Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford
to internalize the ethical understanding of the political integral to Aristotelian political thought within their own professional and household circles, as becomes clear from the emphasis on right rule in the extensive library owned by the most prominent of these governors, John Carpenter.
A public spectacle of death even more effective than the “daunce” in inculcating virtuous and lawful behavior in the city appears in the sixteenth century, now overseen not by a city functionary but by those of the Tudor kings, in the shape of the remarkable increase in public execution of felons and traitors at Tyburn and other busy London gallows. Here, the Aristotelian model spectacularly breaks down, as a different strand of ethical thought, the Stoic, a constant in artes moriendi from The Visitation of the Sick on, comes to the rescue, now in order to help readers face not merely the fortunes of lay living and dying in a general sense but the urgent and specific experience that is death at the hands of the tyrant. Even here, however, the integral relation between the ars moriendi and governance holds. While only one of three main artes discussed in Chapter 5, Whitford’s Daily Exercise and Experience of Death, actively works to protect the household as a locus of governance, the sudden rush of new arts of dying appearing in print through the 1530s discussed here all take care to include meditations involving state execution into new paradigms of urban death preparation.
My focus here on London and on governance thus allows me to trace in detail some of the ways in which death discourse is implicated in the literary, political, and religious culture of the city and responds to changes in each. My contention throughout is that developments in death discourse are related to wider cultural developments and that death discourse was an active and still comprehensible component of long fifteenth-century thought, society, and belief. The language of morbidity, obsession, decadence, and trauma has no useful place in its historical analysis. While the ars moriendi may seek to move and disturb, it always has definite ends in view. Far from seeing the ars moriendi emerge from this analysis as a symbol of medieval alterity or the exhaustion of the fifteenth century, if we track its place within its cultural and representative order, we find the period more available to understanding, not less.
There remains the possibility that the special interest in death in long fifteenth-century art and literature bears a direct relation to the Black Death of 1348–50 and its several successors, a possibility that usually in some way underlies the “morbidity” thesis. Unforgettably evoked at the beginning of Boccaccio’s Decameron, plague is the explicit backdrop to a select number of literary representations of death, including Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, the apocalyptic final passus of Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the Parisian Danse macabre, painted facing an overflowing charnel house.19 Developing out of the author’s unusual desire to experience “a bodelye syekenes … so harde as to the dede,” including the final rites, Julian’s Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and Revelation of Love may reflect the enhanced awareness of death on the part of those, like her, who had lived through the plague.20
Although all these examples save one belongs to the fourteenth century, the Black Death was vividly remembered in fifteenth-century London, not least because of the ways in which it materially and symbolically shaped the cityscape. The spate of fifteenth-century almshouse building in fifteenth-century London touched on in Chapter 2 need have no relation to plague and its memories. But in the course of this book, we visit two of the city’s pardon churchyards—emergency cemeteries where Londoners who had died unconfessed were buried, their sins forgiven by special dispensation—both of them key cultural sites associated with the plague: the first connected with the sacred and heavily politicized space around St Paul’s, the second with the London Charterhouse, symbol of the city’s devotion to the ascetic ideal, outside the walls at Smithfield and near the ancient hospital of St Bartholomew’s.
I do not dismiss the Black Death hypothesis, even if I suspect that the major effects of the plague on late medieval urban death culture had as much to do with shifts in the relationship between the clergy and the laity after the deaths of so many ministering priests, or with the new concentration of urban wealth enabled by population reduction and enhanced social mobility, as with the long shadow of the terrible event itself.21 Yet to treat the plague as a singular cultural trauma is to seal off late medieval death discourse both from other periods of history and from a fluid and constructive relationship with long fifteenth-century culture itself. Besides, literary and visual imaginations of death are hardly confined to the fifteenth century. Death is at the theological center of Christianity, and mortality is a preoccupation in insular vernacular literature from the Anglo-Saxon period onward. As we see in Chapter 1, many devotional and ritual practices associated with the ars moriendi predate the Black Death by hundreds of years.
Moreover, the ars moriendi flourished for centuries after the plague had become a distant memory. Sophisticated literary artes moriendi appear for at least three centuries after the genre’s emergence into the vernacular in the late fourteenth century, from John Donne to Jeremy Taylor and beyond.22 A major recent study of the American Civil War traces the art of dying as a praxis, still recognizably connected to its medieval predecessor, into the mid-nineteenth century.23 The ideal of the “good death,” central to the ars moriendi, has become a controversial issue in contemporary hospice care.24 If anything, the ars moriendi is a sign of cultural continuity across the centuries, not disjuncture. As we see in Chapter 5, the attempt to distinguish the postmedieval ars moriendi from its medieval predecessor by arguing for an epistemic transformation is untenable. The densest cluster of original vernacular death manuals discussed in this book belong not to the fifteenth century but to the 1530s: the beginning, in the cultural imaginary, of Western modernity. Moreover, the appearance of three new and popular ars moriendi within a decade has nothing to do with the natural disaster of the plague, but appears to be a response to human actions, as another kind of public manifestation of mass death appears in the form of judicial executions.
Most important for my purposes, however, making too direct a causal association between fifteenth-century death culture and the Black Death does not allow for a differentiated and flexible analysis of the complex cultural forms in question: it shuts down the conversation. Study of London’s innovations in representing death illuminates several processes of cultural change, centrally, as I argue, in relation to government and, in the broadest sense, jurisdiction. Here I will mention two others, both of current interest. One is the process of laicization: the pronounced shift of emphasis toward the laity and their concerns that is one of the best-known phenomena of the decades after the Great Schism of 1376, generating much of the vernacular theology produced in late medieval England and Europe. In the three decades from 1380 to 1410, an important face of laicization in England was the radical political and theological agenda associated with John Wyclif, fiercely critical of monasticism and the secular church and demanding a reorientation of authority in the church, effectively, around lay elites.25 But Wycliffism was not the only reformist force of the period, and laicizing reform survived the movement’s suppression, taking on and making mainstream parts of its agenda as it went.26 The Visitation of the Sick itself, especially in its expanded rewriting for wealthy lay users, circulated in early fifteenth-century London books whose contents are inflected by Wycliffism but whose agenda is in tune with the normative, and increasingly confident, lay religiosity of the period.
Despite the presence in the city of impressive numbers of highly educated rectors, cathedral canons, and other religious,27 important aspects of the spiritual life of fifteenth-century London were in concrete ways in the hands of its civic governors. For reasons explored in this study, the discourse of death was one of their basic resources. Baptism, the Eucharist, confession, and other sacraments, including the unction given the very ill: all these moments of sacramental contact with the transcendent required a priest. In the practices we see emerge in the Visitation of the Sick and other accounts of the deathbed, the “good death” that all serious Christians hoped to achieve did not. Laymen could and should attend the deathbeds of other laymen. Moreover, because the laity lived