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CHAPTER 1

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Spiritual Governance and the Lay Household

The Visitation of the Sick

The Second Estate: Thomas Wimbledon’s Redde rationem

“Alas, alas, þilke grete citee þat was cloþed wiþ bisse [linen] and purpre and brasile [dyed fabric] and overgilt wiþ gold and precious stones and perles. For in on hour alle þese grete richessis beþ distroied” (Revelation 3:16–17). Þan shulleþ þey seye þat shulleþ be dampned wiþ hire [i.e., the city]: “We have erred fro þe wey of trewþe and of ryȝtfulnesse. Liȝt haþ not schyned to us, and þe sunne of undirstondyng haþ not rysen to us. We haveþ be maade wery in þe wey of wikkednesse and of loost [lust], and we haveþ go [gone] harde weyes. But þe wey of God we knewe not. What haþ pride profited to us, oþer [or] þe bost of oure richesse? What haþ it brouȝt to us? Al is go as a schadewe of deeþ, and we mowe [may] now schewe no tokene of holynesse; in oure wikkednesse we beþ wasted awey” (Wisdom 8:6–13). Þynk þerfore, I rede [advise], þat þou schalt ȝelde rekenyng [you must give an account] of þy balye [stewardship] (Luke 16:2).¹

So ends the first part of Thomas Wimbledon’s celebrated Redde rationem villicationis tue (give an account of your stewardship: Luke 16:2), a sermon preached in 1388 at Paul’s Cross in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of the largest open spaces within the city walls, before a mixed assemblage of Londoners, setting out the duties of the three estates, chastising them for their failures, and looking forward to the coming judgment.² The kingdom of heaven is like a “housholdynge man.” Christ assigns the work of the household to “þre offices: presthod, knyȝthod, and laboreris.” All three estates are intricately interdependent and none must fail, lest the household perish through “defaute [lack] of knowyng of Goddis lawe,” increase of “þeves and enemies,” or the “defaute of bodily sustenaunce” that follows when “bakeris … makeris of cloth … marchaundis,” and others do not do their work.³ Therefore “every staat [estate] shul [must] love oþer and men of o [one] craft shulde neiþer hate ne despise men of anoþer crafte,”⁴ while, at the judgment, all must give a “streyt rekenyng” to Christ, their householder, answering three questions of their governance or stewardship over others or themselves: “how hast þou entred? … how hast þou reuled? … how hast þou lyvyd?”⁵

Suddenly, however, it is as though the judgment is now. All the estates, “every curat and prelat of holy chirche,” “kynges, princys, maires, and schyrevys [sheriffs], and justices,” and “every Cristene man,” are summoned to the preacher’s rhetorical bar, where one sin over all is found to destroy the household of Christ: covetousness, the one sin so ravenous it “may not bee fulfillid.”⁶ This is the sin that prevents the old from repenting even when they know death “graunteþ no respit” but brings us “wiþouten dalay” to our reckoning.⁷ This is also the sin that must soon—perhaps as soon as 1400, “not fully twelve ȝeer and an half lackynge,” according to one learned reader of “Abot Joachym” and “mayde Hildegare”—draw the world to its close.⁸ The opening of the Seven Seals is almost done; the opening of the great book of life that follows is at hand. “Loke þerfor now what þyng is writen in þe bok of þy conscience whyle þou art here. And ȝif þou fyndest out [anything] contrarie to Cristis lif oþer to his techynge, wiþ þe knyf of penaunce and repentaunce scrape it awey and write it beterer [better], evermore hertily þynkynge þat þou schalt ȝelde rekenynge of þy baylie.”⁹ “For in what state so evere a mannes laste day fyndeþ hym whan he goþ out of þis world, in þe same state he bryngeþ hym to his dom.”¹⁰

With its apocalyptic account of a city and a culture gone astray and its pointed criticism of the clergy in particular, “Wimbledon’s Sermon” was popular well into the early modern period, printed in a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions as evidence for the existence of an “enlightened but beleagured minority” of “proto-reformers” whom Protestants claimed had withstood the Church of Rome, prominent among them Thomas Wimbledon’s contemporary John Wyclif.¹¹ And indeed, although its theology has nothing distinctively Wycliffite about it, the sermon does speak in a powerful reformist voice to a city that felt itself beleaguered, not only by the ongoing debates over Wyclif’s radical proposals for church reform and the eschatological crisis of the schism but more locally by the factionalism, civic violence, and open revolt of the previous decade and the disciplinary actions Richard II had taken in response.¹² Wimbledon’s “men of o craft shulde neiþer hate ne despise men of anoþer crafte” evokes years of interguild competition and street fighting: a darker period for many of London’s citizens, including its governors, than they would see for another hundred years. Wimbledon’s apocalyptic language is biblical, of a piece with calls to reform and attacks on avarice all over Europe, while his social vocabulary is feudal, working within a communitarian ethics familiar from the great London poem of the previous decades, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, with its similar call to the estates to perform their duties, “ech lif to knowe his owene.”¹³ But the sermon’s prophetic judgment of a city engulfed by a desire for riches it can neither keep nor consume—”as þe licour in þe pot profiteþ not to þe pot [is of no use to the pot] but to men þat drawen and drynkeþ þerof, so worldly goodis ofte profiteþ not to chynchis [misers] but to oþere þat comeþ aftir”¹⁴—at once speaks to the disturbances of the time and goes to the heart of the moral anxieties of a community to which profit, however suspect, was not only desirable but vital.

“Wimbledon’s Sermon” was also popular in the fifteenth century, surviving in two copies in Latin and seventeen English copies,¹⁵ including two of the “household miscellanies,” Oxford, University College MS 97 and London, British Library Harley MS 2398, that concern me later in this chapter.¹⁶ Produced in numbers during the first half of the fifteenth century and with contents that overlap in regular enough ways that Ralph Hanna has been able to outline a loose copying and distribution network, with London as its most likely axis,¹⁷ these books have attracted notice in the last few years for the evidence they offer of a devout lay-oriented reading culture—mainly focused around literate residents of London and other cities and members of the regional gentry, although also including secular priests—and more specifically, for this culture’s interest in themes and texts linked to Wycliffism.¹⁸ The inclusion in many of these books of texts of more or less Wycliffite emphasis, often rewritten in small ways to suit particular views—occasionally, as Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry have shown, lightly censored¹⁹—are among the signs of how intensely such interest survived the suppression of organized Wycliffism by Archbishop Thomas Arundel and his successor, Henry Chichele, blending with the new kinds of reformism, imbued by the Council of Constance, at work in what Vincent Gillespie calls “Chichele’s Church.”²⁰

These lay books are typically organized around rather elaborate presentations of standard catechetical items, commentaries on the Paternoster, the Ten Commandments, and so on, but also include a varied array of other instructional and devotional materials. These latter might be spiritual treatises such as Richard Rolle’s Ego dormio, originally written for an anchoress, or the Speculum ecclesie by Edmund of Canterbury, originally written for professional religious, but also instructional works more closely applicable to the elite laity, such as parts of the treatise on lay Christian living, Pore Caitif, or the Schort Reule of Lif, which outlines a daily regime for Christian living to members of the three estates, but pays most detailed attention to lords: those in authority over “wif … childre … homli meyne [household servants]” and “tenauntis,” that is, substantial property owners.²¹ All four works, along with a number of others addressed to “lords” or householders in this broad same sense, are found in London, Westminster School MS 3: a book that can be speculatively linked to the famous “common profit” scheme for the lay circulation of religious materials associated with the early fifteenth-century London stationer John Colop and that was owned in the 1470s by Richard Close, church warden in the parish of St. Mary at Hill, London.²² The Schort Reule in particular is a popular item, found in six other books, including two more with close London connections, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 938, another book perhaps related to the “common profit” project, and University College 97, as well as Harley 2398.²³ With their mixed devotional, homiletic, and practical contents and their emphatic tilt toward the pastoral, lay books like these are expressive of the interests, aspirations, and spiritual responsibilities of two generations of privileged English laypeople.

Given its opening depiction of Christ as a “housholdynge man” and its direct appeals to those who exercise secular, as well as clerical, power, “Wimbledon’s Sermon” is in many ways a natural traveling companion of texts like the Schort Reule; indeed, many works included in the lay miscellanies may also date from the 1380s. All the same, to read the sermon from the viewpoint of the 1420s or 1430s, when many of these miscellanies were first circulating, and from a London viewpoint in particular, is to experience a certain disconnect, for a great deal had changed since the tense moment the sermon evokes so vividly. The apocalyptic year, 1400, had come and gone without the promised destruction, along with the worst of the religious and civic unrest that made Wimbledon’s sense of an imminent ending seem widely plausible. After weathering a royal regime change, a small but well-publicized series of heresy burnings, and more, London itself was not only in the midst of a building boom and cultural renaissance—some of its public spaces almost literally “overgilt wiþ gold and precious stones and perles”—but also, thanks to a financially weak and otherwise preoccupied monarchy, in a position of relative political independence that allowed its governors to think, if only for a few decades, in semirepublican terms of the city’s autonomy. This state of confidence, indeed, lies behind the civic context of all the materials discussed in this and the following two chapters of this book.²⁴

Most interestingly, from the viewpoint of the early fifteenth century, the sermon seems old-fashioned in its understanding of reform, which it hopes to effect through public controversy and change at a political and societal level, relying on its prophetic evocation of imminent apocalypse to induce its audience to repent more than it does on its account of the “special rekenynge” that follows each individual’s death,²⁵ and using the tactic of criticism of the clergy in the laity’s hearing that was soon to be outlawed; such criticism was explicitly forbidden in Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409.²⁶ Even though “Wimbledon’s Sermon” is itself found in two early fifteenth-century lay miscellanies, the contents of books such as University College 97 and Harley 2398 in general view reform differently: as a matter of individual moral education at all societal levels, beginning with deep lay study and practical implementation of catechesis, and demanding the energetic cooperation of educated laymen in particular. Polemic about the state of society or the clergy is not uncommon in these books. But reform here is usually less dramatic and more pastorally specific, its eschatological assumptions not so close to the surface, confined to general accounts of the separation of good and evil at the Last Judgment. The end times have receded and the hard grind of Christian teaching can resume.

More remarkably, however, these books have also heard a message that is only implicit in “Wimbledon’s Sermon” but developed as a standard topic of contemporary Wycliffite preaching, in which complaint about the sins of the clergy spills over into a call for secular rulers to take more control over, and responsibility for, the church.²⁷ In these books, secular governors not only have a legitimate interest in the moral life of society as a whole but are also expected to take on an expanded role of spiritual leadership over their families, their households, and all their “subjects.”

“Wimbledon’s Sermon” makes a firm and traditional separation between the duties of the first and second estates. Priests must answer to how they have “governed Goddis folk þat was taken þe to kepe”: “Seye whom þou haast turned from here cursid lyvynge by þy devout preching. Whom hast þou tawth þe lawe of God þat was arst unkunnynge [ignorant before]?” Secular rulers are asked how they have dealt justice—”how hast þou rewlid, þat is to seye þe peple and þe office þat þou haddist to governe?”²⁸ In these lay household books, this key distinction has become blurred, replaced by language suggestive of the imposition of a new burden of spiritual responsibility onto civic, estate, and household “lords,” the solemnity of which is captured by the title of a brief tract found in Westminster 3 and two other books: “How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis comaundementis and þe gospel to her suggettis and answere for hem to god on domesday.”²⁹ Parents had always had responsibility for seeing to the spiritual education of children and godchildren. Here, however, “lordis and housbondemen” are called to account for the souls of these and potentially other “suggettis”—a term that could be given a very broad interpretation—in almost the same way as are priests. Clerical reform was one important goal of the early fifteenth-century English church, in the wake not only of the religious situation in England but of international events such as the Council of Constance. As it appears from books such as these, societal reform, spearheaded by powerful devout laymen and working within the household (in the most extended sense) as well as the parish, was another.

The new emphasis on the spiritual responsibility of the lay householder or paterfamilias is a central concern in the death text on which I focus in this chapter, now known as the Visitation of the Sick, version E, but in the manuscripts generally given the more expressive title “How men þat been in heele schulde visite seke folke.” A staple of early fifteenth-century vernacular books for the laity, Visitation E appears in all four such books mentioned already and others like them, and was clearly an integral part of the broad pastoral program we shall see they embody. First appearing near the end of the fourteenth century, the work is an expanded lay adaptation of the Visitation A, which was likely written around 1380 and remained in parallel circulation with its descendant, exclusively in manuscripts produced for priests, for perhaps a hundred years.

Neither Visitation A nor its descendant has been the object of much scholarly attention, outside Robert Kinpoitner’s thesis edition from the 1970s, which has not been published and is understandably now in need of updating.³⁰ Indeed, these works are not usually discussed as instantiations of a distinct text at all, but are presented as two of a series of aggregations of Latin deathbed materials that standard reference works refer to as versions A–F: confusingly so, in as much as Visitation E is a direct rewriting of Visitation A, whereas B, C, D, and F are separate translations of portions of A’s sources. Both works, however, deserve to be better known than they are, if only because they seem to be among the earliest developed vernacular artes moriendi extant from anywhere in northern Europe, predating by some twenty-five years both the works usually taken as the wellsprings of the late medieval ars moriendi discussed in Chapter 4, Jean Gerson’s De scientia mortis and its descendant, Tractatus de arte bene moriendi. Representing a distinctly English outgrowth of a common European tradition, Visitation A and E are the first in a long line of such vernacular texts to appear over the next several hundred years.³¹

Nor is this the only claim the texts have to importance. If at first glance Visitation A and E may look like little more than vernacular aids to the Latin rite, a closer inspection shows that, grounded as they are in texts and practices derived from the early twelfth century, they nonetheless are both responses to distinctively contemporary concerns. As we will see in the next section, Visitation A already shows how the standard ritual for the visitation of the sick and dying, or Ordo ad visitandum infirmum, as practiced across much of England according to the Sarum rite, had come by the end of the 1300s to be seen as requiring supplementation, in order to reflect changes in the understanding of the deathbed and to make better use of the pastoral possibilities of dying. Of a piece with the contemporary intensification of interest in the deathbed discussed in the Introduction and exemplified in texts such as Julian of Norwich’s Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, Visitation A consolidates an understanding of deathbed practice that differs in several respects from the one presented by earlier versions of the Ordo, in particular by bringing the responses and attitudes of the dying person sharply to the fore.

A special feature, amounting almost to a genre marker, of early fifteenth-century texts for elite laypeople such as are found in Westminster 3, Bodley 938, and other books, is a double address in which the reader is expected at once to gain individual spiritual benefit as the object of a text’s pastoral intentions and to use the text to teach others. As I argue in the third section of this chapter, such a double program is an important and, at first, somewhat confusing feature of Visitation E, which expands outward from its predecessor, in unsystematic fashion, in two directions at once. On the one hand, the new work adapts Visitation A in ways that render it of more practical value to a reader preparing to undergo the visitation ritual in sickness or dying or to teach others how to do so: as a work of death preparation, another testimony to the new urgencies associated with the occasion. On the other hand, the work also adapts the address of Visitation A in order to allow a lay reader to conduct a version of the ritual in his or her own right, imitating the role of the officiating priest. Visitation E appears to have been written in response to the new responsibilities that “lordis and housbondemen” were being urged to feel toward “suggettis,” and shows these responsibilities in one of their most specific forms. One sign of this agenda already anticipated by Visitation A is that the sacramental parts of the death rite take a back seat to the exchanges between the officiant and the dying person. Although God, the Virgin, the saints, and all the angels are summoned to the death bed in prayer, the center of the rite as described in Visitation E is conversational and human.

An important supporting and symbolic part had long been played at the deathbed by the dying person’s neighbors or “even-cristen,” whose role as witnesses was understood to have both personal and communal values and who had always directly participated in the ritual at various levels. One way to think about the officiating role potentially attributed to laypeople in Visitation E is as an expansion of their former role as deathbed attendants, carrying out the work of mercy known as “visiting the sick” enjoined upon them in the gospels as necessary for their own salvation. Perhaps originally a practical consequence of a dearth of competent priests to officiate at deathbeds in the wake of the Black Death and its successors, the rise of the lay deathbed attendants to new positions of prominence is not confined to the Visitation E but is an equally marked feature of both Gerson’s De scientia mortis and the Tractatus de arte moriendi.³² As we shall see in Chapter 4, an ever more important role was played, as the fifteenth century wore on, by the presence at the deathbed not simply of lay attendants but of a principal assistant or master of ceremonies, the “friend.”³³ Indeed, the seemingly sudden rise of the ars moriendi as an independent genre may have been as much a response to this widespread reconfiguration of the attendants’ role at the deathbed as it was to an expansion of the part played by the dying person her- or himself.

For Julian of Norwich, who uses the deathbed topos of the “even-cristen” as a fluid way to move between her own, singular experience as the figure at the center of the drama and the experiences of Christians in general, the deathbed attendants function as they do in the Ordo, as a sign of the equality of all Christian souls in the face of death and of the private judgment that follows. The famous statement that defines one of the hermeneutic principles of her books, “Alle that I saye of myselfe, I meene in the persone of alle mine evencristene,” relies on this topos.³⁴ Such equality is also presupposed, after a fashion, both by the estates satire of “Wimbledon’s Sermon,” with its injunction that “everey staat shul love oþer,” and by the Schort Reule, with its final evocation of the “good lif, reste, pees, and charite … among cristene men,” if all dutifully perform the role in life they have been assigned.³⁵ The Visitation E also uses the “even-cristen” formula, along with other language of equality, to signal a similar inclusivity.

As an account of a ritual of instruction and exhortation, however, Visitation E is also a text about governance: the self-governance of the dying person and the governance of the dying person by the lay attendant. The last section of the chapter thus turns to consider the work in the context of the manuscripts in which it is found—particularly Harley 2398, a book written in Gloucestershire although it has close ties to two London books, Bodley 938 and Westminster 3—and the wider representation of lay spiritual governance in these manuscripts. Several texts in these manuscripts articulate explicitly what Visitation E presents in action, that the “lordis and housbondemen” for whom these books were made must view their role in quasi-sacerdotal terms, even comparing their double spiritual duty (to their subjects and themselves) to the “mixed life” of action and contemplation shouldered by a bishop.

The Augustinian canon Walter Hilton, whose writings gradually became staple reading for fifteenth-century devout lay Londoners, wrote a brief treatise On Mixed Life in the 1380s or early ’90s, in which he depicts the devout habitus of a secular lord as divided between the public exercise of secular lordship and a private life of affective devotion.³⁶ The lay mixed life depicted in the Visitation E and other works discussed in the last section overlaps with Hilton’s influential account, and occasionally circulated in its vicinity. But it is still a different model, assigning real spiritual power to the secular lord, and thus breaching the division of roles between the first two estates as Hilton—in this respect like Wimbledon—is reluctant to do. Visitation E’s extension of elite lay authority into the spiritual realm thus offers us a point of entry not only into the role of death discourse in the exercise of governance in the household, broadly considered, but into the civic uses of this discourse, yet more firmly under lay control, to which we turn in Chapter 2.

The Ordo ad visitandum infirmum and Visitation A

The liturgical Ordo for the sick and dying around which the Visitation texts are organized involved at least two sacraments and three distinct rituals, each with its own lengthy liturgical and textual history: the office of visitation itself, in which the priest carries the consecrated host to the sick person’s house, with prayers for recovery; then two further offices for those who are not merely sick but dying or dead, final unction and commendation of the soul. The first, the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum proper, might be undertaken by a priest more than once on his pastoral visits to provide spiritual aids for the seriously ill. If a sick person, having failed to recover, seemed to be dying, the entire, extended sequence would be performed, with the celebration of communion taking on the name of viaticum and the final section, the commendation, being said at the moment of death. The three sections appear more or less in their final conjoined form and order by the thirteenth century, surviving in manuals from each of England’s major liturgies, Sarum, Hereford, Bangor, and York. However, even before this and other occasional liturgical offices were brought into larger manuals like these during the twelfth century, independently circulating Latin rituals for the sick included nearly the same units.³⁷

One feature of the ritual in a number of early manuscripts that anticipates its much later paraliturgical development in the Visitation of the Sick and other artes moriendi is its use of the vernacular. In several eleventh-century books, the rubrics of the Ordo, and a few other passages, are in Old English, a language whose liturgical uses were generally reserved for a small set of rituals in which comprehension of the words uttered was especially crucial: excommunication, confession, penance, and portions of the baptismal rite. Unusually, most of the Old English in these early Ordo manuscripts is directed at the priest, clarifying the actions to be performed and inner attitudes to be assumed as the ritual proceeds if it is to have efficacy—another reminder of the urgency of the death rite even before the pastoral reforms of the early thirteenth century and the importance attributed to the details of its performance.³⁸ Occasionally, however, the vernacular is used in the prayers, at those critical moments where, as David Dumville notes, “it was necessary for the unlatinate … to participate more fully”—that is, comprehendingly—”in spoken rather than merely physical aspects of the liturgy.”³⁹ At such moments, we can already sense the presence not only of the priest and his dying charge but of the deathbed attendants: participants in the rite who, as souls in need of their own salvation, are also objects of its message of exhortation and comfort.

In the post-Conquest English liturgy, the “casual bilingualism” of these incursions of the vernacular into the domain of Latin occurs only in the baptism and marriage rites in which the non-Latinate directly participate, giving prescribed answers to prescribed questions⁴⁰—although priests’ books from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries containing occasional offices like those associated with the visitation ritual are so rare this may not be of much significance.⁴¹ However, even if these Old English prayers and rubrics are further evidence of what Mechthild Gretsch describes as a specifically Anglo-Saxon “confidence in the potential of the vernacular to be developed as a medium for scholarly and religious discourse on a par with Latin,”⁴² they clearly anticipate the larger-scale attempts to supplement the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum with vernacular prayers and exhortations, with the deathbed witnesses as well as the dying person increasingly explicitly in mind, from the last decades of the fourteenth century onward.

Two centuries after the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum reached its developed form, a full vernacular written text emerged to serve as a paratext to the Latin rite. Appearing for the first time in books copied in the late fourteenth century, the two versions of the Visitation of the Sick survive in nineteen manuscripts, the majority produced within the period 1380–1450.⁴³ Of the six surviving manuscripts of the shorter A version of this text, almost all can be linked with clerics or religious, appearing with the Ordo itself or with homiletic and pastoral works in Latin and Middle English relevant to their professional duties. In Oxford, St. John’s College MS 47, for example, donated to the college library by Richard Butler, an early seventeenth-century archdeacon of Northampton, the work is the sole vernacular text in a collection of occasional offices of Sarum Use designed, like several other Visitation A books, for portability and use.⁴⁴

Visitation A offers a flexible text to guide and shape the events at a sick or dying person’s bedside. Made up of discrete sections, including homiletic exhortations, an examination of faith, and passages of general spiritual comfort, the work signals through rubrics what can be left out and what must be read if the sick person is near death. Although parts of it are original, the text itself is loosely based on two early twelfth-century sources, both produced less than a century after many of the Anglo-Saxon Ordo manuscripts containing Old English: the epistolary treatise De visitacione infirmorum, often ascribed in the Middle Ages to Augustine, which has the distinction of being the earliest nonliturgical treatment of death and dying to attain any wide European influence;⁴⁵ and the very brief Admonitio morienti, a set of catechetical questions and exhortations to the dying person originally from the same period that circulated widely in England and elsewhere, often under the name of Anselm.

Long unattributed, the main source of the Visitation, the pseudo-Augustinian De visitacione infirmorum, is now known to be the only religious prose work—written in two parts as letters to a gravely ill nephew—by the humanist poet Baudri de Bourgueil (1045/6–1130), abbot of the monastery of Saint-Pierre-de-Bourgueil in Brittany and, later, archbishop of Dol.⁴⁶ Baudri’s 256 surviving poems experiment with a wide range of classical forms, including satires, lyrics, meditations, epigrams and epitaphs, and epistles on secular and religious topics, and are often associated with the contemporary poets of the Loire school, Marbod of Rennes, Hildebert of Lavardin, and Godefroid of Reims. Taking Horace, Virgil, Martial, and, especially, Ovid, as his models, Baudri wrote (according to Winthrop Wetherbee) for the “new, urban-courtly culture of the period,” providing sophisticated reading for the literati of his day and aggressively arguing the claims of Latinity.⁴⁷ As the synthesis of stylistic elegance, worldly engagement, and piety in De visitacione infirmorum itself implies, his secular concerns were also compatible with an intensely felt and up-to-date religiosity. But the scattering of quotations from the Stoics and the high-style exhortations or prayers borrowed from the work in the Visitation of the Sick suggest that his Middle English translator in part valued his writing for its distinctive note of elegiac, neoclassical humanism. This is our earliest sign of the link between the theme of mortality and classical philosophical rhetoric we will notice repeatedly during the course of this book.

The first part of De visitacione is a three-thousand word consolation treatise carefully attuned to the needs of the ill for emotional direction and succinct theological contextualization of their experience. After expressing Baudri’s sorrow at his nephew’s illness (chapter 1), the work opens with a set of consoling exhortative images that anticipate the moment at which the soul is to be “placed as a living rock” in the silent walls of the heavenly Jerusalem (chapter 2).⁴⁸ Confession and the “hammer of penitence” provide a necessary preparation for entry into heaven,⁴⁹ as do works of bodily mercy, almsgiving, the ordering of charity, and tribulation, whether in the form of bodily sickness or worldly persecution (chapters 3–4). Illness, tribulation, and death itself are to be welcomed as God’s loving chastisement and an opportunity for patience and expiation of sin—for God’s mercy, “as though unjust” (“quasi unjusta”), allows the soul time to prepare for death and does not take vengeance for sins (chapters 6, 5). The letter ends with a “prayer of the one about to die” (“oratio morituri”) in the voice of the dying (chapter 7).⁵⁰

Despite their epistolary intimacy, these chapters, which introduce many of the standard death topoi we will encounter over the next five chapters, were evidently written for a wider audience and context than the immediate one they evoke.⁵¹ The work’s second section, while still in theory written to the nephew, thus turns to address a wider community of professional religious colleagues in their capacity as deathbed officiants, instructing them in such matters as the correct use of and attitude to the crucifix in focusing the dying’s devotion, the importance of faith in reflection on such theological mysteries as the doctrine of the Trinity, and the need to administer the sacraments in full to the dying and, in particular, for the dying person to make her or his confession to a priest.⁵² Although Visitation A directly translates only from the more personal first part, these broader topics have a close bearing on the rituals for the dying found in the Ordo and assumed by the Visitation, and go far to explain the popularity of Baudri’s text in later medieval England. Insular catalogues and booklists attest to at least two dozen copies of the work (always attributed to Augustine), not only in monastic but in canonical and, by the fourteenth century, collegial contexts.⁵³ As well as Visitation A and E, there are two early fifteenth-century Middle English translations of short portions of the work.⁵⁴ As appears also to have been the case in Germany, it would seem that from the thirteenth century on, Baudri’s Latin text was used to help people die both in religious houses and in hospitals, great houses, and, very likely, parishes.⁵⁵ While the Visitation of the Sick introduces the De visitacione into a still wider range of social contexts, whoever wrote the vernacular work was part of a textual community in which the general utility of its Latin source was already well established.

The other main source of Visitation A is the Admonitio morienti, also known by the extended title Admonitio morienti et de peccatis suis nimium formidanti (Admonition to the dying person not to be too terrified of his sins): a series of questions to ask of a dying person and urgent instructions to assist his or her soul as the person dies and to keep him or her from despair. This short, brilliantly pithy work, very different in its urgency from the De visitacione infirmorum, circulated widely across Europe, usually under the name of St. Anselm, who may indeed have written its first version;⁵⁶ besides inspiring the influential new “interrogations” in Gerson’s De scientia mortis, for example, it is included in its entirety, under Anselm’s name, in the Tractatus de arte bene moriendi.⁵⁷ The survival of several Middle English translations of the work—as well as a Latin version in the “Harley Lyrics” manuscript, London, British Library Harley MS 2253—suggests that by the second half of the fourteenth century it was in common use at insular deathbeds too.⁵⁸ These versions include two prose texts, one of which survives in six manuscripts erroneously described as versions of the Visitation,⁵⁹ a brief verse version inserted into the instructions for the ritual of visitation in John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, and another poem purporting to be derived from the work by the early fifteenth-century Augustinian canon John Audelay.⁶⁰ The same questions again ascribed to Anselm also appear in English versions of the Tractatus de arte bene moriendi, namely The Book of the Craft of Dying and William Caxton’s Art and Craft to Know Well to Die and Ars moriendi (1490, 1491).⁶¹ While the production of a vernacular paratext to the Ordo represents a major development in late medieval English death practices, it is again clear that the author-compiler of the work was drawing on material whose value at the deathbed was well established.

As an “occasional office,” whose manuscript circulation was not confined to large liturgical books, the visitation rite outlined in the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum continues throughout the late Middle Ages to vary from diocesan use to use in England and even within individual uses: the sixteenth-century printed versions of the Sarum Use rite, for example, are considerably more elaborate than the early fifteenth-century version found in one of the oldest Visitation A manuscripts, Oxford, St. John’s College MS 47.⁶² In general terms, however, the rite begins with a procession to the sick person’s house, led by the priest, who carries the reserved host in a pyx as he sings the seven penitential psalms, walking behind two altar boys, one of whom holds a cross while the other rings a bell to tell passers-by that they must either join the procession or, as John Mirk instructs, “knele a-downe” “wyth grete devocyone,” as “Goddes body” is borne by.⁶³ Those who arrive at the house with the priest join those already there to form the community of “even-cristen” presupposed in what follows.

The priest enters the house with the words “peace to this house and to all who live here, peace to those who come in and go out,” asperging the room with holy water, then prays to God for healing, invoking biblical miracles such as the healing of “Peter’s mother in law, the centurion’s boy, and Tobias and Sara”:⁶⁴ partly in hope of recovery, partly in memory of the more common earlier uses of the rite to minister to the sick who were not thought to be dying. The cross brought from the church is held in front of the sick person; as he does this, Julian of Norwich’s “curette” reportedly utters the memorable “Doughter, I have brought the [you] the image of thy savioure. Loke thereopon, and comforthe the therewith in reverence of him that diede for the and me.”⁶⁵ Meanwhile, the rite of unction (anointing of the sick person’s body with oil) is administered, followed (after the sick person has undergone the sacrament of confession) by communion.

After more prayers, if the sick person is dying, the great litany is then said in order to invoke the whole company of heaven to accompany the departing soul to its rest:

Go, Christian soul, from this world: in the name of God the Father who created thee. Amen. In the name of Jesus Christ his son, who suffered for thee. Amen. In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out into thee. Amen. In the name of Angels and Archangels. Amen. In the name of Thrones and Dominations. Amen. In the name of Princedoms and of Powers and of all heavenly Virtues. Amen. In the name of Cherubim and Seraphim. Amen. In the name of Patriarchs and Prophets. Amen. In the name of Apostles and Martyrs. Amen. In the name of Confessors and Bishops. Amen. In the name of Priests and Levites, and of all the orders of the Catholic church. Amen.⁶⁶

The soul gone, there are prayers to offer to speed it on its way and the body to tend to. Thus follows the commendation, the last part of the rite to take place in the house, after which the body is removed, the rite ends, and the new rites of requiem and burial in due time begin.

This decorous ideal ritual, complete with psalms, antiphons, versicles, and responses, must always have been particularly susceptible to interruption and adaptation in practice, from the moment it enters the domestic space where the person who occasions the ritual lies dying. Death may be too sudden for the ritual to be performed in its entirety; the dying person may not be able to say the “amens” required in the benedictions that follow anointing; confession may not be possible to perform, unction and communion to bestow. Or death may be delayed, interrupting the ritual to the point that it must be resumed or repeated later; this appears to have happened to Julian in her own brush with death, when, after taking “alle my rightinges of haly kyrke,” she remained ill for three more days, until she and “thaye that were with me” believed her death had come and summoned the priest again.⁶⁷ Either way, the dying person will need comfort and may need instruction and exhortation until the very end. What is more, unction and communion both ritually require the sick person to be in an appropriate spiritual state, at peace with God and neighbor. The St. John’s 47 version of the rite acknowledges this requirement with the rubric: “These things [the prayers for recovery] once said, before the sick person is anointed or given communion the priest should question him as to the manner of his belief in God and if he acknowledges the body and blood of our lord Jesus Christ; after that, he should confess and be absolved of his sins. This done, let him kiss the cross, then the priest, and then every one else, in order.”⁶⁸ Before the sacramental part of the ceremony begins, the rite thus calls for affirmation of the state of the dying person’s faith. However, neither in this nor in the other, less formal areas implied or mentioned in the rite does this version of the Ordo offer any script for the priest’s words or actions.

Visitation A fills these gaps in the Ordo’s representation of the deathbed at a time when the parts of the rite related to them were coming to seem especially significant. The work is not explicitly organized around the Ordo, and it is not always clear at what points in the rite the four exhortations and interrogations of which Visitation A consists are to be said. This may be deliberate, given the fluidity of the rite itself. However, in three of its six manuscripts Visitation A is interleaved with the Ordo (in Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 750), immediately follows it (in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 209), or is appended to a collection of occasional offices that include it (in St. John’s 47). Such arrangements leave no doubt that it was actually used in conjunction with the rite. Indeed, it is possible, at least in general terms, to reconstruct how this might have worked in practice.

The opening exhortation, which assumes the possibility that the sick person may live and is largely an invitation to confession and penance (“And therfor I counsail the þat þu schrive the clene [make a clean confession] & make the redi”), is presumably to be said “before the sick person is anointed or given communion,” as the rubric in St. John’s 47 has it, although Visitation A makes no mention of the Eucharist and delays enquiring into “the manner of his belief in God” until a later moment. The note struck here and sustained throughout is of humane confidence. The exhortation takes up Baudri’s image of the stone in the wall of Jerusalem to offer the dying person an image of spiritual stability and heavenly reward as though both are all but certain:

My dere sone in God, þou hiest [are going] fast thi wai to Godward [towards God]. There thou shalt see alle thi former faderis, apostils, martiris, confessoris, virginis, & alle men & wommen that be savid. And þerfor be of gode confort in God. And thou must leyn [lay] a ston in the wal of cite of hevene witouten ani noise or strif. And therfor, ar [before] thou wenden out of this world, thou must make thi ston redi, & than shalt þu nouȝt be lette [hindered]. The ston is thi soule wiche thou makest clene. The noise that þu must make here is the thinking [recollection] of thi sinne wyche thou must telle the prest. The stroke is penaunce that thou shalt be sori for thi sinne & smithe [smite] thiself on thi brest & whan thou hast made redi thus thi ston, than may thou go thi wai in God & lai thi ston sykerlic [securely] withoute noise in the cite of hevene & therfor I counsail the þat þou schrive the clene & make the redi.⁶⁹

Confession may lead to healing, since sickness can be caused by sin. Whether or not it does, the time to confess is now, both for the dying person and for the “even-cristen” around the bed, who are included in the exhortation as they prepare their own deaths by watching another’s: “And this is nouȝt only to seke men, but also to hole, for everi dai a man nehieth [nears] his deth ner [nearer] & ner.”⁷⁰

Once it is clear that “his sekenes aslake nouȝt,” the sick person receives one or both of two further exhortations, both expansions of passages of Baudri: one so that “he grucche nouȝt whan he is seke,” the other, to be given “ȝif a man be nie [near] the dethe,” to urge him to embrace his death, longing for it with all his soul.⁷¹ The first offers a standard array of verbal “confort” for those in tribulation, noting that “sekenes of God is hele to the soule” if, and only if, it is endured patiently, when it serves to lessen time in purgatory.⁷² In passages added to the source and appropriate to the ritual’s lay, domestic setting, Visitation A emphasizes that, in “chastising” his “child,” God does what “a man” who sees “anotheris child do schreudeli [behaving naughtily] in his fader presence” would expect any father to do, if “he were his child or ellis loved him.”⁷³ God’s “chastising” is, in any, case, merciful, as though a “king to whom thou hast be tretour [traitor]” should decide to punish not with death but with a brief spell in the “esi prison” of “a litul sekenes here.”⁷⁴ Sickness and death are directly analogous to the instruments of household and political discipline. The second attempts to activate the dying person’s contemptus mundi—quoting Cato and “these olde filosophurs” on the “wickidnes of this world”—and to create an identification with the dying words of Paul and Augustine: “A thou deth, end of alle wickidnes, thou deth, end of travail, beginning of ese & alle joie, what man mai bethenke [consider] the profitis & the blisses that thou bringest with the. Thou are desireful to me, for a Cristin man may nouȝt evil die, but wel die, and lif wit Criste.”⁷⁵ Although the Ordo leaves no very obvious space for them, these two exhortations perhaps ideally take place after the sacramental part of the rite and before the litany: a period of indefinite extension, when later versions of the Ordo offer optional prayers to be said by or for the sick person.⁷⁶

The final exhortation, initially based on the Anselmian Admonitio, also fits into this open-ended moment, said either after the third exhortation is complete, “whan thou hast told him alle this,” or if need be, “ȝif thou have no time to sai alle for hast of death,” interrupting it “whan thou seest that he neiheth the death.”⁷⁷ Here the examination deferred from earlier (the Anselm questions) is inserted at the very moment the ability of the sick person to answer is failing, allowing credal affirmation and prayer to be the last rational responses that the person makes:

Brother, art thou glad that thou shalt die in Cristin feith?

Responsio. ȝe.

Knowleche that thou has nouȝt wel lived as thou shuldest?

Responsio. ȝe.

Art thou sori therfor?

Responsio. ȝe.

Hast thou wil to amend the ȝif [if] thou haddist space of lif?

Responsio. ȝe.

Levist thou in God, Fader Almighti, maker of heuene & of erthe?

Responsio. ȝe.⁷⁸

Working through only the most important articles of the faith in the shortest possible form—using a series of questions adapted from baptism rites—the examination quickly moves on to its most urgent topic: the need to surrender the self to the vision of the cross (still being held in front of the dying person according to the Ordo), and to embrace not the idea of death in general but the possibility of salvation through self-abandonment to Christ’s death in particular.

In this final passage, the priest quietly shifts from second-person exhortation to first-person prayer, gradually speaking as though in the voice of the dying, in a long closing passage that moves between the Admonitio and Baudri, drawing on the different registers of each:

Tunc dicat sacerdos. [Anselm] Wil thi soule is in thi bodi, put alle thi trust in his passion & in his deth, & thenke onli theron & on non other thing. With his deth medil the [mingle yourself] & wrappe the therinne, nouȝt thinking on thi wif, ne on thi children, ne on thi rychesse, but al on the passion of Crist; [Baudri] & have the crosse tofore the [before you] & sai thus: I wot [know] wel thou art nouȝt my God, but thou art imagened aftir him [in his likeness] & makest me have more minde of him after whom thou art imagened. [Anselm] Lord, Fader of hevene, the deth of Oure Lord, Jhesu Crist, thi Sone, wiche is here imagened, I set betwene the & my evil dedis, & the desert [merit] of Jhesu Crist I offre for that [what] I shuld have deservid & have nouȝt…. Into thi handes, Lord, I betake [commend] my soule…. [Baudri] I trust nouȝt on my dedis, but despeir of heme, save ȝit [except that] I trust more on thi merciis than in the dispeir of my wicked dedes. Thou are my hope. Thou art my God…. I come & knouleche to [acknowledge] the. I beseche the of merci, wiche deniest to no man merci.⁷⁹

An insider witness to the interactions between the Ordo and a text like Visitation A here is again provided by Julian of Norwich, who in dying “sette mine eyen in the face of the crucifixe” as instructed by the priest, finding “alle that was beside the crosse … huglye to me, as if it hadde bene mekille occupiede with fendes,” and whose ensuing revelation begins as Anselm’s “with his deth medil the, & wrappe the therinne” still sounds in her ears.⁸⁰ After this exhortation, the ritual then reverts to the Ordo litany, perhaps begun as the dying person loses consciousness, followed by the commendation.

Visitation A is thus a powerful aid to and augmentation of the Ordo, taking charge of the moments in the rite that were hardest to script by providing the adaptable, affective, and, above all, vernacular materials necessary to their performance. (Later versions of the Sarum rite Ordo ad visitandum infirmum responded, incorporating their own exhortations and interrogations in Latin.)⁸¹

Yet by taking these same moments so seriously, the text also signals both a new intensity around the rite of visitation and a shift in its balance, one anticipated by earlier uses of Baudri’s De visitacione and Anselm’s Admonitio, but only here encapsulated in a paraliturgical text in the vernacular.

In the Ordo, salvation is imagined taking place almost solely through the Sacraments and the intercessions of the priest, joined in a limited way by the attendants and relying, on the part of the dying person, only on acquiescence, except for confession. By offering the same weight to instruction and exhortation that the Ordo gives the sacraments and the litany, Visitation A engages the attendants through a series of pastoral discourses, and also asks the dying layperson to participate directly, throughout the rite, in the process of salvation, as her or his inner responses to dying are molded by the text into a proper attitude of passionate abandonment to Christ. As it is a dependent text that relies on the Ordo for its legitimacy, it is not true to say that Visitation A downgrades the sacraments. Nonetheless, the focus of the Ordo once Visitation A has been made part of the rite is likely not to be confession, absolution, unction, or communion but the cross and the inner response on the part of the dying person it is meant to evoke. More than a passive recipient of the church’s sacraments and beneficiary of the prayers offered by the priest to the court of heaven and a merciful God, the dying layperson has become an actant in the spiritual drama.

Visiting the Sick: Visitation E and the Works of Mercy

Clearly initially intended for priests, the vernacular guide to deathbed pastoral care that is Visitation A is reflective of the same intensification of thinking about death we see at work in the writings of Julian of Norwich. Yet even though its use of the vernacular shifts the relationship between the dying person, the “evencristen” onlookers, and the rite, Visitation A only begins to respond to one key component of the wider cultural change it embodies: the transformation of specifically lay engagement in, and authority over, the deathbed. To gain a fuller sense of this transformation, we need to turn now to one of the works most directly implicated in it. This is Visitation E, a major rewriting of Visitation A carried out soon after the latter’s composition, and closely connected with London, whether or not it was written there. Although one of two early copies, the Piers Plowman manuscript Cambridge University Library MS Dd.1.17, is from York, the other, University College 97, seems to have been copied in London by William Counter (a clerk of Sir William Beauchamp with later connections to the Worcester area) as one of several roughly contemporary copies with metropolitan connections. Both these books date from around 1400 or earlier, the same period as the first manuscripts of Visitation A.⁸²

Considerably more complex than Visitation A and double its length, Visitation E rapidly carved out a distinctive place for itself during the first few decades of the fifteenth century, when the popularity of the Visitation group was at its height. Where manuscripts of Visitation A all show signs of religious ownership and paraliturgical use, none of the thirteen manuscripts of Visitation E contain liturgical materials, and about half are what I earlier called “lay household books”: religious miscellanies the bulk of whose texts, catechetical and otherwise, were written for direct lay consumption.⁸³ To read this companion work with one eye on its relationship to its source, the other on the works that traveled with it, is to see the shift toward lay involvement that in Visitation A affects only the dying person taken a stage further. It is also to recognize a powerful engine of transformation within the rite for the dying itself: the presence of deathbed attendants, fulfilling their own spiritual responsibility to themselves and to their “even-cristen” by carrying out one of the most important of the works of bodily mercy, the visitation of the sick.

Although it was never ritually codified, the lay practice of visiting the sick was at least as old as the ecclesiastical death rite: indeed, like the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum, it was derived directly from Scripture. For Jesus in Matthew 25, the “corporeal works of mercy,” those repeated acts of generosity toward the needy neighbor, are both essential to and sufficient for salvation: the sole criterion that he will use in separating the saved sheep from the damned goats when he returns to judge the world on the Last Day. Visiting the sick is the same as visiting Christ himself: “Come ȝe, the blessid of my fadir, take ȝe in possessioun the kyngdoom maad redi to ȝou fro the makyng of the world. For Y hungride, and ȝe ȝaven [gave] me to ete; Y thristide, and ȝe ȝaven me to drynke; Y was herboreles [shelterless], and ȝe herboriden me; nakid, and ȝe hiliden me; siik, and ȝe visitiden me; Y was in prisoun, and ȝe camen to me.”⁸⁴ According to Thomas Aquinas, the seven works of mercy—the seventh, not mentioned by Christ, is burial of the dead—are not only forms of almsgiving (“alms” indeed derives from Greek elenmosyne, mercy) but works of justice, and thus intrinsically relevant to secular rulers in particular.⁸⁵

As a specifically secular set of practices, more easily exercised by the laity than by those in contemplative life, the works of mercy were a key theme in late medieval pastoral writing, from the catechetical works grounded in Archbishop John Pecham’s Syllabus of 1281, which lists them among the truths all Christians should know, to Langland’s Piers Plowman, where they feature in accounts of saving charity, particularly when the spiritual destiny of urban merchants is under scrutiny. Among much else, merchants are advised to “amend mesondieux” with their profit “and myseisé folk helpe” if they wish to be saved.⁸⁶ In more than one manuscript, Visitation E itself travels with “Þese ben þe sevene dedes of mercy gostly,” a brief tract that opens by explicitly invoking the judgment scene depicted in Matthew 25 (“Of þe dedes of mercy god wole speke at þe day of dome to alle on his riȝt side”), outlining the deeds of bodily mercy before giving them a second, spiritual interpretation.⁸⁷ As I show in the next chapter, caring for the sick and dying had an especially close relation to the works of mercy, inasmuch as these acts of charity were of pressing concern not only to the living but to the dying, as they disposed of their worldly assets with an eye, in part, to their own salvation.⁸⁸

The lay practice of visiting the sick had long been intertwined with its relative, the ecclesiastical Ordo, which assumes the presence of lay attendants, some of whom are assisting at the deathbed from the start while others enter the house of the dying with the priest, gathered up as he processes through the town with cross, handbell, and Eucharistic host. In the vernacular pastoral writings of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, accounts of the practice independent of the rite began to multiply, both as a result of its inclusion as a primary item of catechesis, as Pecham’s Syllabus was accepted as a normative guide to pastoral teaching, and as part of the new attention paid, across a range of texts, to all the works of the active religious life. In certain vernacular works with radical reformist and perhaps Wycliffite leanings, such as The Fyve Wyttes, the practice appears almost to substitute for the rite, as the presence of the priest at the deathbed recedes into the background and the lay attendant takes on a quasi-sacerdotal role. At once a product and a catalyst of this development, Visitation E offers an ideal vantage point from which to study it in detail, for the work scripts a version of the visitation rite in which the laity participate so thoroughly that ecclesiastical rite and lay spiritual practice almost fuse.

The clearest sign that Visitation E is a repurposing of Visitation A for lay users is that the work serves a double generic function and addresses a double audience—or a single audience with two potential relationships to the text. As with Visitation A, much of the work is presented as a practical script for a deathbed performance, although here the dying person tends to be a “brother or suster,” not the “sone” addressed by the priestly speaker of the A version.⁸⁹ Visitation E follows Visitation A closely enough that it could still in theory be used by a priest to supplement the Ordo. But unlike Visitation A, the work also asks to be received both as a reconstruction of the deathbed for a lay reader anticipating sickness and as a moral exhortation of such a reader while undergoing it. One of the reviser’s concerns was to help readers to prepare for their own deaths, using the text to help them occupy the place of the dying in advance or prepare themselves in old age or sickness. Readers of Visitation E are asked to anticipate the moment at which they must become recipients of the liturgical rite and lay practice of visitation.

Thus where in Visitation A the second, more urgent set of exhortations is introduced by an instruction to the priest—”Þerfor if his sekenes aslake nouȝt [does not lessen], thou shalt confort him on this maner”—in Visitation E the equivalent passage addresses the sick reader directly—”Therfore, ȝef þi peynes slake not, comforte the [yourself] in god in this manere”—as though inviting readers to minister to themselves, outside the ritual context of the Ordo.⁹⁰ Where Visitation A ends with a succinct prayer spoken by the priest on behalf of the dying, Visitation E substitutes a longer inner monologue, voiced aloud or “in þi herte” by the dying and often reminiscent of the Ordo, as the priest’s voice fades away with the rest of the world and the dying person is left alone with the cross:

And lord al myghty Jhesu Crist, sitthe thyn hooly gospel witnesseth þat þou wolt nought the deeth of synful man but that he bee turnyd from synne and lyve (Ezekiel 18:32), have mercy of me synful wrecche, after thi woord, and as þou blamedest Symount for he hadde indignacioun þat Marie magdeleyne for hir synnes schulde neighe the, have mercy of me moost synful, and lord Jhesu as þou clepedist [called] Zachee and Poul and oothere diverse from here [their] synes, dispise nought me þat come to the wilfulliche [voluntarily] wyth-owten suche clepeynge…. For I knowleche [acknowledge] þat I may not helpe my-self ne aȝeyn-bugge me [redeem myself] with my dedys: but stedefastliche I truste in thi passioun, that it suffiseth to make ful asseth [satisfaction] to þe fadir of hevene for my synnes.⁹¹

Like the shorter speech in Visitation A, this rhetorically poised and syntactically rich prayer, which takes up one sixth of the whole work, could in practice be spoken for the dying by a priest or attendant, but perhaps makes most sense as a script for a meditative rehearsal of death.

One purpose of this elaborate revision of Visitation A therefore seems to have been to transform a priest’s paralitugical aid into a treatise suitable for private or household reading, with the deathbed scene acting as a point of focus, obliging readers to entertain the thought of their own deaths and the conversion it invites. “And therfore I counseile þe in þis lyf þat þou schryve the cleene to god and make þe redy,” declares the narrator, expanding the only passage Visitation A addresses to the attendants and presenting one of the work’s programs in the process.⁹²

But this is not the only concern of Visitation E. If one set of adaptations to Visitation A pulls the work toward homiletic meditation, another set serves to sustain the earlier text’s practical engagement with the actuality of the deathbed while moving the work away from its intricate connection with the Ordo toward the wider spiritual practice of visiting the sick. The opening rubrics of various copies of the text give it the title “How men þat been in heele [in health] schulde visite seeke folke,” indicating the new, more generalized emphasis. A later rubric, placed after the instruction to “comforte the in God on þis manere,” introduces the following homily on patience with the rubric “how a man schulde comforte another þat he grucche [complain] not whanne he is seeke.”⁹³ In some cases following Visitation A, in others independent, rubrics to successive sections of the work point readers to identification not with the dying but with the role of the priest: “Whan thowe hast tolde hym alle this, or ellys ȝef þou myght not for hast of deeth: bygynne heere eer [before] his mynde goo [goes] from hym.”⁹⁴ In this instantiation, the text addresses itself to anyone who may be required to console the seriously ill and needs sound material to draw on. Generalizing the ecclesiastical visitation rite by returning it to its biblical source among the works of mercy, the text also now potentially supplants key aspects of the ecclesiastical rite.

The deliberate character of this shift from liturgical rite to spiritual practice and from priestly officiant to lay ministers becomes clearer when we consider the portions of Visitation E that deal directly with the sacraments and the priests who administer them. In Visitation A, the sacraments are rarely mentioned, since the text is designed for use in conjunction with the Ordo. Only in its first exhortation does the work explicitly enjoin confession to a priest, elaborating Baudri’s image of the soul-stone the dying one will lay in the walls around the heavenly city by allegorizing confession and penance as the hammer blows involved in forging and polishing the stone to make it “clene” for its new purpose. Visitation E modifies and elaborates this passage in ways that shift the balance of power and responsibility in play at the deathbed. In the quotation below, italics indicate Visitation E’s expansion of its source, bold a major substitution:

The noyse þat þou most [must] make heere in worchynge of this stoon, is ofte for-thynkynge [repenting] of þi synne, whiche þou most knowleche to god knowynge the gilty, and ther-after it is profitable to þe to have conseil of trewe preestes the whiche owen [ought] to blesse the poeple, tellynge hem that ben sorwful for here synnes that þei schullen thorugh goddis mercy been asoylid of hem [absolved of them]. The strokere [pumice] wherewith þou slykest [smoothes] this stoon is verrey [true] repentaunce þat þou schalt have in thyn herte sorwyng of þi synne, smytynge thi-self on þe brest with greete sighyng of sorwe and stedefast wil to turne no moore aȝeyne to synne. And whan þou hast maad redy þus thi stoon, þat is thi sowle, thanne myght þou go the redy way to god, and legge [lay] þi stoon sykerliche [securely] with-owten noyful noyse in þe citee of hevene. And therfore I conseile þe in þis lyf þat þou schryve the cleene to God and make þe redy.⁹⁵

By replacing “telle the prest” with “knowleche to God” as it begins to expand Visitation A’s advice here, Visitation E changes both the occasion of the discourse and the role of the priest. In Visitation A, the Ordo is in progress, and the discourse serves as a transition between the opening Latin prayers and the sacramental scenes that follow. Here, we seem to be at a scene of lay visitation, with no priest necessarily present. As a result, rather than preparing directly for sacramental confession, the sick person is enjoined to think bitterly of past sins and admit them to God in preparing for death, only “there-after” seeking out “trewe preestes” for “conseil”—it would seem on matters too specialized or intimate to be shared with the lay speaker. Nor is any explicit mention made of the sacramental, as distinct from pastoral, role of “trewe preestes.” Although “conseil” here could just be a term for confession, there is no presumption that the role of “trewe preestes” is to perform the Ordo or that they will necessarily be involved in the final stages of the sick person’s death. Rather, the priest may attend the sickbed rather as the lay officiant does here: not for liturgical reasons, but at the behest of a sick person who determines, on the basis of an assessment of a particular priest’s “truth,” that his attendance is “profitable.” The sick person, with the help of the officiating speaker, is now firmly in charge of the process of dying, and the formal visitation ritual described by the Ordo takes second place both to the lay visitation the work is enacting and to the counseling visit of the “trew preest” it enjoins.

Although the words “it is profitable to þe to have conseil of trewe preestes” sound like those of a lay officiant, nothing in this passage suggests the active exclusion of the sacraments of confession, communion, and unction from the deathbed or makes it incongruous for a “trewe preest” to use Visitation E as part of a performance of the Ordo. Yet even as it trusts in the divine mercy, the work is pessimistic about the easy availability of such priests. As the officiant laments, extolling the superiority of a good death over a life so full of “envye, wrathe, glotonye, lecherye, prude, slouth, covetise, ffalshed, manslaughtre, and thefte” that the sinner’s only hope is a virtuous death: “But harde it is, to lyve wel fulliche in this wrecchede worlde…. For heere is hunger of goddis lawe and fewe þat desiren ther-aftir, and þei þat thristen þer-aftir been ofte-tymes slaked with bittere venym; and therfore þe charite of menye wexith coold thorugh þe heete of wykked covetise.”⁹⁶ (“Covetise” is the sin that “Wimbledon’s Sermon” also finds at the root of modern corruption.) Even for those who “hunger” after “goddis lawe,” “trewe preestis”—priests of sufficient education and virtue—are hard to find: a common complaint in late medieval London in particular, as Sheila Lindenbaum has noted.⁹⁷ Indeed, one scenario the work may be addressing could involve the necessity of receiving the sacraments, in the context of the Ordo, from a parish priest who is not thought “trewe” or able to give good pastoral advice, so that supplementary arrangements such as those represented by Visitation E become necessary.

With its careful instructions and thorough evocation of the affects and attitudes that constitute the good death, Visitation E allows a competent and devout lay person or other nonpriest to step in and fulfill the role of counselor and spiritual guide when “trewe preestes” are lacking. This role obviously cannot include the sacramental and may have other limitations. Nonetheless, it can involve the lay officiant not only in offering “counseil” of her or his own but in taking responsibility for the sick person’s final moments, even without the timely presence of a priest to say the final prayers of the Ordo. At the end of the work, the lay voice that has earlier informed the dying layperson that “it semeth þat þou hiest the faste in þe way fro this lyf to godward,” thus proceeds to interrogate the dying layperson in the faith in the words of the Anselmian Admonitio:⁹⁸ “‘Brother or sustir, art thou glad that thou schalt deyen in cristene feith?’ ‘Yee.’” Whether or not the Ordo is in progress around this scene, there is no indication that, even at the final crisis, any priest present will take over as a matter of course. In this milieu, “even-cristen” can continue to exhort and examine “even-cristen” even at the point of death.⁹⁹

Visitation E in Its Manuscript and Social Contexts

Writing of the surprisingly extensive lay circulation of the Visitation of the Sick, Vincent Gillespie draws the work into the confines of the term “laicization,” presenting it as a key example of what he calls that “process of assimilation by the laity of techniques and materials of spiritual advancement that had historically been the preserve of the clerical and monastic orders.”¹⁰⁰ Yet this formulation, important though it is, may understate the case. Visitation E is concerned with matters more pointed than lay “spiritual advancement,” from the existential issue of the lay soul’s eternal destiny to the ecclesiological one of the respective status and roles of clerical and lay participants in the deathbed drama. In its first wave of popularity, the work appears in compilations that do much more than lightly adapt clerical and monastic materials to lay use. Rather, these compilations share an ambitious understanding of their privileged lay addressees as exercising a spiritual ministry or jurisdiction over those in their care: as actants, not only in their own salvation but in that of others.

To some extent, this emphasis on lay spiritual jurisdiction aligns Visitation E with the specific mode of reformist vernacular anticlericalism associated with Wycliffism. The work uses at least two of the phrases Anne Hudson has identified as part of a “Lollard sect vocabulary,” “trewe preestis” and “Goddis lawe,” while several of the compilations in which it appears have attracted scholarly attention for their inclusion of heterodox alongside orthodox works, and for the watchful and critical attitude toward the clergy they foster in their readers: an attitude we have seen Visitation E seeks to inculcate even in the dying.¹⁰¹ The work’s relative indifference to the Ordo ritual; its emphasis on inner contrition at the expense of sacramental confession; its lack of direct interest in communion and extreme unction; its concern to place the dying person, with or without a priest in attendance, in unmediated dialogue with God: all these are parallel or analogous to stances often associated with vernacular Wycliffite writings, including writings that traveled with the work and occasionally show signs of its influence.¹⁰²

Yet as has become increasingly clear in recent scholarship, by the early fifteenth century, many of the emphases characteristic of Wycliffite writing were shared in literate lay religiosity in general, at least in the urban environments within which prose religious compilations such as those containing Visitation E circulated, which evince both the characteristic “similarity in the motivations of dissenters and conformists” Ian Forrest describes in his book on fifteenth-century English heresy proceedings and the “cosmopolitan” inclusivity ascribed to London religious compilations by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry.¹⁰³ Although interconnections between Visitation E and vernacular Wycliffism deserve exploration—particularly in light of one of the work’s earliest manuscripts, University College 97, whose Wycliffite sympathies often lie close to the surface¹⁰⁴—the common emphasis on lay spiritual jurisdiction in Visitation E and the books in which it traveled point not only to the history of religious radicalism but also to a specific fifteenth-century development within the culture of pastoral care. This development is the new importance assigned a specifically secular site of such care, the urban lay household.

The household had always been a place of pastoral instruction and discipline, in which parents and householders had something of the same obligation to catechize and correct children and servants that a curate had to his parishioners.¹⁰⁵ When the Treatise of Wedded Men, found in Westminster School 3, a manuscript associated with Bodley 938, exhorts parents not merely to allow “godfadris and godmodris to techen þe children þe Paternoster and þe Crede” but to ensure that they fully understand “þe hestis [commandments] of God,” without which “þei schullen not be savyd … but be ful hard and depe dampnyd in helle, more þan heþene men,” it is dramatizing a familiar lesson.¹⁰⁶ But in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English cities, as scholars such as Sarah Rees Jones and Shannon McSheffrey have recently shown, the extended, hierarchical household unit played a vital role in the maintenance of order and “civic morality,” as urban governments made the male householder directly responsible for monitoring sexual conduct, arranging marriages, and giving monetary sureties for the lawful conduct of all the coresidents under his charge. As Rees Jones puts it, for the “new civic and guild structures of administration” of the fifteenth century, the household in its entirety “should be a place of good government in which the harmonious ends of civic government might be achieved.”¹⁰⁷

Keeping pace with this broadened focus on temporal governance, several of the compilations containing Visitation E have at their center the conscious elevation of and intensification of focus on the specifically spiritual jurisdiction of the paterfamilias, whose exercise of a “fadris love to his meyne [household],” through teaching, admonishment, discipline, and encouragement, obliges him, according to How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis commaundementis, to carry out not only “þe office of holy chirche” within his jurisdiction (“in his hous”) but “on sum maner [in some sense] a bischopes office.”¹⁰⁸ Several of the household miscellanies in which Visitation E appears provide materials for a householder to utilize in his “benevolent rule” over dependents, as he instructs, guides, and shapes himself, his godly familia, and even his tenants and day laborers.¹⁰⁹ The inclusion of the work in these books thus serves to extend the householder’s spiritual governance to the edge of the lives of his dependents, providing the encouragement and knowledge needed to supplement the parish priest’s ministry at the deathbed.

The instructional program retained in whole or part in most of the compilations that contain Visitation E is Pecham’s Syllabus, which in addition to the works of mercy required priests and parishioners to know the articles of faith, the commandments of old and new law, the seven sacraments, the four cardinal and three theological virtues, and their antagonists, the seven deadly sins.¹¹⁰ In some Visitation E books, the reformist orientation of these catechetical clusters toward enabling lay teaching and learning is especially clear. Cambridge University Library MS Nn.4.12 (c. 1400), for example, is made up almost wholly of texts expanding the basic Syllabus materials: the so-called Wycliffite expositions of the Pater Noster, Ave Maria,¹¹¹ and Apostles Creed; a commentary on the Ten Commandments; Visitation E; and a number of other works that crisscross through the items on Pecham’s Syllabus several times.¹¹² These texts not only provide the information the reader needs to be saved, they also argue for the duty of laypeople both to teach one another the same truths and to hold the church to its own, sober pastoral responsibilities: “Oure beleve [Creed] techis us þat God ordeyned hyt [it] al, and bad [commanded] þat men schuld cun [memorize] hyt, and teche yt to oþer. And ȝif prelatys faylyn in þis, Christ seyde þat stonys schulde cry (Luke 19:40); and secler [secular] lordys schuld, in defawte [absence] of prelaytis, lerne and preche þe law of God in here modyr tonge,” states the Apostles Creed commentary, encapsulating one of the programs of the manuscript as a whole.¹¹³ In University College 97, Visitation E again appears with a full set of expositions of the items in Pecham’s Syllabus, this time along with the less widely known text on the two commandments of the new law, Diliges Dominum Deum Tuum, which instructs readers to “kepe and teche the comaundementȝ of God,” in part by providing “holy conseillyng and techyng” to sinful neighbors in need.¹¹⁴ Both books seek to expand the spiritual duties of lay people to include what is, in effect, pastoral teaching. The presence of Visitation E among these works is a further symptom of the reformist orientation of both.¹¹⁵

Indeed, Visitation E appears with these catechetical items so regularly that it appears to have attained the status of an indispensable instructional text. London, British Library Royal MS 17.A.xxvi, for example, groups the works with a further set of expositions of Syllabus items, some of them in their Wycliffite versions, then expands its program by adding the Middle English version of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse, with prologue and commentary, and the Early Version Wycliffite Bible translation of John’s Gospel.¹¹⁶ In the bulky Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud Miscellaneous MS 210, Visitation E again appears with a cluster of mostly Wycliffite catechetical items, along with the vigorously reformist and affective Book to a Mother, which encourages lay participation in certain areas of pastoral care, such as correcting the sins of others, in the context of a highly ambitious program of lay asceticism.¹¹⁷

Visitation E is not a casual addition to these more complex collections. On the contrary, it shares in the wider rhetoric and goals of its textual companions. For example, the Wycliffite tract on excommunication, “þe grete sentence of curs expounded,” found in London, Westminster School MS 3, with all the Wycliffite catechetical items mentioned above, describes the profitableness of “confession maad to trewe prestis”—with “contricioun for synnes before done” and “good life and keeping Goddis hestis and werkis of mercy … after”—in much the same terms as Visitation E.¹¹⁸ A commentary on Psalm 26, found uniquely in the same book, also echoes Visitation E’s lament for the loss of “Goddis lawe” in the current “wrecchindes of þis world,” deploring the “worldly wrecchis, ful of pride, ypocrisye, and covetise,” who “wenne [hope] to stoppe … goddis lawe,” prophesying that “al þe persecucioun and sclaundre þat comeþ to goddis trewe servauntis schal turne hem to good, as holy writt seiþ.”¹¹⁹ Treatises on the Ten Commandments in several manuscripts offer helpful context for one of the work’s theologically self-conscious moments, when the dying person, while gazing at “a cros or ymage made wiþ mannys hondes,” as the Ordo enjoins, is directed to “sey or thinke in thyin herte: ‘I woot wel þou art not god, but ymaad aftir hym, to make men have þe moore mynde of hym after whom þou art ymagid.’”¹²⁰ Although Visitation E is here immediately drawing on Visitation A, which is itself indebted to Baudri’s De visitacione infirmorum,¹²¹ it seems that in this milieu, even at the point of death, idolatry is a potentially dangerous breach of “Goddes lawe.”

So integral is Visitation E to these compilations, indeed, that one passage of the work is directly taken over by the prologue to the Wycliffite Ten Commandments in the version found in the large early fifteenth-century compilation, London, British Library Harley MS 2398:

[Visitation E; italicized passages from Visitation A] ffor every day a man neigheth his deeth neer and nee. ffor the moore a man in this lyf wexith [grows] in dayes and ȝeres, the moore he unwexith [diminishes]. For, as seyntes seyn: þe firste day in the whiche a man is born is þe firste day of his deth. ffor every day he is diynge while he is in this lyf. And therfore seith þe gospelle: “Awake, for þou wost never whiche hour god is to come” (Matthew 24:42), in thi ȝouthe or in thi myddel age or in thi laste dayes, or prevyliche [secretly] or openliche. And therfore loke þat þou be alwey redy! For it is semeliche [appropriate] þat þe servant abyde þe lord, and not the lord his servaunt. And nameliche whan greet haste is, he is worthi blame þat is unredy. But grettere haste no man redith of, than schalle be in þe comynge of Crist.

[Harley 2398: italicized passaged from Visitation E] For everych day a man neyȝep to his deþ, nere and nere. For þe more a man in his lyfe wexeþ in dayes & ȝeres, þe more he unwexeþ. For, as seyntes seggeþ: “þe furste day in þe weke þat a man is ybore is þe furste day of his deþ. For everyche day he is deyng whyle he is in þis lyf.” And þerfore seyþ þe Gospel: “Awake, for þou wost never whiche [h]oure God is to come”: whether in þy ȝonge age, other in þy myddel age, other in þy laste days; or pryveliche, other openlyche. And þerfore looke þou beo alwey bysy in his servys. And þenne, what tyme ever he come, þou mayst beo to hym redy. For it is semeliche þat servant abyde þe lorde, and nouȝt þe lord his servant. & namelyche, whanne gret hast ys, he is worþy blame þat is þenne unredy. Bot gretter hast no man redeþ of þan schal beo in comynge of Crist. And þus þou mayst wel y-knowe þat it is lytel ynow to kepe continuelliche Godes hestes to make a goed ende.¹²²

Appropriately borrowed from the end of the first exhortation of Visitation E, where the speaker turns from the dying person to the attendants, with the words “and this is not oonliche to telle to syke men, but eke to hoole men,” in its new context this passage understands death preparation as a central part of the Christian life in a society directed by the Ten Commandments. Although no other copy of the Wycliffite Ten Commandments contains this prologue, its appearance here is again suggestive of how integral to reformist pastoral thought both Visitation E itself and the practice of sickbed visitation the work outlines in such detail had become.

Several of the books containing Visitation E offer insight as to the kind of audience that might be concerned to reflect on and practice the expanded spiritual role accorded to lay lords and householders, but it is again Harley 2398 that offers the most suggestive set of textual and social contexts for the work. The literate lay reader for whom Harley seems to have been produced is invoked in the incipit of its very first item, the pastoral and contemplative treatise Memoriale credencium: “Man and womman þat wilneþ [determines] to fle synne and lede clene lyfe, takeþ hede to þis litul tretys þat is y-write in englisch tong for lewed men þat konne not understonde latyne ne frenssche.”¹²³ This same readership is addressed in all the dozen or more works that follow, which both confirm and complicate the program laid out in Memoriale credencium by focusing not only on the individual lay person’s “clen lyf” but on the role she or he can play in shaping the lives of others. As well as affective texts, including the Bridgetine Fifteen O’s and chapters on prayer and meditation from the lay manual Fervor Amoris (items 2 and 14), the book includes several expositions of catechetical items that, as often, provide material for religious instruction as well as learning (an exposition of the Ten Commandments and three of the Paternoster: items 3, 7, 10, 13). Besides Visitation E (item 8), it also includes a series of texts on the three estates, some of which lay out the duty to teach more directly: “Wimbledon’s Sermon,” a relatively conservative work in this regard, as we have seen (item 6); Of Wedded Men and Wyves and Here Children, with its instructions on household teaching (item 9); and, most interestingly, the Schort Reule of Lif and a work found only here, The Fyve Wyttes (items 15 and 4).¹²⁴

It is important to bear in mind that the bulk of Harley treats the reader as the recipient of religious knowledge, not its teacher, instructing him or her (in the words of Memoriale credencium) how “a man shal lyve parfitlych and holylich” through faith, penance, the practice of the virtues, and “knowyng of hym self and knowyng of god almyȝty.”¹²⁵ Nonetheless, although we do not know who first owned Harley 2398, its contents suggest that the book was also compiled in a conscious effort to delineate and develop the view of the pastoral duties of the privileged laity sketched in texts like How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis commaundementis from Westminster 3, which teach their lay readers how to exercise “on sun maner a bischopes office,” of which participation in deathbed visitation forms an important part.¹²⁶

The Schort Reule is much invested in a lord’s spiritual instruction of his household, including his “homli meyne” or domestic servants and even his “tenauntis.” Very much like How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis commaundementis, it threatens the reader with damnation for failing to correct his servants—”For þou shalt be dampned for þer yvel [evil] lif and þin evel suffraunce [forbearance] but if þou amende it up þi myȝt [to the best of your power]”—and exhorts him to “chastise in good maner hem þat [those who] ben rebel aȝens Goddis hestis [commandments].” The lord’s duty to “meyntene [look after] truli up þi kunnyng and miȝt [to the extent of your skill and power] Goddis lawe and trewe prechouris” may still be the most important of his spiritual duties, in which ““if þou failist … þou forfetist [offend] aȝens God in al þi lordshipe in bodi and soule.” But it is only the most public and political among the many duties he is expected to perform.¹²⁷

The importance ascribed to the visitation of the sick itself within this spiritual economy is most obviously affirmed by the appearance of Visitation E. But the prominent place played by deathbed visitation in the exercise of lay spiritual governance is also suggested in telling detail by The Fyve Wyttes, an important work (or portion of a work) that offers an extended and wide-ranging analysis of the proper uses, positive and negative, of each of the bodily senses.¹²⁸ Like any treatise on the senses, the work is much preoccupied with governance of the body, which it understands as a “dwellyng-place” or “halle” with “fyve sotel [thin] wyndowes,” and which God both commands and counsels be appropriately ruled, its windows and gates opened or shut as will benefit the soul who lives within. Less usually for this genre, the work is also concerned with the reader’s governance of the communal body of his extended household, threatened as all its members equally are by spiritual death: “Deth haþ ascendyd by ȝoure wyndowes; it is entred into ȝoure houses for to dyspercle [destroy] þe lytel childeren of wiþoute and þe ȝongelynges [young men] of þe stretys (Jeremiah 9:21).”¹²⁹ Indeed, the work continually shifts between its individual and its social registers, sometimes treating the reader as though his duties are all to himself, only to resituate him quickly within his actual position of difficult authority over others.

As a result of this double allegiance to the reader’s inner and public lives, The Fyve Wyttes offers particularly astute and well-balanced analyses of the standard moral topics of the genre, sometimes parting ways with more severe contemporary works on issues such as food, clothing, and minstrelsy in pursuit of a practical working model of the “mixed” lay life. Perhaps its most socially nuanced passages, however, concern visitation of the sick, a ritual in which the reader may have to venture outside his own domestic space and the normal ambit from which he governs territory, town, or guild, into the homes of his subjects. Thus the work’s account of smell, and the visceral kind of suffering associated with this sense, imagines such a visitation to the alien deathbed of a person with a disgusting illness, or incontinence, or a decaying body:

Yf þou see þin evene-cristene, þe creature of God, in visitacioun of sykenesse ouþer hirtynge [pain], as suche desese [for example, some injury] þat is roted oþer is corrupt [stinking] wherfore he haþ bodyly desese, or elles of eny ynward desese or syknesse, as yf þat his breþ is nouȝt lusty [fresh] ouþer paraunter [perhaps] unkyndely [unwholesome] corrupcioun comynge from himself which for fybulnesse he may nouȝt kepe himself from. And yf þou spare [fail] þerfor come to him in comfort of him or, yf þou come, paraunter for abhominacioun of suche savour [smell] þou makest loþly semelant [an unpleasant face] wharby he is discomforted [embarrassed] oþer þat oþre be þe loþer [less willing] for to visite him, in þis þou forfetest [do wrong]. Þenke wel in þyn herte þat, þough þou be now nevere so fresch and swote, þou myȝt ful lyȝtly [easily] in a lytel tyme be as loþly and unlusty as he … Spare nouȝt þerfore goedly for to visite and comforte such on as þou miȝt liȝtly be when God wol.¹³⁰

An earlier passage, on sight, also sees the reader faced with the unpleasantnesses that accompany performance of the works of mercy, enjoining him to “byhalde Crist in his lymes” (in the fellow Christians who are the limbs of his body on earth) by focusing not on the healthy and powerful but on “hem þat ben at myschef or desese of body, relyvynge [relieving] hem and comfortynge after þy powere,” performing all the works of mercy including “comfortynge hem þat ben syke,” while reflecting “in þyn herte þat þey ben Godes creatures and his owene ymage.”¹³¹

Both these passages make careful use of the egalitarian discourse of the “even-cristen,” a strong presence throughout the treatise. Both, however, also presuppose a social imbalance between the lord and those to whom he offers comfort. In beholding “Crist in his lymes,” a theological formula that readily blends with the social formula in which the lord is the “head” of his household, the reader is to remember that the sufferers “ben breþeren and systers after kynde and grace of redempcioun”:¹³² a reflection itself suggestive of social distance between the reader and his “even-cristen.” In the passage on smell, the danger that, should the reader “makest loþly semelant” at the smell of a sick person, other people may “be þe loþer for to visite him” also suggests an occasion fraught with the pressures that inhere in encounters between those who are not social equals, especially in the household space of the dying person, which has its own internal hierarchies of power and spiritual responsibility. In requiring that the reader humble himself by the reflections and good works they enjoin, both passages imply that, when the lord carries out the work of mercy, he does so among his own subordinates and as a matter of special, as well as general, responsibility. It is not hard to see why Harley should include, as a matter of course, a copy of Visitation E to enable this difficult duty to be performed.

As the text develops its theme of the difficult uses of the senses, it indeed becomes clear that the lay reader is being understood as fundamentally a minister, whose duties to all to whom he is connected by any tie of dependency mirror the duties of a curate to everyone in his parish so closely that the two can be discussed in quite similar terms. Another discussion of sight, often reminiscent of the Schort Reule, thus notes that, for those in “governance temperal and spiritual” alike, spiritual responsibility for one’s dependents is a matter of eternal life and death:

Þou schalt byhalde [consider] diligently þulke þat þou hast in governaile [have responsibility for] temperal and spiritual, þat þou kepe þe lawe of God principaly after þe counceyl of þe wyse man, seyynge þus: Diligenter considera vultum pecoris tui. “Bysyly byholde þe chiere or þe vysage of þy best [beast]” (Proverbs 27:23). Þat is: tak goed hede how þy servantes and þy subjectes lyveþ, þat þey be nouȝt vicious. Yf þou be a curat and hast spiritual governayle and charge of mennes soules, þou art bounde opon peyne of þyn owen dampnacioun for to take hede to þulke þat þou hast in cure…. Iff þou have temporal governayle, þou art bounde and helde, upon payne of þyn owen dampnacioun, to loke and byhalde þat þy subjectȝ kepe þe lawe of God, þat ben þy wyf, þy childe, þy hured hyne [hired servant], þy bounde servaunt and þy tenaunt, and alle oþer þat þou hast a warde [under your protection].¹³³

The curate has to perform differently with different kinds of parishioners, learning to preach and teach in the way most likely to bring each to God. Yet the secular lord also has to think in flexible ways, since his rule over the six categories of dependents listed here differs. It is necessary to “teche þy childe in his ȝouþe for to love Crist and his lawe,” like any parent; equally to “teche” “þy hured hyne” and “þy tenaunt,” often through discipline, warning them if they “surfete” and expelling them “fro þy companye” if they are “incorrigible and wol nouȝt amende hem”; and to punish a “bounde servaunt,” not possible to expel, “for brekynge of Cristes byddynge” more swiftly than for trespass against one’s “persone.”¹³⁴ The lord’s duties even extend to policing the teaching of religion in his territories, where he is to exercise a similar mix of discipline and discretion toward the itinerant preachers often called “heretykes or lollardes,” whose vulnerable informality he should, unless they prove false, protect in the name of the prophetic truths they deliver.¹³⁵ At the same time, he must also be to his tenants “as þe hurde [shepherd] his schep,” sharing the same pastoral duty and living under the same threat of divine punishment “oppon þulke þat [those who] rechelesly rewleþ ther subgettȝ or serveþ hem nouȝt of competent necessaries” as do priests with care of souls.¹³⁶ For in the words of 1 Timothy, the biblical book on pastoral care, “Who þat rekkeþ nouȝt of his [does not take care of his own], and namely [especially] of þo þat ben of his housholde, how þey lyve ne how þey be governed, he haþ forsake his feyþ and ys wors þan a paynem [pagan].”¹³⁷

Fyve Wyttes thus suggests a set of social contexts in which a lay householder might make actual pastoral use of a text like the Visitation of the Sick E as part of his wider temporal and spiritual responsibilities toward his subjects, and also as part of his exercise of lordship over them. In the process, it does not quite merge lay and religious forms of spiritual governance, demanding of the “curate” a level of rhetorical skill, psychological expertise, and self-awareness that the lord is not taken to possess. Although the priest’s role, like the lord’s, is to teach divine law, the work’s professional pride in the cura animarum comes through in its depictions of the subtlety of the true priest, to whom the reader owes a duty of spiritual obedience as part of his wider duty to behave as a member of the ordinary laity. However, within the framework of secular duties the work sketches for the lord, the practice of visiting sick subjects—a practice that could readily extend to teaching them and those with them, and to helping them to die—is represented on a continuum both with the lord’s temporal duty to see that his subjects “have here necessaries competently to here bodylye nede” and with the curate’s spiritual responsibility to save the souls of his parishioners.¹³⁸ A mix of firm discipline and comfort these special qualities that those who carry out the visitation of the sick must bring to the households they enter, according to the Visitation texts—is the key to the governance of others in both cases.

The devolution of spiritual responsibility and governance at work in Visitation A and E, and in the household books within which the latter circulates, are thus complex. They demand a new level of alertness to the nonritual elements of the deathbed rite on the part of the priest, who must look to the deathbed as a pastoral opportunity as well as a liturgical duty. But because the sacraments are no longer necessarily at the center of the death rite, they also invite a new concern to manage the process of dying on the part of the lay sick person, who must exercise spiritual self-governance in order to respond to the new demands for spiritual preparation that the rite, as supplemented by the Visitation of the Sick, makes on the dying. Since this dying figure is part of a lay community who is included in the work’s exhortations, these responsibilities spill over to the deathbed attendants, who in Visitation E are in turn charged with a more nuanced relationship to the duty of comfort and counsel than was explicitly so earlier. Finally, when the attendant is a household paterfamilias, this role takes on an almost priestly level of responsibility, since the lord must answer before God for the souls of those under his temporal subjection. As a public space, the medieval lay deathbed must always have been finely and socially articulated. Responding to developments in late medieval civic and religious culture, the Visitation texts in their manuscript contexts show these articulations in newly self-conscious use.

The multiplication of layers of governance over oneself and others within the institution of the household that lies behind the Visitation of the Sick is part of the wider multiplication of jurisdictions James Simpson has argued was characteristic of fifteenth-century culture in general and that was so of the period’s religious reform in particular.¹³⁹ In the rest of this book, we see this same multiplication of responsibility repeatedly in action, as all the roles in play around the deathbed intensify through the course of the century and the cultural meanings of dying well ramify in response. In this first chapter, we have encountered these processes only distantly, through books whose early use must mostly be inferred from their contents. Despite suggestive links between the metropolis and three household books in play here, Westminster School 3, Bodley 938, and University College 97 and the strong possibility that London was a center of copying and exchange for other books of the same type, we know too little of the circumstances in which these books were first used to localize them with much social specificity. In the materials to which we turn now, we are more fortunate: most texts discussed in the rest of this book attach to specific London biographies, institutions, and places. The chapter that follows introduces us in particular to an urban religiosity deeply invested in clerical education and increasingly secularized, in which the spiritual authority that accrues to the lay paterfamilias over his household in the Visitation E can be seen writ large at the civic level.