Confronting death--as God's judgment on sin and as God's doorway to eternal life--and struggling as a "Christian Knight" against the devil, the world, and human desires: these two topics gave Johann Spangenberg, a close friend and devoted adherent of Martin Luther, the basis for one of the most popular pieces of devotional literature in the early years of the German Reformation. In this pamphlet published in the early 1540s, readers encounter an instrument designed to cultivate the piety of the Wittenberg Reformation among the common people, a piety that prepared for death (and thus for daily...