It was in the 15th Century, around 60 years after the trauma of the Black Death, that the first version of Ars Moriendi was published. The Black Death had thaught the Catholic Church a lesson: there was going to be times when the number of people dying would be too high for the Church’s men to assist all of them — sometimes things could get real busy — and as a consequence the Church saw a need for additional and alternative ways to spread knowledge of how to die properly. On one hand what was needed was an instructional guide for the clergy, but on the other hand why not also aim for some sort of self-help manual for anybody who … well, anybody who was prone to die one day? The answer came by way of some finely carved woodblocks and Johannes Gutenberg’s “new invention” of book printing.
When we talk about Ars Moriendi, we really talk about two texts: a long version and a short version, both of which were wildly popular, and were translated into most Western European languages. It was the short version — which was an adaptation of the second chapter of the long version — that came with woodcut illustrations. These images were sometimes also circulated as individual engravings, for people to hang on their walls.
We know of eleven different sets of blockbook woodcuts, but as far as I’ve been able to find out we don’t know the identity of any of the artists. Below are the eleven woodcuts of a German edition from 1466, in the order they appear in the book:
