The Death of Christ as a Focus of the Fifteenth-century Artes moriendi

I.

The last request of the fourteenth-century Augustinian monk Hermann of Halle was to have Matthew’s account of the Passion of Christ read out loud to him.¹ A hundred years earlier, Bonaventure reported that St. Francis, too, had asked on his deathbed to hear the Passion as recorded by John. As early as the twelfth century, a Ritual of the monastery of Augustinian canons in St. Florian decreed that the Passion be read to the dying.² Clearly, the Biblical accounts of Christ’s suffering and death were deemed appropriate reading for the dying in the Middle Ages; presumably, they offered comfort to those confronting emotional or physical anguish—or both—in their final hours.

The affective piety of the late Middle Ages made especially effective use of the Biblical texts by extracting from them the most emphatic or most moving elements for use in new types of literature on death and dying. In a series of Latin and vernacular texts known as Artes moriendi, fifteenth-century authors skillfully used details of Christ’s suffering to allay the spiritual agony of readers and listeners preparing for their own death. These Artes moriendi typically depict the visitation of a dying man by angels and demons, appearing in regular alternation to urge the moribund to repentance or to sin.

Obviously, literary treatments of death and dying vastly predate the composition of the first Artes moriendi.³ But the repeated outbreaks of disease beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, coupled with what seemed to contemporaries to be ever more frequent experiences of war and famine and the mundane fact that a priest could not always be present at a person’s death,⁴ created the need for a set of textual “instructions” and helped the late medieval Ars moriendi flourish as a literary type.⁵

In this study, the genre term Ars moriendi refers specifically to two distinct, but related, Latin texts. One, possibly composed in Vienna during or soon after the Council of Constance (1414), is the Speculum artis bene moriendi, “The Mirror of the Art of Dying Well,” a Latin prose work disseminated in manuscripts and early prints; for the sake of clarity, I will refer to this long, purely textual Ars moriendi as the Speculum.⁶ While the current consensus identifies the Speculum as the older of the two Latin Ars moriendi discussed here, other scholars have given chronological precedence to the version that is often simply—and confusingly—termed the “shorter” Ars moriendi, or, in German scholarship, the “Bilder Ars-moriendi” (Picture Ars-moriendi).⁷ As the earliest known copy of the “Bilder Ars-moriendi” is a blockbook edition apparently from the 1460s,⁸ I refer to this shorter, illustrated text as the blockbook Ars.⁹

These two Latin texts, the Speculum and the blockbook Ars, rely particularly on Jean Gerson’s early fifteenth-century Opus tripartitum, the third part of which is entitled La Médecine de l’âme, itself sometimes known as Gerson’s Ars moriendi.¹⁰ The Speculum and the blockbook Ars, in turn, provide the inspiration for later works, both Latin and vernacular.¹¹

The following works in the Ars moriendi tradition are especially important to this study: the Speculum (early to mid-fifteenth century, after Gerson’s Opus Tripartitum),¹² the blockbook Ars (editio princeps ca. 1450),¹³ the anonymous English Crafte and Knowledge For to Dye Well (ca. 1490),¹⁴ William Caxton’s The Arte and Crafte to Know Well to Dye (1490),¹⁵ and Caxton’s Abridged Craft (1491).¹⁶ As this essay shows, these five texts share an emphasis on Christ’s Passion, but at the same time, through various differences, ranging from lexical choices to choices of medium, each text lays claim to individuality.

II. OVERVIEW OF THE TEXTS

The oldest of these five texts, the Speculum, is divided into six parts, preceded by an introduction. The introduction, observing that the journey of death may seem difficult and dangerous to many people, establishes the need for a text that teaches the art...