In recent years, the rituals and beliefs associated with the end of life have increasingly been identified as being of critical importance in understanding the social and cultural impact of the Reformation. This interdisciplinary collection draws together essays from historians, literary scholars, musicologists and others working at the cutting edge of research in this area to provide an historiographical overview of recent work on dying, death and burial in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe.

Introduction: Dying, death, burial and commemoration in Reformation Europe, Elizabeth Tingle and Jonathan Willis; The pursuit of power: death, dying and the quest for social control in the Palatinate 1547-1610, Ruth Atherton; 'At the hour of our death': praying for the dying in post-Reformation England, Hannah Cleugh; Death, music and the appropriateness of emotions in Reformation England: humanist portrayals of burial and mourning in Musica Rhetorica, Hyun-Ah Kim; Catholic burial and commemoration in early 17th century Lancashire, + Linda O'Halloran and Andrew Spicer; Fraternal commemoration and the London Company of Drapers c.1440-c.1600, Laura Branch; Faith and fury: funerary monuments in Reformation France, Rebecca Constabel; From fire to iron: martyrs and massacre victims in Genevan martyrology, Jameson Tucker; Ghost stories: Noël de Taillepied's Psichologie ou apparition des esprits (1587) and the rehabilitation of Purgatory in late 16th-century France, Elizabeth Tingle; The prodigious garment: a relic becomes real in early modern Spain, María Tausiet; Index.

Dr Elizabeth C. Tingle is Subject Leader and Associate Professor in History at the University of Plymouth. Her research interests are the French Wars of Religions and Catholic religious culture in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her publications include Authority and Society in Nantes during the Wars of Religion 1558-1598 (Manchester University Press, 2006) and Purgatory and Piety in Brittany 1480-1720 (Ashgate, 2012). Dr Jonathan Willis is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in Early Modern History at the department of history, University of Birmingham, UK. He is a historian of the English Reformation, with an interest in the history and theology of late-medieval and early modern Europe more broadly. His publications include By These Means the Sacred Discourses Sink More Deeply into the Minds of Men: Music and Education in Elizabethan England', History (2009), Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Ashgate, 2010), and 'Protestant Worship and the Discourse of Music in Reformation England', in Mears and Ryrie (eds), Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Ashgate, 2013).