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It frames Christopher Marlowe’s religious controversy, then explains the psychomachia of the moriens, detailing five deathbed temptations—unbelief, despair, impatience, pride, and avarice—alongside angels, saints, and counselors who cite scripture for divine mercy. It connects ars moriendi and ars vivendi, compares related episodes such as Faerie Queene, and uses Rylands’s Ars Moriendi woodcuts to support classroom discussion of temptation and accountability.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/teaching-doctor-faustus-through-the-ars-moriendi-tradition/597841/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/teaching-doctor-faustus-through-the-ars-moriendi-tradition/597841.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"SANS","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-23","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":81},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"How does the essay link Doctor Faustus to the ars moriendi tradition?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It argues that Doctor Faustus is built around mainstream Christianity’s ars moriendi, focusing on a deathbed struggle between negative temptations and assurances of forgiveness.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What are the five deathbed temptations discussed in the essay?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"The essay lists unbelief, despair, impatience, pride, and avarice, and clarifies that impatience targets death itself while avarice reflects an inappropriate attitude toward worldly goods and other people.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How are the woodcuts from The Ars Moriendi used for teaching?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Students are directed to two woodcuts, including the devil’s temptation to despair, where demons accuse the moriens of specific sins, supporting analysis and discussion in class.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},597841,1792404183,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":81,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":34,"language":139,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":143,"read_time":144},962090760505,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_155a257f0dc6eb9ab79c44ca47cae57d","The CEA Forum  \nWinter/Spring 2008: 37.1  \nNext: What's on the Menu in the Poetry Classroom?  \nTEACHING DOCTOR FAUSTUS THROUGH THE ARS MORIENDI TRADITION  \nMatthew Fike  \nThe rough edges in Christopher Marlowe's intellectual life serve as a foil to the mainstream Christianity in Doctor Faustus: the playwright had a reputation for atheism or at least for unorthodox opinions; papers allegedly found in a writing room that he shared with Thomas Kyd denied the deity of Christ; and twelve days before he was fatally stabbed through the eye in a bar fight, the Privy Council had arrested him for heresy (Gill 214) . Some readers of Marlowe believe that it is hard to tell if the smoke of bad reputation signifies the fire of actual heresy, but there is little doubt that he qualified as an “atheist,” one who disbelieves in God and is unfettered by “moral obligation”(“Atheist”) [1] . Marlowe's reputation for making controversial religious statements is partly due to Kyd, who, under duress, attributed a heretical document to him; and the “ascription may well have been correct”(Kuriyama 125) . And yet,“however scornfully Marlowe rejected the [Christian] system intellectually, it still had a powerful hold of some sort on his imagination and emotions”(Kocher 118-19) . Although Marlowe may not have had a Christian spirit, Doctor Faustus clearly shows that he had a Christian intelligence; for the play is built around an element of mainstream Christianity, the ars moriendi tradition or the art of dying well. This fact has been part of the criticism for over a half century, most helpfully in Beach Langston's hard-to-find but excellent article,“Marlowe's Faustus and the Ars Moriendi Tradition”(1952) . The present essay enhances a subset of Langston's inquiry, the five deathbed temptations (unbelief, despair, impatience, pride, and avarice), not only to outline a very effective way of teaching Doctor Faustus but also to highlight possible connections to other texts frequently read in a British survey or an Elizabethan literature course.  \nBetween the late fifteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, many treatises on the ars moriendi were published in England . The most important was The Ars Moriendi (1450), whose woodcuts, as we shall soon see, are fertile ground for class discussion. [2] Others were written by such familiar scholars as Thomas Becon, Erasmus, Thomas Lupset, and William Perkins; and many of these works are helpfully anthologized in David William Atkinson's The English Ars Moriendi. In Marlowe's time, the ars moriendi was as much“in the air” as one of its subcategories, the “near-death experience,” is today.  \nMore specifically, the dying person, or moriens, is the central figure in a psychomachia on his or her deathbed. This“soul struggle” comes from morality plays in which good and evil compete for the attention of a character like Youth, much as the Good Angel and the Bad Angel compete for Faustus's soul. In the case of the moriens, we find demons in opposition to angels, saints, and good counselors. On the one hand, the demons tempt him with unbelief, despair, impatience, pride, and avarice. Two of these need some clarification: the impatience is for death itself, and avarice means an inappropriate attitude not only toward worldly goods but also toward other people. On the other hand, the angels, saints, and good counselors insist that if Christ's sacrifice has saved far greater sinners, then it will surely save the moriens as well. As in the conversation between the Redcrosse Knight, Despaire, and Una in The Faerie Queene, an episode long acknowledged to participate in the ars moriendi tradition (Fike 110-11, n. 3), a deathbed psychomachia centers on human insufficiency versus divine mercy. The demons remind the moriens of his wicked deeds, while the positive figures cite scripture and the Fathers to provide assurance of forgiveness. He may even seethe crucified Christ on the cross, as Caxton points out in Art and Craft to Know ","cbCaii2JFBsOZ5mt","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaii2JFBsOZ5mt","pdf",223161,"English","# The CEA Forum Overview\n## Marlowe, Religion, and the Ars Moriendi Tradition\n## Deathbed Psychomachia: Temptations and Mercy\n## Ars Moriendi and Ars Vivendi: Living and Dying Well\n## Teaching with Woodcuts from The Ars Moriendi","[{\"question\":\"How does the essay link Doctor Faustus to the ars moriendi tradition?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that Doctor Faustus is built around mainstream Christianity’s ars moriendi, focusing on a deathbed struggle between negative temptations and assurances of forgiveness.\"},{\"question\":\"What are the five deathbed temptations discussed in the essay?\",\"answer\":\"The essay lists unbelief, despair, impatience, pride, and avarice, and clarifies that impatience targets death itself while avarice reflects an inappropriate attitude toward worldly goods and other people.\"},{\"question\":\"How are the woodcuts from The Ars Moriendi used for teaching?\",\"answer\":\"Students are directed to two woodcuts, including the devil’s temptation to despair, where demons accuse the moriens of specific sins, supporting analysis and discussion in class.\"}]","Teaching Doctor Faustus Through the Ars Moriendi Tradition | PDF",1792085813,11]