infirmum continues throughout the late Middle Ages to vary from diocesan use to use in England and even within individual uses: the sixteenth-century printed versions of the Sarum Use rite, for example, are considerably more elaborate than the early fifteenth-century version found in one of the oldest Visitation A manuscripts, Oxford, St. John’s College MS 47.62 In general terms, however, the rite begins with a procession to the sick person’s house, led by the priest, who carries the reserved host in a pyx as he sings the seven penitential psalms, walking behind two altar boys, one of whom holds a cross while the other rings a bell to tell passers-by that they must either join the procession or, as John Mirk instructs, “knele a-downe” “wyth grete devocyone,” as “Goddes body” is borne by.63 Those who arrive at the house with the priest join those already there to form the community of “even-cristen” presupposed in what follows.
The priest enters the house with the words “peace to this house and to all who live here, peace to those who come in and go out,” asperging the room with holy water, then prays to God for healing, invoking biblical miracles such as the healing of “Peter’s mother in law, the centurion’s boy, and Tobias and Sara”:64 partly in hope of recovery, partly in memory of the more common earlier uses of the rite to minister to the sick who were not thought to be dying. The cross brought from the church is held in front of the sick person; as he does this, Julian of Norwich’s “curette” reportedly utters the memorable “Doughter, I have brought the [you] the image of thy savioure. Loke thereopon, and comforthe the therewith in reverence of him that diede for the and me.”65 Meanwhile, the rite of unction (anointing of the sick person’s body with oil) is administered, followed (after the sick person has undergone the sacrament of confession) by communion.
After more prayers, if the sick person is dying, the great litany is then said in order to invoke the whole company of heaven to accompany the departing soul to its rest:
Go, Christian soul, from this world: in the name of God the Father who created thee. Amen. In the name of Jesus Christ his son, who suffered for thee. Amen. In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out into thee. Amen. In the name of Angels and Archangels. Amen. In the name of Thrones and Dominations. Amen. In the name of Princedoms and of Powers and of all heavenly Virtues. Amen. In the name of Cherubim and Seraphim. Amen. In the name of Patriarchs and Prophets. Amen. In the name of Apostles and Martyrs. Amen. In the name of Confessors and Bishops. Amen. In the name of Priests and Levites, and of all the orders of the Catholic church. Amen.66
The soul gone, there are prayers to offer to speed it on its way and the body to tend to. Thus follows the commendation, the last part of the rite to take place in the house, after which the body is removed, the rite ends, and the new rites of requiem and burial in due time begin.
This decorous ideal ritual, complete with psalms, antiphons, versicles, and responses, must always have been particularly susceptible to interruption and adaptation in practice, from the moment it enters the domestic space where the person who occasions the ritual lies dying. Death may be too sudden for the ritual to be performed in its entirety; the dying person may not be able to say the “amens” required in the benedictions that follow anointing; confession may not be possible to perform, unction and communion to bestow. Or death may be delayed, interrupting the ritual to the point that it must be resumed or repeated later; this appears to have happened to Julian in her own brush with death, when, after taking “alle my rightinges of haly kyrke,” she remained ill for three more days, until she and “thaye that were with me” believed her death had come and summoned the priest again.67 Either way, the dying person will need comfort and may need instruction and exhortation until the very end. What is more, unction and communion both ritually require the sick person to be in an appropriate spiritual state, at peace with God and neighbor. The St. John’s 47 version of the rite acknowledges this requirement with the rubric: “These things [the prayers for recovery] once said, before the sick person is anointed or given communion the priest should question him as to the manner of his belief in God and if he acknowledges the body and blood of our lord Jesus Christ; after that, he should confess and be absolved of his sins. This done, let him kiss the cross, then the priest, and then every one else, in order.”68 Before the sacramental part of the ceremony begins, the rite thus calls for affirmation of the state of the dying person’s faith. However, neither in this nor in the other, less formal areas implied or mentioned in the rite does this version of the Ordo offer any script for the priest’s words or actions.
Visitation A fills these gaps in the Ordo’s representation of the deathbed at a time when the parts of the rite related to them were coming to seem especially significant. The work is not explicitly organized around the Ordo, and it is not always clear at what points in the rite the four exhortations and interrogations of which Visitation A consists are to be said. This may be deliberate, given the fluidity of the rite itself. However, in three of its six manuscripts Visitation A is interleaved with the Ordo (in Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 750), immediately follows it (in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 209), or is appended to a collection of occasional offices that include it (in St. John’s 47). Such arrangements leave no doubt that it was actually used in conjunction with the rite. Indeed, it is possible, at least in general terms, to reconstruct how this might have worked in practice.
The opening exhortation, which assumes the possibility that the sick person may live and is largely an invitation to confession and penance (“And therfor I counsail the þat þu schrive the clene [make a clean confession] & make the redi”), is presumably to be said “before the sick person is anointed or given communion,” as the rubric in St. John’s 47 has it, although Visitation A makes no mention of the Eucharist and delays enquiring into “the manner of his belief in God” until a later moment. The note struck here and sustained throughout is of humane confidence. The exhortation takes up Baudri’s image of the stone in the wall of Jerusalem to offer the dying person an image of spiritual stability and heavenly reward as though both are all but certain:
My dere sone in God, þou hiest [are going] fast thi wai to Godward [towards God]. There thou shalt see alle thi former faderis, apostils, martiris, confessoris, virginis, & alle men & wommen that be savid. And þerfor be of gode confort in God. And thou must leyn [lay] a ston in the wal of cite of hevene witouten ani noise or strif. And therfor, ar [before] thou wenden out of this world, thou must make thi ston redi, & than shalt þu nouȝt be lette [hindered]. The ston is thi soule wiche thou makest clene. The noise that þu must make here is the thinking [recollection] of thi sinne wyche thou must telle the prest. The stroke is penaunce that thou shalt be sori for thi sinne & smithe [smite] thiself on thi brest & whan thou hast made redi thus thi ston, than may thou go thi wai in God & lai thi ston sykerlic [securely] withoute noise in the cite of hevene & therfor I counsail the þat þou schrive the clene & make the redi.69
Confession may lead to healing, since sickness can be caused by sin. Whether or not it does, the time to confess is now, both for the dying person and for the “even-cristen” around the bed, who are included in the exhortation as they prepare their own deaths by watching another’s: “And this is nouȝt only to seke men, but also to hole, for everi dai a man nehieth [nears] his deth ner [nearer] & ner.”70
Once it is clear that “his sekenes aslake nouȝt,” the sick person receives one or both of two further exhortations, both expansions of passages of Baudri: one so that “he grucche nouȝt whan he is seke,” the other, to be given “ȝif a man be nie [near] the dethe,” to urge him to embrace his death, longing for it with all his soul.71 The first offers a standard array of verbal “confort” for those in tribulation, noting that “sekenes of God is hele to the soule” if, and only if, it is endured patiently, when it serves to lessen time in purgatory.72 In passages added to the source and appropriate to the ritual’s lay, domestic setting, Visitation A emphasizes that, in “chastising” his “child,” God does what “a man” who sees “anotheris child do schreudeli [behaving naughtily] in his fader presence”
