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

Abstract

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