“Learning to Die: Men’s Care, Women’s Work, and the ‘Ars Moriendi’” with Dr. Amy Appleford

This lecture explores the imagination of the 'good death' in late medieval England alongside aspects of its actual practice. From the late fourteenth-century on, the ideal of the good death was shaped and promoted through vernacular books on the 'art of dying’: archival evidence suggests that these books, which, through a mix of ritual and ethical instruction, allowed their readers to manage the lives and deaths of others as well as prepare for their own, were mostly owned by urban gentry and merchant men. From other evidence, however, it appears that the actual work of preparing others for death at this period was largely associated with women, especially spiritually ambitious women, who sought opportunities in city hospitals or in neighbors' homes to attend at a deathbed. Drawing on ars moriendi manuals, civic and institutional records, and literary texts by Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas Hoccleve, the lecture will trace how 'learning to die' was simultaneously able to play important roles both in literary and civic environments dominated by men and the cultural practices that shaped the religious identities of devout women.

Amy Appleford is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Global Medieval Studies Program at Boston University. Her book, Learning to Die in London, 1380-1530 was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015. She is currently working on a study of the imagination of illness and disability in medieval asceticism.

Sponsored by Center for the Study of Religion, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies