visite seeke folke,” indicating the new, more generalized emphasis. A later rubric, placed after the instruction to “comforte the in God on þis manere,” introduces the following homily on patience with the rubric “how a man schulde comforte another þat he grucche [complain] not whanne he is seeke.”93 In some cases following Visitation A, in others independent, rubrics to successive sections of the work point readers to identification not with the dying but with the role of the priest: “Whan thowe hast tolde hym alle this, or ellys ȝef þou myght not for hast of deeth: bygynne heere eer [before] his mynde goo [goes] from hym.”94 In this instantiation, the text addresses itself to anyone who may be required to console the seriously ill and needs sound material to draw on. Generalizing the ecclesiastical visitation rite by returning it to its biblical source among the works of mercy, the text also now potentially supplants key aspects of the ecclesiastical rite.
The deliberate character of this shift from liturgical rite to spiritual practice and from priestly officiant to lay ministers becomes clearer when we consider the portions of Visitation E that deal directly with the sacraments and the priests who administer them. In Visitation A, the sacraments are rarely mentioned, since the text is designed for use in conjunction with the Ordo. Only in its first exhortation does the work explicitly enjoin confession to a priest, elaborating Baudri’s image of the soul-stone the dying one will lay in the walls around the heavenly city by allegorizing confession and penance as the hammer blows involved in forging and polishing the stone to make it “clene” for its new purpose. Visitation E modifies and elaborates this passage in ways that shift the balance of power and responsibility in play at the deathbed. In the quotation below, italics indicate Visitation E’s expansion of its source, bold a major substitution:
The noyse þat þou most [must] make heere in worchynge of this stoon, is ofte for-thynkynge [repenting] of þi synne, whiche þou most knowleche to god knowynge the gilty, and ther-after it is profitable to þe to have conseil of trewe preestes the whiche owen [ought] to blesse the poeple, tellynge hem that ben sorwful for here synnes that þei schullen thorugh goddis mercy been asoylid of hem [absolved of them]. The strokere [pumice] wherewith þou slykest [smoothes] this stoon is verrey [true] repentaunce þat þou schalt have in thyn herte sorwyng of þi synne, smytynge thi-self on þe brest with greete sighyng of sorwe and stedefast wil to turne no moore aȝeyne to synne. And whan þou hast maad redy þus thi stoon, þat is thi sowle, thanne myght þou go the redy way to god, and legge [lay] þi stoon sykerliche [securely] with-owten noyful noyse in þe citee of hevene. And therfore I conseile þe in þis lyf þat þou schryve the cleene to God and make þe redy.95
By replacing “telle the prest” with “knowleche to God” as it begins to expand Visitation A’s advice here, Visitation E changes both the occasion of the discourse and the role of the priest. In Visitation A, the Ordo is in progress, and the discourse serves as a transition between the opening Latin prayers and the sacramental scenes that follow. Here, we seem to be at a scene of lay visitation, with no priest necessarily present. As a result, rather than preparing directly for sacramental confession, the sick person is enjoined to think bitterly of past sins and admit them to God in preparing for death, only “there-after” seeking out “trewe preestes” for “conseil”—it would seem on matters too specialized or intimate to be shared with the lay speaker. Nor is any explicit mention made of the sacramental, as distinct from pastoral, role of “trewe preestes.” Although “conseil” here could just be a term for confession, there is no presumption that the role of “trewe preestes” is to perform the Ordo or that they will necessarily be involved in the final stages of the sick person’s death. Rather, the priest may attend the sickbed rather as the lay officiant does here: not for liturgical reasons, but at the behest of a sick person who determines, on the basis of an assessment of a particular priest’s “truth,” that his attendance is “profitable.” The sick person, with the help of the officiating speaker, is now firmly in charge of the process of dying, and the formal visitation ritual described by the Ordo takes second place both to the lay visitation the work is enacting and to the counseling visit of the “trew preest” it enjoins.
Although the words “it is profitable to þe to have conseil of trewe preestes” sound like those of a lay officiant, nothing in this passage suggests the active exclusion of the sacraments of confession, communion, and unction from the deathbed or makes it incongruous for a “trewe preest” to use Visitation E as part of a performance of the Ordo. Yet even as it trusts in the divine mercy, the work is pessimistic about the easy availability of such priests. As the officiant laments, extolling the superiority of a good death over a life so full of “envye, wrathe, glotonye, lecherye, prude, slouth, covetise, ffalshed, manslaughtre, and thefte” that the sinner’s only hope is a virtuous death: “But harde it is, to lyve wel fulliche in this wrecchede worlde…. For heere is hunger of goddis lawe and fewe þat desiren ther-aftir, and þei þat thristen þer-aftir been ofte-tymes slaked with bittere venym; and therfore þe charite of menye wexith coold thorugh þe heete of wykked covetise.”96 (“Covetise” is the sin that “Wimbledon’s Sermon” also finds at the root of modern corruption.) Even for those who “hunger” after “goddis lawe,” “trewe preestis”—priests of sufficient education and virtue—are hard to find: a common complaint in late medieval London in particular, as Sheila Lindenbaum has noted.97 Indeed, one scenario the work may be addressing could involve the necessity of receiving the sacraments, in the context of the Ordo, from a parish priest who is not thought “trewe” or able to give good pastoral advice, so that supplementary arrangements such as those represented by Visitation E become necessary.
With its careful instructions and thorough evocation of the affects and attitudes that constitute the good death, Visitation E allows a competent and devout lay person or other nonpriest to step in and fulfill the role of counselor and spiritual guide when “trewe preestes” are lacking. This role obviously cannot include the sacramental and may have other limitations. Nonetheless, it can involve the lay officiant not only in offering “counseil” of her or his own but in taking responsibility for the sick person’s final moments, even without the timely presence of a priest to say the final prayers of the Ordo. At the end of the work, the lay voice that has earlier informed the dying layperson that “it semeth þat þou hiest the faste in þe way fro this lyf to godward,” thus proceeds to interrogate the dying layperson in the faith in the words of the Anselmian Admonitio:98 “‘Brother or sustir, art thou glad that thou schalt deyen in cristene feith?’ ‘Yee.’” Whether or not the Ordo is in progress around this scene, there is no indication that, even at the final crisis, any priest present will take over as a matter of course. In this milieu, “even-cristen” can continue to exhort and examine “even-cristen” even at the point of death.99
Visitation E in Its Manuscript and Social Contexts
Writing of the surprisingly extensive lay circulation of the Visitation of the Sick, Vincent Gillespie draws the work into the confines of the term “laicization,” presenting it as a key example of what he calls that “process of assimilation by the laity of techniques and materials of spiritual advancement that had historically been the preserve of the clerical and monastic orders.”100 Yet this formulation, important though it is, may understate the case. Visitation E is concerned with matters more pointed than lay “spiritual advancement,” from the existential issue of the lay soul’s eternal destiny to the ecclesiological one of the respective status and roles of clerical and lay participants in the deathbed drama. In its first wave of popularity, the work appears in compilations that do much more than lightly adapt clerical and monastic materials to lay use. Rather, these compilations share an ambitious understanding of their privileged lay addressees as exercising a spiritual ministry or jurisdiction over those in their care: as actants, not only in their own salvation but in that of others.
To some extent, this emphasis on lay spiritual jurisdiction
