"Death is the Best Doctor": Protestant Teachings on the Body and Soul in Reformation Germany

This article explores how Protestant clergy sought to comfort and instruct the living on how to prepare their bodies for their hoped-for spiritual elevation to heaven after death; it considers the relationship of the body to the soul and their respective states in the period after death but before the Last Judgement; and it examines what reformers taught about the nature of the soul after death. The article focuses on Protestant consolatory literature, especially funeral sermons, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.