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 intricate connection with the Ordo toward the wider spiritual practice of visiting the sick. The opening rubrics of various copies of the text give it the title “How men þat been in heele [in health] schulde 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