The Ars Moriendi is a Mediaeval Christian death manual that appeared around the middle of the fifteenth century. Though no-one is certain who the author was, there is no doubt that Jean Gerson was the major inspiration through his Opusculum Tripartitum. The general consensus is that the text was written by a member of the mendicant orders, probably a Dominican, and it was through them that the text spread so rapidly across Europe. The text was originally written in Latin with translations into the various vernaculars coming later. The Ars Moriendi appears in almost every major European language. I choose to limit my study to those in Latin. Since there are two Latin traditions, the longer or CP, and the shorter or QS, I further narrowed the field of study and concentrated exclusively on the latter. The text seems to have been produced as a response to the devastation of the Black Death. With so many priests either dead or missing. The popularity of a manual that instructed how to die in a way that ensured one made it to heaven is easy to understand. Of the three hundred known manuscripts, only six are of the shorter version. Five of these I have studied. The sixth unhappily was destroyed in 1944 in Metz. This paucity is not surprising since the true appeal of this work is the woodcut. Of the five manuscripts, at least two were copied from printed editions. The text itself is not very impressive as it is comprised mostly of various quotations from the Church Fathers and the Vulgate. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Our thesis set out to translate, with relevant commentary, the three prose passages found in the MS. Cotton Vitellius A. xv. The contribution we are convinced this translation makes to Old English studies, along with the importance attached to the manuscript containing Beowulf, is the justification for our thesis. After commenting on the contents of the manuscript in general, our study turns to the matter of the three prose passages. Here we discover remarkable correspondence in material and in the approach of the Anglo-Saxon redactor to that material. Monster and marvel are combined in the texts in such a way as to provide us with the conclusion that the passages were gathered under one cover to preserve a literary motif. Beginning with the Life of St. Christopher, the texts are introduced individually. We infer an Eastern origin for the Life of St. Christopher, but is immediate predecessor was Latin. Similar treatment of the Wonders of the East and the Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle indicate a tradition in the pattern of their transmission. Each reveals an Eastern origin, a preoccupation with the monstrous and the marvellous, and an immediate Latin predecessor. A brief review of the problems connected with working with a manuscript of irregular punctuation (and no physical structure) introduces the three prose passages in translation. We have endeavoured to produce a text that is both readable and as close as possible to the original in structure. The translations are annotated throughout to provide the reader with both a knowledge of textual problems and an awareness of similarities of content among the three passages and Beowulf. While we worked with published editions of these works in Anglo-Saxon, we very carefully checked these against the recently published facsimile of the manuscript; in some instances, this double-checking enabled us to discover meanings that did not seem clear in the printed editions.

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