Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540. Amy Appleford

Chapters 4 and 5.

      For much of the book, however, I am concerned not with what these texts tell us about changes across time but with an interest they all share: the role of death preparation in forms of good governance, that is, in the virtuous ordering of the polity, and the importance of a proper attitude toward mortality on the part of subjects and their secular and religious rulers. In focusing on this theme, I am indebted to James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution, whose model of late medieval English society as structured according to a complex “set of adjacent, interdependent, and competing jurisdictions” I have found productive throughout this study.¹⁰ But I am also following the lead of the death texts themselves, all of which have intrinsic relationships with fifteenth-century “feudal, civic, and religious” structures of governance, participating in important ways in real world struggles for authority or in the literary imagination of legitimate jurisdiction.¹¹ The first three chapters of the book in particular are loosely organized around a specific model of governance well known in late medieval London, and ideally suited to discussion of the various “jurisdictions” that influence and are influenced by the ars moriendi and their complex interplay. This is the tripartite Aristotelian model that seeks to relate three principal arenas of political and ethical action: the self, the household, and the city.

      The synthetic approach to self-government, domestic government, and civic government integral to Aristotle’s Politics was regularly invoked in discussions of politics from the early thirteenth century on, in the many academic commentaries on the work, in the late fourteenth-century French translation by Nicole Oresme, and in Latin and vernacular treatises written under Aristotle’s influence.¹² As described in John Trevisa’s translation of Giles of Rome’s late thirteenth-century De regimine principum, The Governance of Kings and Princes (1390s), self, household, and city are tightly integrated locales in which forms of control and rule, rightly practiced, together produce a harmonious and virtuous polity. Following Giles, Trevisa divides his work into three books, beginning with “how the kynges majeste, and so how everiche man, schal rule hymself,” that is, with the branches of governance known as “ethica and monastica”; continuing with “how a [he] schal rewle his meyne [household],” that is, with “Iconomyk, a sciens of housbondrie”; and concluding with the “parfite” topic of “how a schal rule a cite and a regne,” that is, with “politica.”¹³ My own analysis does not follow what Trevisa calls his “resonable and kinde” order, since it makes best historical and expository sense to begin with the second term, “Iconomyk, a sciens of housbondrie.” As Trevisa later defines it, this is the rule “eche citeyn” should exercise over “his owne hous and maynye, not onlich for [because] suche reulyng is his owne profit but also for suche reulyng is i-ordeyned to þe comyn profit, as to þe profit of regne and of citee.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, I stay close to the central insight and demand of this Aristotelian system, that the areas in which “governance” is practiced are at once separate and integrated, and attend often to the demands such an ethical politics imposed, even as I also explore the limits of its reach.

      As Sarah Rees Jones has demonstrated, London governors made a concerted effort in the fifteenth century to make the household a subset and arm of the city’s governing structure, “a place of good government in which the harmonious ends of civic government might be achieved.”¹⁵ In a recasting of an old system of local governance known as “frankpledge,” whose origins are Anglo-Saxon, adult male householders were made legally responsible for the physical well-being and good behavior of their familiae, which included not only their natural kin but also those living in under their roof including servants and apprentices.¹⁶ In particular, fifteenth-century London householders were expected, as Shannon McSheffrey has shown, to monitor and regulate the moral and sexual conduct of their dependents and servants.¹⁷ Several of the books containing a version of The Visitation of the Sick discussed in Chapter 1, some from London, others associated with the West Midlands, seem to have cognizance of this developing system, extending it in certain cases to give householders similar responsibility for their tenants.

      The majority of the artes moriendi treated in this book appear in at least one manuscript or printed book addressed to a householder audience, suggesting that part of the householder’s newly intensified role as moral overseer also extended to the end of life of his dependents. Despite the wholly masculine deathbed scene depicted on the front cover of this book, documentary evidence suggests that women did the actual difficult work of looking after the physical needs of the sick and getting the dead ready for burial. However, it seems that, at least ideally, the head of the household exercised moral governance over the dying, supporting Felicity Riddy’s suggestion that, at the fifteenth-century sickbed, “the physician counsels, the sovereign—the person in charge—issues precepts: the nurse … gets on with the business of care.”¹⁸ In crucial ways, moreover, overseeing the death of a dependent as represented in these household books appears to be unlike many of the other duties assigned to the London householder, for it is understood as a spiritual responsibility, overlapping significantly with the spiritual jurisdiction of the priest. This enlargement of lay spiritual jurisdiction explains, for example, the frequent appearance of the “E” version of the Visitation of the Sick alongside works that deal explicitly with the broad responsibilities of the householder. Although this is for several reasons a complex case, it may also explain the frequency with which surviving copies of The Book of the Craft of Dying, the death text discussed in Chapter 4, contain ownership inscriptions from late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century guildsmen and members of the urban gentry.

      Governance of the self through ethica monastica (personal ethics) is also an important object of interest for fifteenth-century artes moriendi and tribulation texts, certain of which develop ascetic praxes derived from monastic or eremitic literature, including meditatio mortis and other imaginative forms of self-negation. Newly translated and adapted for use by a lay audience, monastic praxes shape an inner, lay asceticism, responsive to the desires of pious, educated, and privileged lay Londoners to participate in the perfectionist life of enclosed religious. The presence of the death text central to Chapter 3, Suso’s Learn to Die, in a number of lay manuscripts of the later fifteenth century and as the climactic element in Hoccleve’s Series is one sign of the spread of this ascetic-derived lay religiosity; Whitford’s repurposing of his Daily Exercise and Experience of Death, originally written for the Syon nuns, for lay householders is a second; in another register, Lupset’s understanding of the scholar’s life of court service as a potential philosopher’s martyrdom in the Treatise of Dying Well is a third. While the artes moriendi that support household governance enlarge the jurisdiction of lay male household heads, ascetic death texts counsel meditation on the ephemerality of the body and the social and temporal world, nurturing continence and inwardness. In practice, however, and particularly toward the end of the period, these two modes of death text often travel together, as interlocking elements.

      The most “parfite” and demanding of the modes of governance outlined by Trevisa, the rule of “citees” and “regnes,” supposedly both supports and depends on the other two—and the most spectacular manifestation of London public death culture discussed in Chapter 2, the Daunce of Poulys, indeed works precisely to reinforce the proper rule of self and household as a means to strengthen and sustain the civic body. In the Daunce of Poulys, the undifferentiated language of spiritual equality in the face of death that belongs to traditional death discourse (“death the leveler”) retains its affective force, as dying representatives of each estate, joined hand in hand each with its own death and with one another, face their common end together. Yet the city governors had a particular investment in perpetuating an image of the city as a mortality community, as they encouraged London’s inhabitants to embrace virtue and avoid vice—including vices that transgressed the city’s laws and economic order—in order to die well, even