It is a short dialogue between a Ploughman, who ploughed with feather (that means he was not a peasant, but a clerk) written in Middle High German. The ploughman laments the early death of his wife Margaretha, whom he loves dearly, and accused the Death of injustice. The Death answers in plural form "We", like God do in the second last chapter of this dialogue. The Death attests that the wife of the ploughman has been a very virtuous woman, but refuses to acknowledge the injustice down to the ploughman. As everyone who is once born must die, disregarding with what age and who. The ploughman lists the virtues and great deeds of man, but the Death laughs at the folly of man. The ploughman praises the luck of family life, the Death numbers all the disadvantages of a married life. The ploughman sings a hymn of beautiful and virtuous women, the Death sneers and plays the role of the worst misogynist. The ploughman asks sincerely for advices to make amend of sorry, the Death stresses the uselessness of all hope to find remedy for the loss. In the end God comes to settle the quarrel, and tells the Death to be humble as the power of Death comes only from God. The ploughman is praised for his courage but is also asked to rest the case, because, as God is written as saying: "Every human being is obliged to give the Death his life, the Earth his body, and Us his soul" (chapter 33). Thus, the ploughman calms down and prays for the soul of his wife. The last chapter (34) consists in a very long and moving prayers which assembles a litany, in which the ploughman addresses God in all his attributes as the Creator and Lord of our life and existence.
But I don't quite see which function the quarrel can have: the Death appears in the role of a cynic. Life is nothing than sorrow and hardship, human beings are bad, hope and joy make only the loss of what is dear to us more painful. The human body is nothing than a cadaver, given over to the worms. The ploughman is in comparison a lover of the mankind and tries his best to defend the value of life and dignity of man, because, as he stresses on many places, man is the creature of God so can't be as bad and unworthy as the Death sees him. But neither party lets himself be convinced by only one point of his opponent. So it is a riddle to me what the point of this dialogue is. Perhaps the writer only wants to show the unreconcilable antithesis of the human existence: Life and Death, Joy and Sorrow. Without the Christian Faith it will ends in an aporia. Without the Christian Faith we will go back to the hopeless melancholy of Horace, whose only advices to overcome this antithesis is to carpe diem, and drown your sorrow in the drunkenness. While the Death in this dialogue tells one, despite all his sneers, to "avoid the evil and do what is good, to search for the peace and to keep it constantly. And one should not overestimate the earthly joy and possessions. Above all, one should have a pure conscious". So the Death as cynic is not a hedonist nor a nihilist. He is a curing cynic like the cynics in Lucian's Satire: the cynic is there to keep people honest and to free their soul from foul spots and superfluous sorrow and conceitedness.
One chapter (chapter 16) where the Death describes himself is especially interesting, which I translate as in the following:
"You ask, what we are: We are nothing and are nevertheless something. We are nothing, because we have no life nor substance, no figure nor duration (unterstand: not quite sure what meaning this word in Mhd. has). We are again something, because we are the End of Life, the End of the Existence, the Begin of Nothing, a thing between both of them. [...]".
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