The second group consists of the first three items in Hoccleve’s last major poetic achievement, the Series (early 1420s)—the Complaint, the Dialogue, and an amplified verse translation of the death chapter of Suso’s Horologium sapientiae called Lerne to Dye—which together represent a similar construction of an ascetic identity through the contemplation of adversity and death. The Series is often read as Hoccleve’s attempt to be reaccepted into the London literary and political community from which he had been exiled by illness. I suggest that these three sections of the poem instead sketch a program of interior asceticism and conversion that rests on the public continuation of his break with society. At the household and civic level, death discourse retained much of its traditionally communitarian emphasis. At the personal, penitential level, as Hoccleve shows us, it took on individualizing properties, shaping the soul so that it need not rely on the prevalent economy of purgatorial prayers and indulgences. Dying to the world on a daily basis, the inward ascetic Hoccleve draws on what David Lawton has called the “public resources for interiority” offered by mortification discourse, transforming the experience of social alienation and self-fragmentation into the foundation of eremitic and prophetic speech.29
The first three chapters all focus on the first five decades of the fifteenth century, the decades of Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Carpenter, of the building of the charities associated with Whittington, and of the intensive circulation of The Visitation of the Sick. Chapter 4, “Wounded Texts and Worried Readers: The Book of the Craft of Dying,” an account of the origins, contents, and social contexts of The Book of the Craft of Dying, begins to move the discussion toward the end of the century. A close Middle English translation of the enormously popular Latin Tractatus de arte bene moriendi, the Craft of Dying may have been produced as early as 1430 but mostly circulated, almost exclusively in London manuscripts, between the later fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The Tractatus is a thoroughly rewritten and vastly expanded version of the final part of Jean Gerson’s pastoral treatise Opusculum tripartitum (1405–14), a work written to support the work of secular priests and to standardize the pastoral care associated with the deathbed. Perhaps produced in the environs of the University of Vienna during the difficult years surrounding the heresy trials and burnings of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, the Tractatus is informed by Gerson’s fierce reformist energies, but focuses, unusually, on a split lay and monastic readership, insisting on the spiritual capability and responsibility that individuals in both communities have to help their colleagues die. In enjoining the lay user to behave like a monastic and the monastic user to behave like a virtuous lay person as he or she shapes a mors provisa, the work reflects the mix of conservatism on the theological level and innovation on the ecclesiastical and practical levels characteristic of the Continental Observant Reform movement and the great councils of Pisa and Constance with which it is associated.
Chapter 5, “The Exercise of Death in Henrician England,” examines the English death culture of the 1530s, the first decade of the English Reformation. In his Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben (Sermon on Preparing to Die), Martin Luther argues that fear is an improper emotion to feel at death, since it betrays a lack of belief in Christ’s conquest of sin and human suffering and in one’s own election. Instead of feeling contrition for sin, the dying should feel triumphant, directing attention only to Christ’s triumph over death; disassociating themselves from any sinners, living or dead, they should anticipate joining directly, with no interval for purgatory, the saints who are already with God. Luther’s revision of death preparation into a single focused cultivation of faith in Christ’s saving grace is directed toward alleviating fear born of worry regarding the proper interior experience of repentance, the spiritually advanced but debilitating fear that was a by-product of the antiformalist and perfectionist tendencies of fifteenth-century death manuals such as the Craft of Dying.
The desire to combat fear is also the focus of the death texts by Richard Whitford, Desiderius Erasmus, and Thomas Lupset, the most popular original artes moriendi to appear in print in English during the reign of Henry VIII. Each of these, first published in the 1530s, ran through more than one edition, and each offers itself as countering fear as the most common and crucial obstacle to dying a good death. Although they continue the earlier works’ interest in the relation between outer form and inner experience, however, these writers are less concerned with forms of perfectionist fear—fear of inadequate contrition or lack of passionate love of God—than with the basic and “natural” fear of physical death. These texts provide new models of death, ones that point to changes in London’s, and England’s, public political and religious culture. As Erasmus writes in the preface to A Preparation to Death, learning to die is enormously important, “for this is of mans lyfe the laft part (as it were) of the playe, wherof hangeth eyther everlastyng blysee of man, or everlastynge damnation.”30 In all three texts discussed here, learning to die is presented for the first time as taking place not only in the domestic space of the household but in public view: as a spectacle scripted by a human author, not a divine one; a “playe” on a stage, watched by a strangers in a crowd, not a ritualized natural event in a sickbed.
CHAPTER 1
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Spiritual Governance and the Lay Household
The Visitation of the Sick
The Second Estate: Thomas Wimbledon’s Redde rationem
“Alas, alas, þilke grete citee þat was cloþed wiþ bisse [linen] and purpre and brasile [dyed fabric] and overgilt wiþ gold and precious stones and perles. For in on hour alle þese grete richessis beþ distroied” (Revelation 3:16–17). Þan shulleþ þey seye þat shulleþ be dampned wiþ hire [i.e., the city]: “We have erred fro þe wey of trewþe and of ryȝtfulnesse. Liȝt haþ not schyned to us, and þe sunne of undirstondyng haþ not rysen to us. We haveþ be maade wery in þe wey of wikkednesse and of loost [lust], and we haveþ go [gone] harde weyes. But þe wey of God we knewe not. What haþ pride profited to us, oþer [or] þe bost of oure richesse? What haþ it brouȝt to us? Al is go as a schadewe of deeþ, and we mowe [may] now schewe no tokene of holynesse; in oure wikkednesse we beþ wasted awey” (Wisdom 8:6–13). Þynk þerfore, I rede [advise], þat þou schalt ȝelde rekenyng [you must give an account] of þy balye [stewardship] (Luke 16:2).1
So ends the first part of Thomas Wimbledon’s celebrated Redde rationem villicationis tue (give an account of your stewardship: Luke 16:2), a sermon preached in 1388 at Paul’s Cross in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of the largest open spaces within the city walls, before a mixed assemblage of Londoners, setting out the duties of the three estates, chastising them for their failures, and looking forward to the coming judgment.2 The kingdom of heaven is like a “housholdynge man.” Christ assigns the work of the household to “þre offices: presthod, knyȝthod, and laboreris.” All three estates are intricately interdependent and none must fail, lest the household perish through “defaute [lack] of knowyng of Goddis lawe,” increase of “þeves and enemies,” or the “defaute of bodily sustenaunce” that follows when “bakeris … makeris of cloth … marchaundis,” and others do not do their work.3 Therefore “every staat [estate] shul [must] love oþer and men of o [one] craft shulde neiþer hate ne despise men of anoþer crafte,”4 while, at the judgment, all must give a “streyt rekenyng” to Christ, their householder, answering three questions of their governance or stewardship over others or themselves: “how hast þou entred? … how hast þou reuled? … how hast þou lyvyd?”5
Suddenly, however, it is as though the judgment is now. All the estates, “every curat and prelat of holy chirche,” “kynges, princys, maires, and schyrevys [sheriffs], and justices,” and “every Cristene man,” are summoned to the preacher’s rhetorical bar, where one sin over all