Written Because the Black Death Had Left Too Few Priests to Go Around

O'Connor's study of the genre situates the Ars Moriendi's composition against the catastrophic mortality of the Black Death and its recurring later outbreaks, periods during which the ordinary expectation that a priest would be present to guide a dying person through confession and last rites frequently could not be met, since clergy themselves died in large numbers or simply could not reach every dying parishioner during a mass epidemic.

The text was designed explicitly to let a layperson, whether the dying person or a family member and friend at the bedside, carry out a spiritually adequate preparation for death without a priest necessarily present, a genuinely practical response to a real pastoral emergency rather than only a theological exercise. Its influence extended for centuries after the immediate crisis that prompted it, shaping later printed good death literature across Protestant as well as Catholic Europe, since the underlying concern, dying well and preparing others to die well, remained a central preoccupation of Western Christian devotional writing long after the plague years that first gave the genre its urgency. Protestant reformers later produced their own versions of the same genre, adapting its structure while removing elements tied specifically to Catholic sacramental practice.