Series alongside deathbed manuals, meditations, tribulation treatises, catechetic instructions, almshouse ordinances, and wills, I also attend to the books in which such materials circulated, to the institutional contexts that gave them purchase, and, where possible, to identifiable readers, most of them male members of London’s lay elite. Since London’s literary and religious culture evolved rapidly during this period and was exceptionally open to international influence, I track cultural and religious change on the European, as well as English, stage and the role played by death texts of French, Italian, German, and Austrian origin in the metropolis and among those who lived and died in it. Taking its cue from the medieval Christian understanding of death itself, as an event most straitly bounded in time and space yet also a portal to the infinite and eternal, my book affirms the indissolubility of the secular and the sacred in the public culture of fifteenth-century London and argues for the importance of taking their interpenetration seriously.
Learning to Die in London is the first book-length study of the English ars moriendi during the long fifteenth century and contributes to a surprisingly small body of specialist literature on the subject.1 This does not mean that the topic will seem unfamiliar to medievalists or, indeed, to early modernists. On the contrary, it seems to attach so naturally to the period as hardly to need discussion. It is a truism that, in the centuries after the European Black Death of 1348–50, death became a focus of special intensity even by the standards of an era for which it was always a preoccupation. Figured by the skeletons that occupy the lower compartments of “transi” tombs or link bony hands with representatives of the “estates” of late medieval society in the Danse macabre, death functions as a potent symbol of the period’s difference from the modern.
Occasionally, this difference is seen in positive terms. For example, in Eamon Duffy’s well-known study of fifteenth-century religion, The Stripping of the Altars, the communal orientation of late medieval death culture grounds a lay religiosity centered on the rhythms of parish life, as part of the concerted attempt made by late medieval moral teachers to persuade the laity of the transience of earthly pleasures and goods and the need to seek eternal salvation at all costs.2 Like Philippe Ariès in Homme devant la mort (translated as The Hour of Our Death),3 Duffy emphasizes medieval death culture’s longue durée, focusing on the most slowly changing aspects of what he calls “traditional” practice, especially the Latin liturgical Ordo ad visitandum infirmum (visitation of the sick) and the rites of burial, requiem, and commemoration or “mind” that followed, during the century before these were disrupted by the English Reformation.
More often, however, even in recent work, late medieval death culture is quite casually understood as obsessive or morbid: the product, as Johan Huizinga asserted nearly a century ago, of “deep psychological strata of fear” of death on the one hand and “a kind of spasmodic reaction against an excessive sensuality” on the other, on the part of a culture that, in some accounts, was itself morbid to the core.4 The sheer elaborateness of late medieval death culture, its masses, chantry chapels, purgatory visions, its focus on inculcating penitence, fear, and contemptus mundi provides scholars of secular culture with a further reason to avoid engaging with religion and scholars of medieval religious culture with a reason to prefer different topics. Outside medieval studies, the topos that Renaissance or Reformation modernity was born from a repudiation of the death “fixation” figured by these phenomena—that modernity embraces life, where the medieval embraced death—often goes unquestioned even by scholars of the early modern phases of the ars moriendi tradition itself.5 In recent decades, social historians and art historians have begun to work behind the clichés grounding these generalizations, producing local analyses that seek to take the variety of late medieval practices and representations of death on their own terms.6 In other medieval disciplines, including my own field of literary studies, a tendency to think of death practice and attitudes as static and generalized persists.
Pointedly avoiding discussion of morbidity and the “macabre,” then, I aim in this book to offer more nuanced ways to read textual representations of death produced during the course of the long fifteenth century. I read these representations less as the unconscious expression of a mentalité or shared psychic state than as “polemic and argumentative … rooted in historical contingency,” as Sarah Beckwith memorably did for images of corpus Christi nearly twenty years ago.7 Death is at once a natural fact and acculturated through the human production of meaning. Death discourse bridges this world and the next, evoking an urgent concentration on temporal bodies, eternal souls, and their prospects in situations whose intensity tests the limits of reason, discipline, affection, and belief. Death discourse also bridges self and community, the personal, familial, and civic, seeking to channel this intensity to productive ends. By examining the period’s most influential cultural forms of death in a specific locale, and by exploring the effects of these forms, I mean to show that the period’s imaginations of death are intentional and mobile, in dialogue with and responsive to doctrinal, social, and economic change.
In focusing on a series of Middle English death texts circulating in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London, I am concerned primarily throughout with the larger role the artes moriendi—understood very broadly as texts that offer or depict a way of dying well—play in the public culture of the city. The geographical focus is intentionally limited. An increased interest in the ars moriendi in the fifteenth century was a European phenomenon. My focus on London is not intended to suggest otherwise, but instead allows for textured analysis of the forms and functions of the genre in a limited area across a 150-year period. It also enables me to contribute to our knowledge of late medieval London.8
Like other cities, London had special reasons to engage in public, as well as private, reflection on death and mortality. Urban crowding meant that life expectancy was likely to be lower than elsewhere, even as urban wealth guaranteed influxes of new residents: in the demographically reduced but far richer city of the postplague era, funerals might outnumber births. As “Troynovaunt”—the city mythically founded by Brut after he fled from the old Troy—London was much aware of its survival beyond the lifetimes of individual generations of citizens and took care to ensure and represent its own longevity, both artistically and through institution building.9 Like its public art, most of its churches, almshouses, prisons, hospitals, roads, drains, and urinals owed their existence to the huge charitable bequests contemporary death practice expected of wealthy citizens and to the legal maneuvers that preserved the fortunes made in life by those who were now corpses through “perpetual” corporations. But as a prototype of the New Jerusalem, which understood even the mayoral justice dispensed at the London Guildhall as an image of divine justice, it was also much aware of its own earthly mortality.
In this wealthy, devout, and heavily laicized context, a number of the traditional functions of the ars moriendi acquired a newly honed importance. Death provided the occasion for the penitential inculcation, often through literary texts, of the ascetic mindfulness, moral discipline, and acts of charity that the transcendent reality behind it required even of the city’s worldliest citizens, informing the behavior of specific individuals of wealth and power such as Richard Whittington, moneylender to the Crown and three times the city’s mayor, in definite ways. It allowed executors and others a means of renewing the city’s charitable institutions and the cityscape as a whole, using moneys from testamentary bequests—whose principal aim was to speed wealthy merchant donors through purgatory—to creative new ends, such as improving the quality of the city’s religious education. It offered the opportunity for imaginatively rich ethical reflection, in poetry and public art, on the tragic nature of temporality for a mercantile community perpetually bound, like London itself, to Fortune’s wheel. As a ground of homiletic instruction in several textual and visual genres, it acted as a spur to social differentiation and community discipline.
Although the study covers a wide range of vernacular texts, it focuses substantially on seven death texts in common London circulation. Three of these are deathbed manuals: the Visitation of the Sick (c. 1380); The Book of the Craft of Dying (c. 1430), a translation of the
