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