.
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