries. The collection of essays and exhibits is the result of collaborative debate by scholars from Europe and north America, who have together worked on the cross-disciplinary importance of material history in making sense of how past society was fundamentally transformed through the world of goods.

Reviewed by: Luthers Tod. Ereignis und Wirkung ed. by Armin Kohnle Robert Kolb Luthers Tod. Ereignis und Wirkung. Edited By Armin Kohnle. Schriften der Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten in Sachsen-Anhalt 23 Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2019. 386 pp. The death of Martin Luther, on February 18, 1546, sent waves through the German empire and far beyond, not only in his own time but also in subsequent decades and centuries. Kohnle's introduction deftly leads readers through the volume's varied perspectives on topics relating to Luther's death and Luther's teaching on death. These studies make clear how profound both the positive and the negative impact of the Wittenberg reformer was and continued [End Page 242] to be. For nearly five hundred years details of his dying and the ways in which the memory of it has been conveyed command attention from both those who use his death to celebrate his reform and also those who continue, without documentation, to assert that he committed suicide or to report that the smell of sulfur, of Satan, filled the room as he died. As is the case with all such collections, the quality of these studies varies. It is not so surprising that the initial essay assessing the development of published counsel for the dying from medieval ars moriendi to reformational books for the dying omits key studies, such as Austra Reinis's Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) or Cornelia Niekus Moore's Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany. Non-German scholarship simply lies beyond the horizon of some. However, the essay's omission of works from the school mobilized by Rudolf Lenz and Eva-Maria Dickhaut is puzzling. It leads to false conclusions, such as the assertion that Lutheran funeral sermons do not reveal active support from those at the bedside of the dying or that these sermons say nothing of the administration of absolution and the Lord's Supper for them (47). More typical of these essays is the second: Volker Leppin's assessment of Luther's engagement with death—his own and others'—and of his pastoral approach to the dying and the grieving highlights the confidence in the gift of eternal life that the reformer proclaimed, sometimes in the face of doubts raised by his own Anfechtungen. Heiner Luck's careful examination of Luther's testament, which violated Saxon civil law in its accord of guardianship of their children to Katherine von Bora, illuminates the radicality of Luther's desire to have his wife in charge of children and legacy. Sabine Kramer's analysis of the impact and implications of her husband's death on and for Katherine, and Christopher Spehr's survey of the fate of the children of Luther and his colleagues, provide enriching details and analysis regarding what his death meant for those closest to him, as does Christine Mundhenk's elucidation of Melanchthon's published reaction to his colleague's death. Michael Beyer opens up a parallel aspect of the Wittenberg Reformation with his insightful exposition of reports on the deaths of Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, and Johannes Bugenhagen. [End Page 243] Luther's death quickly became a media event; Jochen Birkenmeier traces the composition, goal, and impact of the published reports describing how Luther died, based on eyewitness accounts by Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius, Melanchthon's funeral oration, and Bugenhagen's funeral sermon. Klaus Fitschen tracks the legend of Luther's suicide from a book published in 2012 via the more notorious and more detailed work of Paul Majunke (1890) to the claim first voiced by the Dominican Thomas Bozius in 1591. Not only Protestant Luther scholars, including Gustav Kawerau and Theodor Kolde, but also Roman Catholic critics of the Reformer, including Johannes Janssen and Nikolaus Paulus, effectively refuted Majunke's work. Stefan Rhein provides a detailed, insightful literary analysis of the poetic paeans that celebrated the Reformer's career and contributions in the wake of his death. The recent focus of cultural historians on material culture and memorial culture is reflected in several reports, among them, one on Luther's grave marker and its service to the house of...

There was a time when the clergy, medical providers, philosophers, and individuals agreed on how to achieve a happy and holy death. In the fourteenth century, as a response to the horror of the black death, a document emerged that was accepted and adopted by these disparate parties. Translated as the art of dying, the ars moriendi was a set of common instructions and coaching tools to facilitate a peaceful transition for providers and patients alike. The contemporary world needs a new ars moriendi that articulates a triple aim: standardizing the service terms and definitions of hospice and palliative care, promoting early initiation of end-of-life services, and de-emphasizing services provided by intensive care units (ICUs) and emergency departments. If consensus could coalesce around these three goals, the experience of death and dying could be significantly improved.

This study explores the female experience of death in early modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it advances our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. Becker illustrates how dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of how it allowed her to be defined, enabled and elevated. The first part of the book gives a cultural and historical overview of death in early modern England, examining the means by which human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. Becker explores particularly the female experience of death, and how women used the deathbed as a place of power from which to bestow dying maternal blessings, or leave instructions and advice for their survivors. The second part of the study looks at 'good' and 'bad' female deaths. The author discusses the motivation behind the reporting of the deaths and the veracity of such accounts, and highlights the ways in which they could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes. The third section of the book considers how death could, paradoxically, liberate a woman. In this section Becker evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites and sermons, commemorative and autobiographical writing and literary legacies. While accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. This opportunity for expression, along with the power of the deathbed, are the focus for this study.

In one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, John Henry Newman reminded his congregation that ‘Life is short; death is certain; and the world to come is everlasting.’ Although Newman in fact lived to a ripe old age, the Victorian experience of death was alarming and unpredictable in the face of wasting diseases, epidemics, the risks of childbirth, industrial accidents, and the uncertainties of medical science. Death provided plenty of material for reflection, and it was a staple theme of preaching and religious literature. In this imaginative and thought-provoking study, Mary Riso uses the obituaries published in the monthly magazines of four evangelical denominations—Wesleyan Methodists, Primitive Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists—to track beliefs, attitudes, and social aspirations in the middle years of the nineteenth century. She takes 300 obituaries from each denomination, spread across the 1830s, 1850s, and 1870s, and draws on them to explore theology, social background, the influence of Romanticism, and the last words and experiences of the dying. The chronological sweep enables comparisons across the period, both within and between denominations. Thematic chapters address the major topics of Nonconformist death, obituaries as literature, theology, social mobility, denominational variations, the ‘Romantic Spirit’, last words, and the ‘good death’, and a detailed appendix tabulates obituary content by thirty-nine categories of reference, from theological emphases to lifestyle. Close analysis of the obituaries is linked to broader discussions of Victorian religion, society, and culture, and to older traditions of Christian reflection on mortality in the literature of the ars moriendi.Riso discerns a common shape to the obituaries, a basic fourfold narrative pattern of early life, conversion, subsequent activities, and final illness and death. Emphases varied across the years and across the denominations. The general pattern of development detected here seems to have been a gradual decline in dramatic conversion narratives, a growing attention to or willingness to mention professional or vocational successes, a sense of heaven as a place of continued relationship and service, and an increasing proportion of male (and ministerial) obituaries with the passing decades. These trends, however, were manifest in quite different ways in the different denominations. Riso finds the Congregationalists to be the most professional and the most prosperous, while the Primitive Methodists resisted respectability well into the 1870s. Wesleyans, although increasingly well-to-do, retained a vivid spiritual vocabulary, a commitment to entire sanctification, and a much more equal gender balance than the representatives of Old Dissent.By happy coincidence, one character identified in Riso's sample decade of the 1850s was Samuel Budgett (1794–1851), Wesleyan Methodist founder of a highly successful wholesale grocery business, and subject of a substantial and controversial memoir by William Arthur, The Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett (1852). This reviewer was prompted to reflect on the relationship between the obituaries published in the denominational magazines and other extant biographical material, whether funeral sermons and tributes reported in the religious press or full-length books, or, in the case of Methodist ministers, in the officially sanctioned obituaries in the Minutes of Conference. Each was subject to a process of selection, drafting, submission, and editing, but the outcomes seem to have varied considerably. It would be interesting to see some more case studies of the similarities and differences, in content, style, and purpose, between the particular genre of the magazine obituary and memorials shaped for other publications. It would also be illuminating to have some sense of whether Evangelicals in the Church of England (or, indeed, Christians of other theological persuasions) adopted similar or different conventions of memorialization.Dr Riso has read widely in the sources and historiography of nineteenth-century religion, as well as in the various denominational magazines, and she is to be congratulated on a stimulating study which sheds light on the beliefs and values of a significant segment of mid-Victorian society, and which will, no doubt, prompt further investigation and lively debate. This is a worthy and welcome addition to Ashgate's Methodist Studies Series.

If something is ‘a matter of life or death’, we take that to mean it is of critical importance. In spite of this it is only in the last few decades that historians have made death the focus of their study. This collection of essays by social and cultural historians, edited by Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann, focuses on the shadow cast by the dead in twentieth-century Germany. And what a rich subject for analysis this proves to be. The twentieth century was marked by the experience of mass death and destruction. German defeat in the First World War was just one of the factors that fuelled Nazi ideology and the belief that the sacrifice of German soldiers between 1914 and 1918 had to be redeemed for the good of the nation. The Nazis therefore sought to overturn the peace treaty of Versailles from 1919, which laid the responsibility for the First World War firmly at Germany’s door, and to avenge their war dead by restoring Germany to its former position of greatness in the world. The dead, this collection shows, had a central position in propelling the Nazis to power.

Governance of Diversity Between Social Dynamics and Conflicts in Multicultural Cities. A Selected Survey on Historical Bibliography

Margo Swiss and David A. Kent, eds. Speaking G riefin English Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2002. Pp. 365". U.S. $60.00 cloth. This collection of essays complements recent scholarship by such cultural historians as Ralph Houlbrooke and David Cressy in elaborating a more complicated and nuanced representation of early modern grief than the summary picture supplied by Lawrence Stone. It also builds on standard scholarship of literary genres pertaining to grief (most notably G.W. Pigman ill’s study on elegy) to identify important adaptations, resistances, and refinements to tradition and convention in early modern grief-writing. In scholarship that seeks to relate literature to other elements of culture, one of the most interesting questions is how and how adequately the artifice of literature represents and redresses the human experience from which it derives and to which it is addressed. The best essays in the present volume make clear attempts to answer this question in the literature of grief. Three of the best essays discuss female modifications to the generic tradition. Donna J. Long asserts that the maternal elegy (exemplified by Mary Carey, Lucy Hastings, Gertrude Thimelby, and Alice Thornton) should be seen as a mode within the broader genre and one that is shaped by social pressure to restrain grief over the death of a child. In this mode traditional elegiac elements of praise and lament are lost or downplayed and traditional attempts at consolation often fail as the elegist asserts her special role as mother and seeks poetic means to “recuperate” her sense of self. Similarly, W. Scott Howard argues that An Collins finds in the elegy’s traditional progression from private utterance of grief to “a consolation linking the public recognition of loss with universal principles” a pat­ tern for turning her own personal experience of mourning into a call for political action. Most notably, her elegy on the civil war (a poem of public mourning) translates her personal search for redemptive spiritual knowl­ edge into a promise of political reform. Margo Swiss’s essay also makes a connection between the private experience of one woman’s grief and its larger social implications. In a complex argument Swiss asserts that Milton opposes current conventions in depicting Adam’s reasoned but inadequate response to Eve’s “emotionally intelligent” tears which are an appropriate response of grief to her dream in Book 5 of Satan’s temptation. Hers is a “godly sorrow” that prophetically anticipates the universal grief of the Fall and ultimately draws Adam into a union of sorrow and redemption. In their shared grief, Adam and Eve model a “cooperative androgyne” that reflects the affective androgyny in the Father/Son relationship. 280 | Nelson Phillip McCaffrey effectively uses Freud’s distinction between mourn­ ing and melancholy to revisit Andrew Marvell’s problematical depiction of grief in “The Nymph’s complaining for the death of her faun.” McCaffrey augments and refines his theoretical framework with reference to Vamik D. Volkan and Daniel Josephthal’s theory of the “linking object” and his own elaboration of Heinz Kohut’s “self-object” (which he re-styles as “Narcissistic Idol”) to explain the Nymph’s inordinate mourning of her faun as an expression of melancholy that stems from her failure properly to grieve her sense of loss at her betrayal by the unfaithful Sylvio, who gave her the faun but spurned her heart. Michael McClintock’s excellent offering finds in Thomas Heywood’s Apologyfor Actors a theory of “affectivity ” (a character’s ability to project intense emotion) and the role that affective spectacle can play in the reformation of an audience by inciting grief, confession and ultimately reform. He then uses A Woman Killed with Kindness to exemplify Heywood’s contention that the affective force of theatrical representations (of grief in this case) reinforces social order, especially gender roles and familial bonds. Paul Stanwood similarly asserts that John Donne and Jeremy Taylor are able to provide in “artful discourse” an edifying channel for their audiences’s grief, but he does not provide so clear a model of how this artifice works. He shows that Donne followed the practice of his time in dividing his funeral sermons into...

Reviewed by: Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class Ginger S. Frost (bio) Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, by Leonore Davidoff; pp. x + 276. New York: Routledge, 1995, $17.95, £13.95. Worlds Between is a collection of essays by noted British social historian Leonore Davidoff. The collection ranges from her groundbreaking work from the mid-seventies, such as her study of domestic service, to her well-known work with Catherine Hall on the Victorian middle-class family in the mid-eighties, to more recent work on sibling relationships and the public/private dichotomy. Davidoff, in her Introduction, explains the connection between the articles by pointing out that all the topics “come from the margins,” and “are often seen as peripheral to historical and sociological interests” (1). Those categories are so broad, however, that it is probably better to see the book as a capsule picture of Davidoff’s evolution as an historian of gender. In some ways, this book is dissatisfying. Almost none of the articles are original to the collection. Most have been published and even reprinted before; the one exception is the seventh article, on siblings (the last article, too, is a much expanded version of a previously published piece). Since these articles are very well known and, in fact, have been most influential in family history, why republish them here, sometimes for the third time? After all, they have hardly been buried in obscure journals or overlooked by other historians. In addition, Davidoff has included only a short Introduction and no conclusion; [End Page 332] thus, she has made only a superficial effort to connect the works with overarching themes or to trace the trajectory of her thought. She does not even include an index to make it easier for the reader to do so. Even more disappointing, she decided not to try to update most of the articles, but to leave them as they first appeared. Though understandable, this decision means that she missed the opportunity to rethink some of her most interesting ideas in the light of new methodologies and theoretical constructs. And yet, given all that, the collection remains absorbing. Rereading Davidoff’s work means rediscovering her skill and intelligence as a researcher, thinker, and writer, and remembering her enormous impact. Indeed, the very reason that the articles do not seem fresh is that her ideas are so embedded in modern British family history. Though her influence is wide-ranging, this book especially highlights five of its trajectories. First, in all her work, implicitly or explicitly, Davidoff questions historical categories, particularly the division between public and private. Servants, for instance, were paid employees, yet also “part of the family”; landladies ran businesses, but also acted as substitute wives; housework was both a paid occupation and a “natural” aspect of femininity. In her later work, Davidoff has concentrated more and more on examining the very categories as historical entities—how they came into being and how they have influenced historians. She concludes that often “it is classification systems themselves” (11) which determine what will be studied, and so it is all the more important for historians to understand how the systems developed. Second, Davidoff has always made excellent use of a wide range of disciplines, including feminist theory, sociology, and anthropology. Yet she grounds these in a specific historical time. As she insists, “The effort to conceive gender—or class or race—as an abstract logical grid without a notion of historical process is doomed for the categories are only worked out during that process and are emergent in social practices” (10, all emphases as in original). A third major theme of the collection lies in Davidoff’s insistence that the key period in gender and class formation was the “long nineteenth century” between 1780 and 1914. Though she recognizes that many of the ideas and economic forces of the nineteenth century had roots in the early modern period, she asserts that the crucial moment of class and gender formation was the age of industrialism. This period saw the hardening of gender ideology, the “rationalization” of housework, the problematic (and sometimes imaginary) separation of home from work and private from...

Since the Chinese Communists took control of Inner Mongolia, very little has been written about the region. This book is an attempt to redress the balance. It is a study of the effect of decades of social engineering on a Minority Nationality in China. David Sneath charts the recent history of the pastoral Mongolians of Inner Mongolia since they became the subjects of the Chinese Communist state, and examines the society that has emerged since the abolition of the Communes in the 1980s. He explores the history of local economic and political forms to illuminate the transformations and continuities of life in pastoral Mongolian society, and offers an account that includes both the swings of national and regional government policy and the experiences of individuals subject to those changes. By taking a historical perspective his study reveals underlying modes of symbolism, and notions of domestic organization and paternalistic authority, that have remained fundamental to pastoralism in Inner Mongolia. It suggests an indigenous mechanism for economic inequality and dependency in pastoral society, one that has helped to shape the pastoral nomadic sociopolitical order of the past.

Child labour is a controversial issue both in present day as well as in past societies. In historical perspective, studies focus on the factory labour of children during the industrialization process. On the one hand, its contribution to the family income is mentioned as a potential positive effect on the living standard of the whole family, on the other hand reference is made to the permanent health risks for children working in the factories. Using qualitative sources, there were contemporary testimonies supporting both views. The present paper, therefore, uses a rather quantitive approach referring to the number of working days lost due to illness, anthropometric indicators such a height and weight, the results of draft examinations as well as mortality differences and cause-of-death rates from “accidents” in urban and rural areas during the nineteenth century. Available data do not provide clear evidence of direct harmful effects of child labour; many indications point to a neutral or even positive effect.