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 aligns Visitation E with the specific mode of reformist vernacular anticlericalism associated with Wycliffism. The work uses at least two of the phrases Anne 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