Click here to read Ed Simon’s Order of the Good Death essay on how the dawn of the Scientific Age forced thinkers to re-evaluate their notions of mortality:
Anxiety has always surrounded death, but in the seventeenth-century there was perhaps a new fear – of Nothingness. These writers deployed Ars Moriendi and Memento mori to approach death in a century when consoling truths were drifting away, like smoke from a funeral pyre. However, the greatest consideration of mortality from the century, perhaps any century, wrestled with those uncertainties, and spun beauty from our doubts and fears.