Five Temptations a Dying Person Must Face, and the Virtue That Answers Each

Ars Moriendi, the Art of Dying, names a genre as much as a single text, surviving in two main medieval versions, a longer treatise from around 1415 and a shorter, heavily illustrated block book version from around 1450 that circulated even more widely because its images let an unlettered reader follow the argument through pictures rather than only text.

The work structures the moment of death as a spiritual battle, presenting a series of temptations the dying person faces, commonly including doubt in faith, despair over one's sins, impatience with suffering, spiritual pride at having endured well, and excessive attachment to worldly things and people, and pairing each temptation with the corresponding virtue and specific prayers or actions that answer it, giving both the dying person and those attending them a concrete script to follow at the deathbed rather than leaving the encounter with mortality entirely improvised. The illustrated block book version paired each temptation with a woodcut image showing demons tempting the dying figure on one side of the bed and angels offering the counter virtue on the other, a visual structure that let the whole argument be followed at a glance even by a reader unable to read the accompanying text closely.