Dying 101: Emotion, Experience, and Learning How to Die in the Late Medieval artes moriendi

This article explores the complex interaction of imagination, self-formation, emotion, and experience at play in the developing ars moriendi genre of late medieval Europe. The art of learning how to die was designed to instruct readers in how to prepare themselves for death. Early exemplars aimed to arouse fear, asking readers to identify with and learn from the experience of a young man dying unprepared. Yet a problem with a strategy of extreme emotional investment was that the emotion of fear could become overwhelming, leading to terrified stasis rather than positive action. A remedy appears through the application to the genre of the emergent epistemology of experience.