The project in short
Concentrating on two main groups of sources, epitaphs and funeral sermons, the project sets out to investigate the cultural changes of death in the Lutheran Kingdom of Denmark-Norway in the 16th and early 17th century. The European context is constituted primarily by the homeland of Lutheranism, Germany/Saxony.
Our research into the epitaphs intends to shed light on their place and function in religious, social, and aesthetic terms in the Lutheran church interior in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In what way did they present the Lutheran heroes to be remembered by these monuments?
The Funeral sermons offered the occasion to develop a narrative about the dead person. Here, Late Medieval traditions not only from the Legends of the saints but also from the Ars Moriendi contribute to the profile and content of this genre in the Protestant context.
The interdisciplinary profile and the comparative perspectives are both essential to the project. Some new answers to the overall question about new ways of negotiating between the living and the dead in Reformation Culture are supposed to be presented at the end of our work.
Background
The project was initiated in 2010, as a collaboration between The Faculty of Theology and Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo. The head of the project is Professor dr. theol Tarald Rasmussen at the Faculty of Theology
Financing
The project is funded by The Research Council of Norway (FRIHUM) and runs through 2013.
More about the project
The first part of the application provides a wider presentation of the project. (doc)