Incunabula Cataloguing Project. IX: Blockbooks (Part 3) – The Art of Dying

The later Middle Ages were tough times in which to be alive. During the 14th and 15th centuries, not only were global temperatures beginning to drop with the onset of the so-called Little Ice Age, there was also widespread famine, pestilence and war. The Black Death in the middle of the 14th century killed an estimated one third to a half of the entire population of Europe. Subsequent outbreaks of plague became endemic.

Having experienced such horrors, it is no wonder that people’s minds turned increasingly to matters spiritual and thoughts of the afterlife. In Europe from the early 15th century, there were a number of artistic and literary responses to these calamitous events, such as the famous Danse Macabre (Dance of Death). These works were reminders to the audience of mortality, the inevitability of death, and of the importance of religion to give them hope.

One such work was the Ars Moriendi (“The Art of Dying”), a book on how to go about having a good death. It was a guide on how to “die well”, containing deathbed advice on believing in Christ and accepting the Church’s teachings, on forgiveness of sin, the power of redemption, how death was not to be feared, and on avoiding temptation in the final hours. Its purpose was to help the dying prepare for death, giving them comfort and counsel, and to help those at the bedside know what to expect and how to respond. It was a popular book among the laity; many manuscript copies were in circulation and with the advent of printing in the 15th century it was produced in larger numbers. About one hundred separate editions of it were printed in the 50 years between the invention of the printing press in the early 1450s and the end of the century.

A shorter version of the Ars Moriendi existed, consisting of condensed text and, importantly, illustrations. This made it an ideal book to produce in blockbook form, with both text and pictures carved into blocks of wood from which multiple impressions were made. Its popularity is attested by the 79 surviving copies (or parts of copies)¹, as blockbooks have only survived in small numbers. It was produced in larger quantities in a number of different editions, but most copies were probably used to destruction or have simply been lost to us over the centuries.

Figure 2: Ars Moriendi – book opening with facing xylographic illustration and explanatory text of the Temptation to Faith. In the illustration, the dying man in his sickbed is surrounded by demons who are tempting the man to unbelief; standing behind the head of the bed are God the Father, the Son and the Virgin; at the foot of the bed are a king and kneeling queen, adoring a pagan idol; in the foreground are two figures, one of whom is being told by a demon to kill himself with a knife. JRL 10123, fols. 1v and 2r.

The Ars Moriendi blockbook was designed to illustrate the temptations of, and the spiritual comfort to, the dying man. Several editions of it exist, all consisting of a short cycle of text and illustrations. The first ten scenes of full-page illustrations show a dying man on his deathbed surrounded by the opposing forces of good and evil (see Figures 2, 3, 4). Arranged in pairs, they depict the devil and demons trying to seize the soul of the dying man through the diabolic temptations (lack of faith, despair, impatience, vainglory (i.e. pride) and avarice), and a counter-scene showing the Good Angel – Bona Inspiration – and attendants giving the dying man good counsel. Opposite each image is a page of xylographic commentary.

Figure 4: (left) Temptation to Vainglory; (right) Exhortation against Vainglory. In the Temptation, the dying man is surrounded by demons who offer him crowns as a reward for his pride; in the background stand God the Father, the Son, the Virgin, and a diminutive Adam and Eve. In the Exhortation, the dying man is surrounded by three angels who call on him to be humble; in the background are the Trinity, the Virgin and St Antony; in the lower corner three sinners (one of them a priest as he has a tonsure) are consumed by flames in the mouth of Hell, whilst a prone demon has a scroll bearing the words Victus sum (“I give up”). JRL 16120, fols. 8v and 9v

The final scene (Figure 5, below) is of the dying man in the hour of his death, triumphant over all temptations. The man, on his deathbed, holds a lit candle; he is surrounded by a monk, the Virgin, Christ on the Cross, St John, the fourteen auxiliary saints, and angels, who are receiving his soul in the form of a small human figure. At the foot of the bed, the demons which have been plaguing him with temptations have been denied and are put to rout.

The John Rylands Library holds two copies of the Ars Moriendi blockbook. The earliest one (JRL 10123) is edition IX, dates from around 1465, and was probably made in the Netherlands. It has contemporary hand-colouring in green, yellow, orange, blue, pink, crimson, vermilion, dark brown, pale brown, and greyish black. The later one (JRL 16120) is edition IV C, is uncoloured, dates from between 1470 and 1488, and was probably produced in Southern Germany, perhaps in Augsburg.

Both copies have been fully digitised. JRL 10123 can be viewed both on Luna and on Manchester Digital Collections (MDC) and JRL 16120 can be found here (Luna) and here (MDC)

1. As listed in the census of surviving copies of blockbooks published in Blockbucher des Mittelalters: Bilderfolgen als Lektuere. Mainz: Von Zabern, 1991. See: ‘Titel-Konkordanz zum Kurrzensus’, pp. 400-401. ↩︎