The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi

Mary Catharine O'Connor's The Art of Dying Well is a scholarly academic study, published by Columbia University Press, of the ars moriendi genre, the medieval and early modern devotional literature instructing Christians on how to die a good death, tracing its two main surviving textual traditions. Despite its age it remains a standard reference specifically because it establishes the genre's basic textual history with care that later scholarship has continued to build on rather than overturn. Its limit is the ordinary one for a study from the 1940s, later art historical and literary scholarship has added detail on the genre's illustrated versions and its wider European variants that this text focused study from before that later work does not cover, so a claim about the genre's visual tradition specifically benefits from a more recent art historical source.