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. The project, whose first results are here presented, moves from the premises just called up and involves the fulfilment of the first Italian Repertoire of the Artes moriendi published between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth centuries. The Italian Repertoire presented here covers a three-century time span (xvi-xviii centuries) and, at the present state of the research, it includes more than 250 titles. This significant corpus of titles has been analysed through a sociological approach, supported by graphics in order to portray the main ‘trends’ of the production and circulation of Artes moriendi in the Italian society in the modern age, to identify the typologies of authors, and to recognise ‘best sellers’, subgenres and specific categories of readers. This analysis is supported by a reflection of contextualisation on ‘well dying’, a theme that in the modern-era Catholic Europe, and especially in the period of maximum development of the literature of preparation for death (second half of the xvi century – xvii century), is treated on the basis of a precise theological conception, i.e. the one elaborated by the Council of Trent, in which pastoral dimension, disciplining and educational action represented an unbreakable unit. The Tridentine theology is, in fact, the breeding ground of this literary genre of long duration. Although over time this literature specialises and differentiates itself according to the recipients and shows significant adjustments of its shape and style to the spirit of its time, it is also true that it always proposes the same ‘pedagogy of death’. We refer to that educational idea which covers the whole life of a person and which passes first and foremost through a series of practices of good Christian life, declined according to patterns and principles defined in their essential shape in the second half of the Sixteenth century. A rich variety of works has been developed along these lines, a long, uninterrupted series of titles where you can easily find out the contact points linking, for example, a great classic of the genre such as the De arte bene moriendi (The art of dying well, 1620) by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, written between the Sixteenth century and the Seventeenth century, to a milestone of the xviii-century literature on well-dying, such as L’apparecchio alla morte (Preparation for Death, 1758) by St. Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori.