From Ars Moriendi to posthumanist death: the technological rewriting of dying

This article explores the intersection between medieval and posthuman imaginaries of dying by tracing a conceptual lineage from the Ars Moriendi to contemporary practices of technological transcendence. It argues that mind uploading and related transhumanist projects reproduce, in secular form, the moral architecture of the late medieval ‘art of dying well’. Through a cultural and philosophical analysis, the study examines how both frameworks negotiate mortality anxiety, control over death, and the promise of continuity beyond the body. The Ars Moriendi offered ritual mastery through moral discipline; transhumanism offers algorithmic mastery through information. Yet both reconfigure death as a site of human agency rather than passivity. By reading posthumanist death through the lens of medieval thanatology, this article reveals a continuity between soteriology and technoscience – a technological rewriting of dying that transforms salvation into simulation.