ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a survey of some of that literature, in English, near the close of the Middle Ages. It explores a range of literary texts that dramatize the dying process, from the well-known to the much less so. Like some of the other texts the people have considered, Everyman seems driven in part by a new emphasis on death's unpredictability. If the macabre is focused on the body as the period's many debate poems between "body" and "soul" also attest it is in part because it is the body that is also the site of a possible redemption. Still, it can be argued that the macabre was imbued with a heightened sense of drama in the late Middle Ages, so much so that this period seems to the reader in retrospect to have been a defining moment in the history of death.
