Hudson has identified as part of a “Lollard sect vocabulary,” “trewe preestis” and “Goddis lawe,” while several of the compilations in which it appears have attracted scholarly attention for their inclusion of heterodox alongside orthodox works, and for the watchful and critical attitude toward the clergy they foster in their readers: an attitude we have seen Visitation E seeks to inculcate even in the dying.101 The work’s relative indifference to the Ordo ritual; its emphasis on inner contrition at the expense of sacramental confession; its lack of direct interest in communion and extreme unction; its concern to place the dying person, with or without a priest in attendance, in unmediated dialogue with God: all these are parallel or analogous to stances often associated with vernacular Wycliffite writings, including writings that traveled with the work and occasionally show signs of its influence.102
Yet as has become increasingly clear in recent scholarship, by the early fifteenth century, many of the emphases characteristic of Wycliffite writing were shared in literate lay religiosity in general, at least in the urban environments within which prose religious compilations such as those containing Visitation E circulated, which evince both the characteristic “similarity in the motivations of dissenters and conformists” Ian Forrest describes in his book on fifteenth-century English heresy proceedings and the “cosmopolitan” inclusivity ascribed to London religious compilations by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry.103 Although interconnections between Visitation E and vernacular Wycliffism deserve exploration—particularly in light of one of the work’s earliest manuscripts, University College 97, whose Wycliffite sympathies often lie close to the surface104—the common emphasis on lay spiritual jurisdiction in Visitation E and the books in which it traveled point not only to the history of religious radicalism but also to a specific fifteenth-century development within the culture of pastoral care. This development is the new importance assigned a specifically secular site of such care, the urban lay household.
The household had always been a place of pastoral instruction and discipline, in which parents and householders had something of the same obligation to catechize and correct children and servants that a curate had to his parishioners.105 When the Treatise of Wedded Men, found in Westminster School 3, a manuscript associated with Bodley 938, exhorts parents not merely to allow “godfadris and godmodris to techen þe children þe Paternoster and þe Crede” but to ensure that they fully understand “þe hestis [commandments] of God,” without which “þei schullen not be savyd … but be ful hard and depe dampnyd in helle, more þan heþene men,” it is dramatizing a familiar lesson.106 But in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English cities, as scholars such as Sarah Rees Jones and Shannon McSheffrey have recently shown, the extended, hierarchical household unit played a vital role in the maintenance of order and “civic morality,” as urban governments made the male householder directly responsible for monitoring sexual conduct, arranging marriages, and giving monetary sureties for the lawful conduct of all the coresidents under his charge. As Rees Jones puts it, for the “new civic and guild structures of administration” of the fifteenth century, the household in its entirety “should be a place of good government in which the harmonious ends of civic government might be achieved.”107
Keeping pace with this broadened focus on temporal governance, several of the compilations containing Visitation E have at their center the conscious elevation of and intensification of focus on the specifically spiritual jurisdiction of the paterfamilias, whose exercise of a “fadris love to his meyne [household],” through teaching, admonishment, discipline, and encouragement, obliges him, according to How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis commaundementis, to carry out not only “þe office of holy chirche” within his jurisdiction (“in his hous”) but “on sum maner [in some sense] a bischopes office.”108 Several of the household miscellanies in which Visitation E appears provide materials for a householder to utilize in his “benevolent rule” over dependents, as he instructs, guides, and shapes himself, his godly familia, and even his tenants and day laborers.109 The inclusion of the work in these books thus serves to extend the householder’s spiritual governance to the edge of the lives of his dependents, providing the encouragement and knowledge needed to supplement the parish priest’s ministry at the deathbed.
The instructional program retained in whole or part in most of the compilations that contain Visitation E is Pecham’s Syllabus, which in addition to the works of mercy required priests and parishioners to know the articles of faith, the commandments of old and new law, the seven sacraments, the four cardinal and three theological virtues, and their antagonists, the seven deadly sins.110 In some Visitation E books, the reformist orientation of these catechetical clusters toward enabling lay teaching and learning is especially clear. Cambridge University Library MS Nn.4.12 (c. 1400), for example, is made up almost wholly of texts expanding the basic Syllabus materials: the so-called Wycliffite expositions of the Pater Noster, Ave Maria,111 and Apostles Creed; a commentary on the Ten Commandments; Visitation E; and a number of other works that crisscross through the items on Pecham’s Syllabus several times.112 These texts not only provide the information the reader needs to be saved, they also argue for the duty of laypeople both to teach one another the same truths and to hold the church to its own, sober pastoral responsibilities: “Oure beleve [Creed] techis us þat God ordeyned hyt [it] al, and bad [commanded] þat men schuld cun [memorize] hyt, and teche yt to oþer. And ȝif prelatys faylyn in þis, Christ seyde þat stonys schulde cry (Luke 19:40); and secler [secular] lordys schuld, in defawte [absence] of prelaytis, lerne and preche þe law of God in here modyr tonge,” states the Apostles Creed commentary, encapsulating one of the programs of the manuscript as a whole.113 In University College 97, Visitation E again appears with a full set of expositions of the items in Pecham’s Syllabus, this time along with the less widely known text on the two commandments of the new law, Diliges Dominum Deum Tuum, which instructs readers to “kepe and teche the comaundementȝ of God,” in part by providing “holy conseillyng and techyng” to sinful neighbors in need.114 Both books seek to expand the spiritual duties of lay people to include what is, in effect, pastoral teaching. The presence of Visitation E among these works is a further symptom of the reformist orientation of both.115
Indeed, Visitation E appears with these catechetical items so regularly that it appears to have attained the status of an indispensable instructional text. London, British Library Royal MS 17.A.xxvi, for example, groups the works with a further set of expositions of Syllabus items, some of them in their Wycliffite versions, then expands its program by adding the Middle English version of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse, with prologue and commentary, and the Early Version Wycliffite Bible translation of John’s Gospel.116 In the bulky Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud Miscellaneous MS 210, Visitation E again appears with a cluster of mostly Wycliffite catechetical items, along with the vigorously reformist and affective Book to a Mother, which encourages lay participation in certain areas of pastoral care, such as correcting the sins of others, in the context of a highly ambitious program of lay asceticism.117
Visitation E is not a casual addition to these more complex collections. On the contrary, it shares in the wider rhetoric and goals of its textual companions. For example, the Wycliffite tract on excommunication, “þe grete sentence of curs expounded,” found in London, Westminster School MS 3, with all the Wycliffite catechetical items mentioned above, describes the profitableness of “confession maad to trewe prestis”—with “contricioun for synnes before done” and “good life and keeping Goddis hestis and werkis of mercy … after”—in much the same terms as Visitation E.118 A commentary on Psalm 26, found uniquely in the same book, also echoes Visitation E’s lament for the loss of “Goddis lawe” in the current “wrecchindes of þis world,” deploring the “worldly wrecchis, ful of pride, ypocrisye, and covetise,” who “wenne [hope] to stoppe … goddis lawe,” prophesying that “al þe persecucioun and sclaundre þat comeþ to goddis trewe servauntis schal turne hem to good, as holy writt seiþ.”119 Treatises on the Ten Commandments in several manuscripts offer helpful context
