Honour and violence in German Lutheran funerals in the confessional age

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Abstract

Based on several detailed accounts of honourable and dishonoured funerals in late sixteenth-century Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig, this paper examines the funeral of the confessional age as the intersection of popular conceptions of community and pollution with Christian ritual and the display of worldly honour. These narrative accounts illustrate the use of death ritual to articulate honour and community or pollution and exclusion, and to call attention to the practice of the funeral ritual, expanding on studies of the funeral based on more general or prescriptive sources. When accounts of eminently honourable funerals are compared with descriptions of the 'maimed rites' of funerals disrupted by popular violence a remarkable symmetry emerges: the essential elements of the honourable Lutheran funeral are precisely inverted or negated in the dishonoured burial, which focuses on the body of the deceased as the source of confessional impurity. Typically, the body was washed and prepared for burial by women. Contrasting the role of women in the honourable funeral with violence against women in a dishonoured funeral reveals the gendering of these rites of violence.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)315-337
Number of pages23
JournalSocial History
Volume20
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 1995
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • History

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