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Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540

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Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. LEARNING TO DIE IN LONDON, 1380–1540 • AMY APPLEFORD university of pennsylvania press philadelphia Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Appleford, Amy. Learning to die in London, 1380–1540 / Amy Appleford.—1st ed. p. cm.—(The Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4669-8 1. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 2. Death in literature. 3. Death—England—London. 4. Death—England—London—Psychological aspects. 5. Death— Political aspects—England—London. I. Title. II. Series: Middle Ages series. PR275.D43A67 2015 820.9'3548—dc23 2014024291 For Nicholas contents Note on Quotations ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Spiritual Governance and the Lay Household: The Visitation of the Sick 18 Chapter 2. Dying Generations: The Dance of Death 55 Chapter 3. Self-Care and Lay Asceticism: Learn to Die 98 Chapter 4. Wounded Texts and Worried Readers: The Book of the Craft of Dying 137 Chapter 5. The Exercise of Death in Henrician England 181 Conclusion 217 Notes 225 Bibliography 281 Index 311 Acknowledgments 319 note on quotations In this book I cite a variety of Middle English editions, manuscript sources, early printed books, and other records, and the representation of these records is nec- essarily somewhat eclectic. All Middle English quotations normalize use of the letter pairings u/v and i/j, place a hyphen before the past participle prefix (y-), and follow modern word division in cases where there could be confusion. Introduction This book is an account of the literature and culture of death and mortality in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century London as it relates to the broad theme of governance. It takes as its focus a body of writings in several different genres circulating in England’s capital between the 1380s, a generation after the Black Death, and the 1530s, the first decade of the English Reformation. I argue that the schooled awareness of mortality was a vital aspect of civic culture, critical not only to the individual’s experience of interiority and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, institution building, and the government of the city itself. At a time when an increasingly laicized religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal and cultural enrichment, and sometimes with violent political change, having an educated attitude to death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense. In fifteenth-century London, as elsewhere in northern Europe, a complex of new ways of representing, preparing for, and even undergoing death gained enhanced cultural power, informing the behavior and perceptions of the city’s citizens and institutions and acting as key public markers of responsible civic engagement and identity. During the period between the accession of Henry IV in 1399 and that of Henry VII in 1485 in particular, when the confidence of the city and its governors was at its height, death discourse was one of the most visible features of London public culture. Death was understood by a broad spectrum of the city’s elites as a generative force: one capable of providing vital personal, institutional, social, and literary as well as religious opportunities. A new understanding of death as an ars or “craft,” something to be learned and managed, also made possible new techniques of self-examination. Intrinsically affective, these techniques in turn made personally intimate the turbulence of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century transformations in the religious and polit- ical culture of city and realm. 2 INTRODUCTION My book explores the particularities of London death culture in relation to a series of vernacular texts, the earliest of which is The Visitation of the Sick, an anonymous work from around 1380 that may be northern Europe’s first ver- nacular guide to the deathbed, and the latest A Preparation to Death, a transla- tion of Erasmus’s De praeparatione ad mortem, also anonymous, printed in 1538. Reading image-texts such as the Daunce of Poulys and literary texts such as Thomas Hoccleve’s Series alongside deathbed manuals, meditations, tribulation treatises, catechetic instructions, almshouse ordinances, and wills, I also attend to the books in which such materials circulated, to the institutional contexts that gave them purchase, and, where possible, to identifiable readers, most of them male members of London’s lay elite. Since London’s literary and religious culture evolved rapidly during this period and was exceptionally open to inter- national influence, I track cultural and religious change on the European, as well as English, stage and the role played by death texts of French, Italian, German, and Austrian origin in the metropolis and among those who lived and died in it. Taking its cue from the medieval Christian understanding of death itself, as an event most straitly bounded in time and space yet also a portal to the infinite and eternal, my book affirms the indissolubility of the secular and the sacred in the public culture of fifteenth-century London and argues for the importance of taking their interpenetration seriously. Learning to Die in London is the first book-length study of the English ars moriendi during the long fifteenth century and contributes to a surprisingly small body of specialist literature on the subject.1 This does not mean that the topic will seem unfamiliar to medievalists or, indeed, to early modernists. On the contrary, it seems to attach so naturally to the period as hardly to need dis- cussion. It is a truism that, in the centuries after the European Black Death of 1348–50, death became a focus of special intensity even by the standards of an era for which it was always a preoccupation. Figured by the skeletons that occupy the lower compartments of “transi” tombs or link bony hands with rep- resentatives of the “estates” of late medieval society in the Danse macabre, death functions as a potent symbol of the period’s difference from the modern. Occasionally, this difference is seen in positive terms. For example, in Eamon Duffy’s well-known study of fifteenth-century religion, The Stripping of the Altars, the communal orientation of late medieval death culture grounds a lay religiosity centered on the rhythms of parish life, as part of the concerted attempt made by late medieval moral teachers to persuade the laity of the tran- sience of earthly pleasures and goods and the need to seek eternal salvation at Introduction 3 all costs.2 Like Philippe Ariès in Homme devant la mort (translated as The Hour of Our Death),3 Duffy emphasizes medieval death culture’s longue durée, focusing on the most slowly changing aspects of what he calls “traditional” practice, espe- cially the Latin liturgical Ordo ad visitandum infirmum (visitation of the sick) and the rites of burial, requiem, and commemoration or “mind” that followed, during the century before these were disrupted by the English Reformation. More often, however, even in recent work, late medieval death culture is quite casually understood as obsessive or morbid: the product, as Johan Huizinga asserted nearly a century ago, of “deep psychological strata of fear” of death on the one hand and “a kind of spasmodic reaction against an excessive sensuality” on the other, on the part of a culture that, in some accounts, was itself morbid to the core.4 The sheer elaborateness of late medieval death culture, its masses, chantry chapels, purgatory visions, its focus on inculcating penitence, fear, and contemptus mundi provides scholars of secular culture with a further reason to avoid engaging with religion and scholars of medieval religious culture with a reason to prefer different topics. Outside medieval studies, the topos that Renaissance or Reformation modernity was born from a repudiation of the death “fixation” figured by these phenomena—that modernity embraces life, where the medieval embraced death—often goes unquestioned even by scholars of the early modern phases of the ars moriendi tradition itself.5 In recent decades, social historians and art historians have begun to work behind the clichés grounding these generalizations, producing local analyses that seek to take the variety of late medieval practices and representations of death on their own terms.6 In other medieval disciplines, including my own field of literary studies, a tendency to think of death practice and attitudes as static and gener- alized persists. Pointedly avoiding discussion of morbidity and the “macabre,” then, I aim in this book to offer more nuanced ways to read textual representations of death produced during the course of the long fifteenth century. I read these represen- tations less as the unconscious expression of a mentalité or shared psychic state than as “polemic and argumentative . rooted in historical contingency,” as Sarah Beckwith memorably did for images of corpus Christi nearly twenty years ago.7 Death is at once a natural fact and acculturated through the human pro- duction of meaning. Death discourse bridges this world and the next, evoking an urgent concentration on temporal bodies, eternal souls, and their prospects in situations whose intensity tests the limits of reason, discipline, affection, and belief.
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