The Artes Moriendi as Source for the History of Education in Modern History. First Research Notes

This article aims at contributing to the debate on educational approaches and practices developed by the Old Regime society to prepare people for the ineluctable event of death, focusing on a specific literary sources with great heuristic potential, such as the texts that deal with preparing for well dying. The study of the writing and dissemination of the so-called Artes moriendi has a long tradition, which has its roots in the pioneering researches carried out by Annales historians, who –as we know– have inaugurated a series of studies, which could even have very different approaches and objectives, and which are usually listed under the common label of ‘the history of death’. In particular, the first historians who studied the literature on well dying were Alberto Tenenti, who focused on the phase of the genre origins, and later on Roger Chartier and Daniel Roche, who specifically examined the French context in the modern age. Currently, despite the literal ‘explosion’ of the ‘historiography of death’, recorded since the early Nineties of the last century, the interest for a systematic study of the Artes moriendi –apart from important works such as the one carried out by Fernando Martínez Gil for Spain– is still poorly grown or, at best, as its the case with the Italian context, it is pursued in a circumscribed way, i.e. a latere of researches focusing on other types of sources, such as the wills, or on specific personalities whose literary production includes also a text on ars moriendi.