ABSTRACT
The beginning of the eighteenth century saw a boom in publications on the theory and practice of court ceremony in Germany. Working from printed and archival sources, authors such as the above-cited Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Johann Lunig and Friedrich Karl von Moser extracted a codification of norms from the practices of preceding centuries. The funeral publications of Electoral Saxony, including those by the secundogeniture courts, are dominated by their ceremonial elements. Throughout the sixteenth century Electoral funerals were commemorated in modest quarto publications, published at the expense of the preachers and authors themselves or commissioned by publishers. By the early seventeenth century there was a general move by the courts to centralize and gain exclusive control over this publishing activity, and in the course of the century most of the Protestant courts of the empire began to produce elaborate funeral books.
