by Heike Düselder and Heinrich Schmidt

In our time, death and dying are areas that are largely determined by repression and taboo. Dealing with death has been left to professionals - doctors, hospitals, funeral parlours - and only recently have attempts been made to counter the isolation of the dying and the social marginalisation of death and to once again focus on humane dying. While today we are horrified by a long, agonising death, in medieval and early modern society it was precisely the fear of a sudden end - and what followed - that determined how death was dealt with. The high mortality rate, mortality crises triggered by epidemics or natural disasters, gave death its place in people's lives. The beliefs and ideas of a society still deeply influenced by the church and religiosity, on the other hand, influenced how death was dealt with. Printed Protestant funeral sermons, which have survived from the early modern period, demonstrate the extent to which life and death were interrelated, but also convey an impression of the change in attitudes towards death that emerged in the 18th century.

"Oewich is so long!" Thus it is written in golden letters for the Gottesacker zu Oldenburg, for the unbelievers and the godless to fear because of the eternal torment of hell / which will befall them / for the faithful and god-fearing for comfort because of the eternal refreshment / which they will attain." With these words, spoken by the Golzwarden priest Hinrich Gerken in February 1639 at the funeral of the bailiff Caspar Heigen in his funeral sermon, he conveyed to the bereaved and the rest of the mourners not only the comfort of the church and the certainty that the deceased, who had experienced a 'gentle and blessed' death, would be among the latter. The reference to the late medieval inscription on the gate of Oldenburg's Gertruden Cemetery shows an attitude towards death in which the medieval imagination - the fear of the Last Judgement and the thought of the afterlife - is still extremely present and powerful. In addition, however, the post-Reformation view of Pastor Gerken allows a stronger orientation towards this world to come to the fore: Protestant funeral sermons were intended to demonstrate to the congregation the importance of a Christian way of life and to make it easier for their members to overcome their earthly problems through faith by conveying Christian orientations and behavioural patterns.

Death and dying were a direct everyday experience for most people in the early modern period. A generally high mortality rate, large, sometimes extreme fluctuations and the wide range of ages at death meant that life was unpredictable, i.e. "uncertain" (A. Imhof). Death was an event that was not just an individual, private problem, but a public matter, embedded in religiosity and faith. At the time of Pastor Gerken, church and piety permeated people's private lives and almost all areas of social life, and the authority of the church had a standardising and disciplining effect, particularly through its pastoral tasks, right into the mental sphere.

Just over a century later, a change seems to be emerging: "Baroque piety" was followed in the 18th century by an era which, against the backdrop of the literary and philosophical trends of the time, heralded the end of the unity of church and society and also signalled a turning point in people's attitudes towards death. The Christian view of death slowly and gradually began to lose its claim to absoluteness, death and dying as formerly central areas of life and experience moved into the distance, repression and tabooing began to make themselves felt.

A regional history research project on "Death in Oldenburg" has set itself the task of tracing this change in attitudes towards dying and death over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. The sources available for creating a research context focussed on the history of mentalities are diverse: entries in church registers, death and burial registers provide initial access, and the numerous references to epidemics and plagues, to the devastating storm floods that wiped out the population of entire parishes, to the alarmingly high infant and death rates in some areas right up to the 19th century, and to the death rate of the population of Oldenburg. The numerous references to epidemics and epidemics, to the devastating storm surges that wiped out entire parishes, to the alarmingly high infant and child mortality rates in some areas right up to the 19th century, are impressive evidence of the extent to which death took its place in the life of early modern society and how little distance was possible. Death and the threat to life were at the centre of an underlying mood that shaped social life as a whole and often resulted in a "sceptical attitude" (W. Norden) towards life - at least as historical demography has shown for individual regions of Oldenburg.

Wills and epitaphs, a walk through a cemetery with gravestones from the 16th, 17th or 18th century, and the various manifestations of regional sepulchral culture in general, provide information about how people prepared for and dealt with death. The numerous ordinances issued in Oldenburg in the 17th and 18th centuries concerning burial are informative sources for a socio-historical study of how dying and death were dealt with in a particular historical environment. How this lifeworld was perceived by its members and was more or less clearly recognised as reality, how people behaved and shaped reality through their actions, is provided by a group of sources which, due to their versatility and autonomy, are among the most interesting early modern sources: the printed Protestant funeral sermons and mourning writings of the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries.

A large number of funeral sermons from the early modern period have been preserved in almost every library with old collections, including the Oldenburg State Library. Having funeral sermons printed, handing them over to the bereaved and the mourners, keeping them or even collecting them was a contemporary trend that began in the first half of the 16th century. The first printed funeral sermons were written by Martin Luther (1532), who wanted to see the intention of the Christian funeral sermon primarily in the comforting of the bereaved and the edification and instruction of the congregation. From around the second half of the 16th century, sermons also contained biographical information about the deceased, and from the beginning of the 17th century these 'personalia' finally became independent components of the funeral sermon, which were read out after the actual sermon. Detailed descriptions of the dying, starting with the illnesses or accidents that ultimately led to death, through to the detailed record of the last days, hours, minutes and finally the behaviour of the dying person at the moment of death, form a central motif in the funeral sermons of the 17th century. The depiction of Christian life and death, of coping with individual strokes of fate, and finally of a person's willingness to accept death, were intended to have an uplifting effect on the listeners and later readers of the funeral sermon, and it was no coincidence that the edification books of the 17th century were later referred to as "the old comforters". The end of this literary genre falls roughly in the first half of the 18th century, and by this time funeral sermons had already undergone a noticeable change both in their content and in their external design, which also points to a change in attitude towards death.

The surviving collection of Oldenburg funeral sermons is of a comparatively modest nature, at least in terms of the number of printed works. The Oldenburg State Library owns a collection of personal writings, including numerous funeral sermons, from the estate of the Bardenfleth pastor Johann Samuel Neumann. Individual 'Oldenburg' funeral sermons can be found in the libraries and archives of Lower Saxony. Despite all reservations regarding estimates of the total number of surviving Oldenburg funeral sermons - after all, those holdings and individual copies that have been preserved in private, uncatalogued collections, estates or in individual parish archives are difficult or impossible to record - the review and recording of the 'known' holdings, including duplicates, resulted in a total number of over 400 surviving, largely catalogued funeral sermons and mourning writings for people who died in the region of the former state of Oldenburg.

The printing of a funeral sermon involved considerable financial expense and was therefore reserved for the upper and middle classes: Members of the nobility and members of a mostly academically educated middle class. Civil servants, pastors - and their wives or children - are disproportionately represented, and a look at the family connections of the deceased suggests that the custom of having funeral sermons printed became a "fad" centred on very specific Oldenburg families. In the rural world, for example, printed funeral sermons hardly played a role. The reasons for this apparent lack of interest - but this is still an open research question - may be to be found in the level of education, the costs and also in the lower mobility of the rural population. The travelling, 'external connections', i.e. acquaintances, knowledge of other cities, regions, customs and finally also "fashions" frequently mentioned in the biographies of members of the nobility or bourgeoisie certainly encouraged or even provoked this kind of public self-presentation in the form of a printed funeral sermon.

The ideal concepts of the "good death" that characterised the late Middle Ages continued to have an impact long into the early modern period. The funeral sermons reflect an ideal-typical course of dying, a basic pattern for coping with this difficult area of life. They also reveal a method for dealing with the fear of death, because, as one funeral sermon warned in 1737, "our lives would not be so troubled in many respects / and the end would often not be so terrible if we occupied ourselves in this way at times and learnt to die before we die."

The outbreak of an illness as a concrete threat to life was initially countered with attempts to cure it using household remedies, medicines or with the help of doctors. However, as soon as the illness was recognised and accepted as a sign of imminent death, people began to prepare for death, regardless of their age. Turning away from all earthly things, the "ordering of the last things", is an immediate prerequisite for this. The presence of relatives, the priest, praying and singing, edifying reading and conversations should help the dying person to bear their pain and fears with patience. Confession, absolution and communion, saying goodbye to family, friends and servants marked the end of life on earth, and dying itself was considered ideal if it took place "without any painful feelings", i.e. without any outward signs of pain, fear or anxiety. Questions and answers and the physical behaviour of the dying person, defined by gestures and facial expressions, were used in an attempt to prove their true faith. The intention of the funeral sermons, to show the congregation an example of Christian life and death, did not exclude the possibility of describing what actually happened in the death chamber, even if it obviously contradicted the ideal image portrayed.

Dying and death were still completely independent of age, and the spectrum of causes of death due to illness was extraordinarily broad. Nevertheless, the funeral sermons show different ways of dealing with the death of children, young women who died in childbirth and an old person who a pastor could attest "a fairly healthy age of 75 years". Despite the frequent use of topoi and stereotypes in the personalia, individuality repeatedly emerges, and the specific social and mental-historical significance of the funeral sermons lies above all in the fact that they do not communicate isolated details, but a context of life that made sense in the understanding of the time. When a woman died in childbirth in Burhave in 1639, the pastor also mentioned her serious, melancholy character and her desire to die in the funeral sermon, which struck him as strange: "And regardless of what I and her friends said to her with kind words / she should remember her dear husband and little children / and not so much eulogise them from this world / but rather surrender her will to God's will: After all, dying / dying / was her first and last word."

The few surviving funeral sermons that were written for children - and in this context we should once again refer to the high infant and child mortality rate, which affected almost every family in a more or less drastic way - differ from the sermons for those who died in adulthood and clearly demonstrate the didactic intention of the pastors to provide coping aids here in particular. The sermons contain numerous references to mourning the death of a child, which clearly contradict the theory of a lack of emotion in the early modern family, which is still widespread in the research literature. In 1650, the priest reported in his funeral sermon for Susanna Elisabeth Dorerus, who died at the age of seven on Tormin, that the child had "shown herself so friendly much and often with a laughing little mouth / so that the now saddened parents felt great joy and would have preferred to keep it." Those "present and around" were ultimately astonished "that such a small child / could bear and endure so much pain and heartache / that cold sweat often flowed down its face / for so long." In the end, however, as the funeral sermons emphasise without exception, the certainty of resurrection and eternal life is associated with a blessed, i.e. Christian, life and death.

On the other hand, an unchristian way of life - and judging by the pastors' entries in the church registers, their complaints about the lack of church attendance, the low participation in communion, one sometimes gets the impression that this was the rule rather than the exception - in most cases also resulted in a burial without "Christian ceremonies", without a funeral sermon, quietly and silently and at the edge of the cemetery. Secularisation and privatisation of death and dying

While the printed funeral sermons of the 17th century still functioned primarily as an instrument of the church to shape a Christian habitus, signs of a - rather inconspicuous - change can be recognised from around the beginning of the 18th century. Dying and death increasingly eluded the control of the church, and a process of secularisation made itself felt, which ultimately turned this area into a private matter. In 1725, the Oldenburg church order called on pastors to "exhort the listeners with all diligence that they gladly attend funerals" - an indication of the declining number of people attending funerals. According to the church regulations, the biographies of the deceased were to be written "without prolixity and vain glory", and this is also an indication of the overemphasis on the secular, which individual pastors were obviously tempted to do in funeral sermons. The medieval-early modern continuity of concentrating on the hour of death seems to have ended, the problem of coping with death is no longer at the centre of the funeral sermon, the descriptions of dying become shorter, disappear completely from the 'personalia' or become stagings of piety, as suggested by the self-written curriculum vitae of Anna Catharina von Halem, who died at the age of 45. Origin, education and training, academic appointment and career, in other words life, are now reflected in the funeral sermon to a much greater extent than death. Funeral sermons - eulogies - delivered by relatives or friends at the graveside developed into a genre in their own right, often replacing the church funeral sermon. The change is most evident in the decline of printed funeral sermons. The influence of the Enlightenment took hold of social values and ways of thinking; death in general and its rational management became the subject of discussion. Funeral sermons were increasingly enriched with "a multitude of testimonies from the Scriptures and other books, which tended to be quoted in frequent grades to decorate the speeches", and an orthodox pastor from Tossens complained bitterly in 1741 about this "charletanerie of scholars".

At around the same time as the end of printed funeral sermons, private obituaries appeared in Oldenburg, which were initially published in the "Oldenburgische Wöchentliche Anzeigen" and whose clientele initially comprised the same social groups - the educated middle classes - as those of the printed funeral sermons a century earlier.

Secularisation was even more noticeable in the funeral service: In 1791, hygienic and epidemiological reasons prompted the city of Oldenburg to move the burial ground, which had been located around the Lamberti Church, to the Gertrudenfriedhof cemetery outside the city limits. The burial grounds were separated from the church, placed at an appropriate distance and surrounded by walls outside the towns, thus creating more than just a spatial distance to death and the dead. In the countryside, on the other hand, this need for segregation does not seem to have been nearly as acute - also due to the lack of corresponding official regulations - as the majority of cemeteries here can still be found in the immediate vicinity of the church as the centre of the village to this day.

Heike Düselder has been a research assistant at the Department of History at the University of Oldenburg since 1993. She studied history, sociology and politics in Oldenburg and, after graduating in 1989, worked as a research assistant on two research projects and at the Museumsdorf Cloppenburg. She is researching "Death in Oldenburg" at the Department of History as part of her doctoral project. - Prof Dr Heinrich Schmidt, who was appointed to the professorship for the social history of the Middle Ages at the university in 1976, retired in 1993. His research achievements earned him numerous honours and many tasks. He is still Chair of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen.