Title: Arte de bien morir / Rodrigo Fernández de Santaella
Abstract: This thesis provides editions of the texts of the fifteenthcentury Spanish translations of the Medieval Latin work Ars moriendi, an influential and popular devotional treatise widely disseminated throughout Europe.The Ars moriendi is one of the literary manifestations of the death cult in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.An indication of its popularity is the fact that there are at least three hundred extant mss and that by 1500 it had undergone over a hundred editions, in Latin and in translation into most of the Western vernaculars, including German, French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Catalan, Italian, Swedish etc.The work is of textual and literary interest in its own right, but added significance is given to it by its importance as an indicator of social and religious attitudes to the problem of death towards the close of the Middle Ages.The Ars moriendi offered a Christian response to the exaggerations and distortions that the topic of death originated in the late Medieval period.There are five extant texts of the Ars moriendi in Spanish, three mss and two prints