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 interpretation.87 As I show in the next chapter, caring for the sick and dying had an especially close relation to the works of mercy, inasmuch as these acts of charity were of pressing concern not only to the living but to the dying, as they disposed of their worldly assets with an eye, in part, to their own salvation.88
The lay practice of visiting the sick had long been intertwined with its relative, the ecclesiastical Ordo, which assumes the presence of lay attendants, some of whom are assisting at the deathbed from the start while others enter the house of the dying with the priest, gathered up as he processes through the town with cross, handbell, and Eucharistic host. In the vernacular pastoral writings of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, accounts of the practice independent of the rite began to multiply, both as a result of its inclusion as a primary item of catechesis, as Pecham’s Syllabus was accepted as a normative guide to pastoral teaching, and as part of the new attention paid, across a range of texts, to all the works of the active religious life. In certain vernacular works with radical reformist and perhaps Wycliffite leanings, such as The Fyve Wyttes, the practice appears almost to substitute for the rite, as the presence of the priest at the deathbed recedes into the background and the lay attendant takes on a quasi-sacerdotal role. At once a product and a catalyst of this development, Visitation E offers an ideal vantage point from which to study it in detail, for the work scripts a version of the visitation rite in which the laity participate so thoroughly that ecclesiastical rite and lay spiritual practice almost fuse.
The clearest sign that Visitation E is a repurposing of Visitation A for lay users is that the work serves a double generic function and addresses a double audience—or a single audience with two potential relationships to the text. As with Visitation A, much of the work is presented as a practical script for a deathbed performance, although here the dying person tends to be a “brother or suster,” not the “sone” addressed by the priestly speaker of the A version.89 Visitation E follows Visitation A closely enough that it could still in theory be used by a priest to supplement the Ordo. But unlike Visitation A, the work also asks to be received both as a reconstruction of the deathbed for a lay reader anticipating sickness and as a moral exhortation of such a reader while undergoing it. One of the reviser’s concerns was to help readers to prepare for their own deaths, using the text to help them occupy the place of the dying in advance or prepare themselves in old age or sickness. Readers of Visitation E are asked to anticipate the moment at which they must become recipients of the liturgical rite and lay practice of visitation.
Thus where in Visitation A the second, more urgent set of exhortations is introduced by an instruction to the priest—”Þerfor if his sekenes aslake nouȝt [does not lessen], thou shalt confort him on this maner”—in Visitation E the equivalent passage addresses the sick reader directly—”Therfore, ȝef þi peynes slake not, comforte the [yourself] in god in this manere”—as though inviting readers to minister to themselves, outside the ritual context of the Ordo.90 Where Visitation A ends with a succinct prayer spoken by the priest on behalf of the dying, Visitation E substitutes a longer inner monologue, voiced aloud or “in þi herte” by the dying and often reminiscent of the Ordo, as the priest’s voice fades away with the rest of the world and the dying person is left alone with the cross:
And lord al myghty Jhesu Crist, sitthe thyn hooly gospel witnesseth þat þou wolt nought the deeth of synful man but that he bee turnyd from synne and lyve (Ezekiel 18:32), have mercy of me synful wrecche, after thi woord, and as þou blamedest Symount for he hadde indignacioun þat Marie magdeleyne for hir synnes schulde neighe the, have mercy of me moost synful, and lord Jhesu as þou clepedist [called] Zachee and Poul and oothere diverse from here [their] synes, dispise nought me þat come to the wilfulliche [voluntarily] wyth-owten suche clepeynge…. For I knowleche [acknowledge] þat I may not helpe my-self ne aȝeyn-bugge me [redeem myself] with my dedys: but stedefastliche I truste in thi passioun, that it suffiseth to make ful asseth [satisfaction] to þe fadir of hevene for my synnes.91
Like the shorter speech in Visitation A, this rhetorically poised and syntactically rich prayer, which takes up one sixth of the whole work, could in practice be spoken for the dying by a priest or attendant, but perhaps makes most sense as a script for a meditative rehearsal of death.
One purpose of this elaborate revision of Visitation A therefore seems to have been to transform a priest’s paralitugical aid into a treatise suitable for private or household reading, with the deathbed scene acting as a point of focus, obliging readers to entertain the thought of their own deaths and the conversion it invites. “And therfore I counseile þe in þis lyf þat þou schryve the cleene to god and make þe redy,” declares the narrator, expanding the only passage Visitation A addresses to the attendants and presenting one of the work’s programs in the process.92
But this is not the only concern of Visitation E. If one set of adaptations to Visitation A pulls the work toward homiletic meditation, another set serves to sustain the earlier text’s practical engagement with the actuality of the deathbed while moving the work away from its
