Den Tod neu denken

Abstract

Rethinking Death Late Medieval Piety after the Plague The essay uses illustrative texts to contribute to research about the religious interpretation of the plague in the late Middle Ages. While the ars moriendi shows a tendency to individualize dying, the Dance of Death, on the contrary, presents deindividualization as a common fate. This kind of ambiguity is reflected in other literary testimonies too, for example in Boccaccio’s “Decamerone”, or on the eve of the Reformation, in Huldrych Zwingli’s “Plague Song”. While these examples show a reflexive engagement with the inevitability of death, more direct religious acts such as liturgy and prayer had a more direct purpose: they seem to have been intended as tools to avert the plague. These findings show that engagement with death closely mirrors the more general pluralization and polarization of the religious world in the late Middle Ages.