“Arts of Dying went to press in spring 2019 and appeared in April 2020, making it a prescient, disquieting book. Smith covers five hundred years of English literature, from Aelfric in the tenth century to Audelay in the 15th, and his philosophical range is wide, extending from medieval terminist logic and the Oxford Calculators to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida and Blanchot. He is especially taken with Heidegger’s idea of Songe or care, as Sein zum Tode—being-towards-death. Such orientation builds a bridge between medieval preoccupation with ars moriendi, the craft of dying, and the existentialist conviction that authentic freedom comes from living in the face of death.”

LRB

"A com­mitment to life shimmers in the compressed energy of thought that courses through the pages of Arts of Dying and animates the medieval English corpus of finitude with new vivacity."

Studies in the Age of Chaucer

“Death is a sophism: we are never in death, only dying all the time. Hence death is work. In this supremely astute, readable, and intelligent book, Smith studies the work of death in Old English poetry and medieval logic, showing how these poets’ and thinkers’ insights about the separation of soul from body, entombment in a crypt, or dispersal in an archive of mourning fully anticipate the analyses of Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Derrida. A true feast for thought!"

Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

 “Arts of Dying is an ambitious study that offers a philosophically and theoretically driven analysis of the treatment of death and dying in a wide range of Old and Middle English texts. Death, as they say, is one of the two great topics of all literature, but Smith offers a compelling and highly original treatment of it. The book is positively breathtaking and provides new and important insights throughout.”

Larry Scanlon, author of Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition

"Arts of Dying explores how medieval writers transformed the individual experience that we must all face alone into a collective one shared across every level of society. Immensely learned, gracefully written, and philosophically agile, it shows us that death is just as much a linguistic act as a physical one. How do we talk about something that has not yet happened to us and about which, once it does, we cannot speak? In focusing on the long now of ‘dying’ rather than the discrete moment of death, Smith documents how these writers handled a tricky temporal problem: the narration of finitude before the end has been reached. This is intellectual history at its best, a poignant project that returns to medieval literature as a place from which to rethink our modern attitudes about death as well as the limits of knowledge."

Kellie Robertson, author of Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy

"Smith’s capacious and attentive understanding illuminates the texts he discusses here; death is treated with authentic philosophical profundity, and this book deserves and requires a similar attentiveness from its reader."

Modern Philosophy

"Covering English literature from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, Arts of Dying demonstrates that literature, like dying, is never complete, always open for interpretation, and that medieval thinking about finitude is more complex than the endless mourning characteristic of postmodern philosophy. “No medieval subject” could have embraced boundless despair, Smith insists, because teaching about transcendence endowed dying with “deep responsibility.” Incisive close readings of primary sources make each chapter compelling on its own, but as a whole, Arts of Dying beautifully and profoundly meditates on that responsibility."

Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures

"Smith is a good close reader, and he introduces the non-specialist to lesser known poems and texts of real interest."

Mediaevistik