Europe. In the three decades from 1380 to 1410, an important face of laicization in England was the radical political and theological agenda associated with John Wyclif, fiercely critical of monasticism and the secular church and demanding a reorientation of authority in the church, effectively, around lay elites.25 But Wycliffism was not the only reformist force of the period, and laicizing reform survived the movement’s suppression, taking on and making mainstream parts of its agenda as it went.26 The Visitation of the Sick itself, especially in its expanded rewriting for wealthy lay users, circulated in early fifteenth-century London books whose contents are inflected by Wycliffism but whose agenda is in tune with the normative, and increasingly confident, lay religiosity of the period.
Despite the presence in the city of impressive numbers of highly educated rectors, cathedral canons, and other religious,27 important aspects of the spiritual life of fifteenth-century London were in concrete ways in the hands of its civic governors. For reasons explored in this study, the discourse of death was one of their basic resources. Baptism, the Eucharist, confession, and other sacraments, including the unction given the very ill: all these moments of sacramental contact with the transcendent required a priest. In the practices we see emerge in the Visitation of the Sick and other accounts of the deathbed, the “good death” that all serious Christians hoped to achieve did not. Laymen could and should attend the deathbeds of other laymen. Moreover, because the laity lived their lives in intense contact with the “world”—from a monastic viewpoint they were the world—their death, although in one respect spiritually worrisome, was for that very reason also an area of especially intimate concern and focus.
A second aspect of cultural change illuminated by analysis of London’s vigorous investment in death and dying is the city’s internationalism. Much the nation’s largest commercial and political center and the heart of its book trade, London was a key point of collection and distribution for new insular texts and ideas. But the city’s close connections to other urban centers in Continental Europe also made it easy for it to remain abreast of fashions in the discussion and representation of death as they developed rapidly in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Bohemia—part of a wider turn toward the pastorally oriented religiosity that characterized the period between the reformist activism of the Council of Constance in 1414–18 and the advent of Lutheranism a century later. Even as they engaged with the long-lasting implications of the insular reformism associated with John Wyclif, the city’s early fifteenth-century governors, spiritual and political, were aware of Continental reformers like Jean Gerson, Bernardino of Siena, Johannes Nider, Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, and Jan Hus, and movements like the Observant Reform and the Devotio Moderna. In the early sixteenth century, Luther’s works were read, and indeed publicly burned, in the city within a few years of their writing, while the web of trading connections between the city and Continental Europe, not least in connection with the book trade, made efforts to prevent their circulation an exercise in futility.
A few privileged Londoners—including some who were neither citizens nor governors but rather members of the class that Rosemary Horrox, in a classic article, has defined as “urban gentry”28—had early knowledge of the fifteenth-century Continental best seller Tractatus de arte bene moriendi through its English translation of around 1430, The Book of the Craft of Dying. Hoccleve’s Lerne to Die may be an early response to the growing devotional prestige of Suso’s Horologium sapientiae among the early fifteenth-century French aristocracy. The Daunce of Poulys, commissioned by the city’s common clerk John Carpenter, may have been in place within a decade of the Parisian Danse macabre itself, the earliest of hundreds of European imitations of that artwork. Carpenter’s extensive library included a copy of another kind of death text, Francesco Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, a handbook for wealthy laymen struggling to keep their lives, and souls, intact in the face of the unpredictability of fortune: the most renowned of many works circulating in London inflected by Christian humanism (and, through it, Senecan Stoicism) that helped establish the reciprocal relationship between learning to die and living in the world that is a signature of London lay death discourse. At the end of the period covered in this book, Erasmus’s De praeparatione ad mortem was written as the result of a commission from Thomas Boleyn, the father of Anne Boleyn, and translated within four years into English for London publication.
The public culture that emerged around death in long fifteenth-century London was sophisticated and richly multivalent: admonitory and celebratory, penitential and sumptuous, communitarian and hierarchic at the same time. As the ordered and articulated depiction of the professions in the Daunce of Poulys suggests, dying in the fifteenth century had become an increasingly imbricated social practice in which distinctions of lay status were reinforced even at the moment of the dissolution of the individual self. With energetic, self-aware, and paradoxically positive intensity, death discourse informs and reflects the living interests and concerns of the city, its citizens, and its rulers. The picture darkens as the fifteenth century, and the book, moves forward. Based on a Latin work produced as part of an early fifteenth-century reformist counterattack against heresy and moral decay, the Tractatus de arte bene moriendi, the Craft of Dying introduces a note of spiritual anxiety and, perhaps, exclusivism to the English deathbed, while more secular professional and physical anxieties are at play in the death texts of the 1530s. Yet the core function of the ars moriendi, to make the fact of death productive, comprehensible, and tolerable within a given cultural system, remains. Death itself changes across the course of the period I describe; the necessity of learning to die does not.
Chapter 1, “Spiritual Governance and the Lay Household: The Visitation of the Sick,” works closely with a group of little-studied texts, including the Ordo ad visitandum infirmum from the Sarum rite, the “A” and “E” versions of The Visitation of the Sick, and the didactic treatise The Fyve Wyttes, to lay out the particular model of laicization on which the more specifically urban and socioliterary studies that follow depend. During the late fourteenth century, the deathbed became the key site at which a model of Christian community increasingly independent of the sacramental apparatus that had long surrounded dying was performed. The Visitation of the Sick (c. 1380) provides a glimpse into this phenomenon. Combining two early twelfth-century Latin texts, the Anselmian Admonitio morienti and the De Visitacione infirmorum by the humanist abbot and archbishop Baudri de Bourgueil (1045/6–1130), the shorter Visitation A provides a text useful for lay and clerical deathbed attendants, introduces an affective and Christocentric theology not part of the Latin ritual, and reconfigures the relations between the dying person and the officiant around the humanistic discourse of amicitia. Grounded in the theology of the “corporal works of mercy,” the longer Visitation E introduces into the egalitarian ideology of the deathbed community a new emphasis on social hierarchy, as the responsibilities of temporal lordship extend to the deathbed itself. In a series of books containing Visitation E, several connected to London, the deathbed becomes a site of spiritual governance by privileged laypeople, making possible lay participation in the “mixed” life usually assigned to bishops.
Chapter 2, “Dying Generations: The Dance of Death,” takes up the link between mortality and government described in Chapter 1 to discuss how London’s common clerk John Carpenter (d. 1442) exploits orthodox death discourse both to commemorate the former mayor Richard Whittington (d. 1423) and to perpetuate an image of the city as a mortality community. Rather than being used for remembrances in the form of the obits that prayed so many other successful merchants through purgatory, the moneys left by Whittington to pay for postmortem works of mercy funded a set of building projects, including an almshouse, a college of priests, and a library, that significantly recast older religious forms with lay Londoners’ edification in mind. As Whittington’s main executor, Carpenter masterminded both these projects and the smaller ones that made the Whittington arms a ubiquitous feature of the cityscape. As common clerk, he also used the city’s moneys to fund other death projects.
