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
