Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford

      Introduction

      This book is an account of the literature and culture of death and mortality in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London as it relates to the broad theme of governance. It takes as its focus a body of writings in several different genres circulating in England’s capital between the 1380s, a generation after the Black Death, and the 1530s, the first decade of the English Reformation. I argue that the schooled awareness of mortality was a vital aspect of civic culture, critical not only to the individual’s experience of interiority and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, institution building, and the government of the city itself. At a time when an increasingly laicized religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal and cultural enrichment, and sometimes with violent political change, having an educated attitude to death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense.

      In fifteenth-century London, as elsewhere in northern Europe, a complex of new ways of representing, preparing for, and even undergoing death gained enhanced cultural power, informing the behavior and perceptions of the city’s citizens and institutions and acting as key public markers of responsible civic engagement and identity. During the period between the accession of Henry IV in 1399 and that of Henry VII in 1485 in particular, when the confidence of the city and its governors was at its height, death discourse was one of the most visible features of London public culture. Death was understood by a broad spectrum of the city’s elites as a generative force: one capable of providing vital personal, institutional, social, and literary as well as religious opportunities. A new understanding of death as an ars or “craft,” something to be learned and managed, also made possible new techniques of self-examination. Intrinsically affective, these techniques in turn made personally intimate the turbulence of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century transformations in the religious and political culture of city and realm.

      My book explores the particularities of London death culture in relation to a series of vernacular texts, the earliest of which is The Visitation of the Sick, an anonymous work from around 1380 that may be northern Europe’s first vernacular guide to the deathbed, and the latest A Preparation to Death, a translation of Erasmus’s De praeparatione ad mortem, also anonymous, printed in 1538. Reading image-texts such as the Daunce of Poulys and literary texts such as Thomas Hoccleve’s Series alongside deathbed manuals, meditations, tribulation treatises, catechetic instructions, almshouse ordinances, and wills, I also attend to the books in which such materials circulated, to the institutional contexts that gave them purchase, and, where possible, to identifiable readers, most of them male members of London’s lay elite. Since London’s literary and religious culture evolved rapidly during this period and was exceptionally open to international influence, I track cultural and religious change on the European, as well as English, stage and the role played by death texts of French, Italian, German, and Austrian origin in the metropolis and among those who lived and died in it. Taking its cue from the medieval Christian understanding of death itself, as an event most straitly bounded in time and space yet also a portal to the infinite and eternal, my book affirms the indissolubility of the secular and the sacred in the public culture of fifteenth-century London and argues for the importance of taking their interpenetration seriously.

      Learning to Die in