The art of dying, a Latin handbook produced in the aftermath of the plague years to prepare a lay reader for their own death and to guide whoever sat with the dying. It names five temptations that come at the end, against faith, to despair, to impatience, to pride and to attachment to possessions, and gives the consolation to set against each. A shorter picture version circulated as a block book with eleven woodcuts and carried the material to people who could not read. It marks a shift in responsibility toward the dying person and away from the priest, and it stands behind a long line of later manuals on the same subject.
Facts
Scholarship
Critical EditionMary Catharine O'Connor's The Art of Dying Well, 1942, established the standard scholarly account distinguishing the earlier long treatise from the shorter, illustrated Ars Moriendi tradition it produced. 1 First PublishedThe illustrated block book version was first printed in the southern Netherlands around 1450, among the earliest European printed books; the longer Latin treatise had already circulated in manuscript from about 1415. 1 TransmissionThe block book version, printed from carved wooden blocks rather than movable type, was reproduced with woodcut illustrations that were copied and adapted across many vernacular editions throughout the fifteenth century. 1 Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / Compiler Composition NoteTwo main medieval versions survive: a longer treatise from around 1415 and a shorter, illustrated block-book version from around 1450 1Tradition: Western Christian (late medieval) Text
Literary Form Transmission
Manuscript TraditionSurvives in two distinct textual traditions, a longer Latin treatise and a shorter, heavily illustrated block book version, which circulated separately and were sometimes treated by later scholars as two unrelated works before their common origin was established. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteComposed against the mortality of the Black Death and its recurrences, when a priest was often unavailable to attend the dying 1Tradition: Western Christian (late medieval) Learn More
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.
Written Because the Black Death Had Left Too Few Priests to Go Around
O'Connor's study of the genre situates the Ars Moriendi's composition against the catastrophic mortality of the Black Death and its recurring later outbreaks, periods during which the ordinary expectation that a priest would be present to guide a dying person through confession and last rites frequently could not be met, since clergy themselves died in large numbers or simply could not reach every dying parishioner during a mass epidemic.
The text was designed explicitly to let a layperson, whether the dying person or a family member and friend at the bedside, carry out a spiritually adequate preparation for death without a priest necessarily present, a genuinely practical response to a real pastoral emergency rather than only a theological exercise. Its influence extended for centuries after the immediate crisis that prompted it, shaping later printed good death literature across Protestant as well as Catholic Europe, since the underlying concern, dying well and preparing others to die well, remained a central preoccupation of Western Christian devotional writing long after the plague years that first gave the genre its urgency. Protestant reformers later produced their own versions of the same genre, adapting its structure while removing elements tied specifically to Catholic sacramental practice.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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