Introduction1 Dying in early-modern Europe was simultaneously domestic and public. As a growing body of work on public rituals of death emphasises, funerary processions, funeral sermons or bell ringing involved large numbers of people and in confessionally mixed areas they could constitute posthumous confessions of faith.2 Yet no matter what the chosen faith of a believer, devotion became a domestic, if not a private, matter once someone was bed-ridden.3 Sacraments and sacramentals associated

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... th death had to be performed in a domestic context, and the final hours of a person's life were usually spent in their homes.4 For the clerical authorities, this setting could pose problems of regulation, as it was harder to control the domestic devotions of a dying man or woman than it was to test their faith in a church. It was with this in mind that clerical actors instructed their clergy on how to behave towards their flock in 1 I would like to thank Tom Hamilton, Jamie Page, Lyndal Roper, Carla Roth and the editors for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to the participants of the Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World conference, the PRISMSOX Early Modern Exchange and the Oxford Early Modern Workshop for their useful suggestions. 2 For example, Bärsch J., "Ordo Exsequiarum und 'ehrliches Begräbnis' . Eine vergleichende Analyse katholischer und protestantischer Begräbnisordnungen der frühen Neuzeit aus liturgiewissenschaftlicher Sicht", in Brademann J. -Thies K. (eds.), Liturgisches Handeln als Soziale Praxis. Kirchliche Rituale in der Frühen Neuzeit (Münster: