is, in any, case, merciful, as though a “king to whom thou hast be tretour [traitor]” should decide to punish not with death but with a brief spell in the “esi prison” of “a litul sekenes here.”74 Sickness and death are directly analogous to the instruments of household and political discipline. The second attempts to activate the dying person’s contemptus mundi—quoting Cato and “these olde filosophurs” on the “wickidnes of this world”—and to create an identification with the dying words of Paul and Augustine: “A thou deth, end of alle wickidnes, thou deth, end of travail, beginning of ese & alle joie, what man mai bethenke [consider] the profitis & the blisses that thou bringest with the. Thou are desireful to me, for a Cristin man may nouȝt evil die, but wel die, and lif wit Criste.”75 Although the Ordo leaves no very obvious space for them, these two exhortations perhaps ideally take place after the sacramental part of the rite and before the litany: a period of indefinite extension, when later versions of the Ordo offer optional prayers to be said by or for the sick person.76
The final exhortation, initially based on the Anselmian Admonitio, also fits into this open-ended moment, said either after the third exhortation is complete, “whan thou hast told him alle this,” or if need be, “ȝif thou have no time to sai alle for hast of death,” interrupting it “whan thou seest that he neiheth the death.”77 Here the examination deferred from earlier (the Anselm questions) is inserted at the very moment the ability of the sick person to answer is failing, allowing credal affirmation and prayer to be the last rational responses that the person makes:
Brother, art thou glad that thou shalt die in Cristin feith?
Responsio. ȝe.
Knowleche that thou has nouȝt wel lived as thou shuldest?
Responsio. ȝe.
Art thou sori therfor?
Responsio. ȝe.
Hast thou wil to amend the ȝif [if] thou haddist space of lif?
Responsio. ȝe.
Levist thou in God, Fader Almighti, maker of heuene & of erthe?
Responsio. ȝe.78
Working through only the most important articles of the faith in the shortest possible form—using a series of questions adapted from baptism rites—the examination quickly moves on to its most urgent topic: the need to surrender the self to the vision of the cross (still being held in front of the dying person according to the Ordo), and 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
