Amy Appleford's Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 is a valuable contribution to our understanding of lay devotional culture on the eve of the Reformation and further demonstrates the prominence of religious literature in the spiritual lives of literate lay Londoners. Indeed, the current strength of revisionist ideas in literary scholarship is starting to realize what Norman Tanner once described as a ‘left-wing orthodoxy’ in the pre-Reformation church. The fifteenth century was a period in which the spiritual ambition of lay readers was satisfied by an increasingly diverse and sophisticated range of vernacular religious writings, many of which blurred the lines between clerical and secular practice and authority. Recent scholarship includes Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh's co-edited After Arundel, which would make an ideal companion to Appleford's study. Learning to Die in London, therefore, is a timely book that draws our attention to a neglected tradition of religious writing. Vernacular writings on the ‘art of dying’, argues Appleford, were central to the formation of spiritual trends in the city and, in turn, the manner in which London was governed.

Chapter 1 lays the necessary groundwork for Appleford's study. A close textual reading of the deathbed manual, The Visitation of the Sick (c. 1380), demonstrates how the personal experience of dying might be thought of as an opportunity for instruction and governance. The deathbed becomes a site in which the guidance of others may be most fully realized by those in positions of authority. Chapter 2, the longest and richest of Appleford's work, will be of greatest interest to readers of Urban History as it weaves a complex picture of the foundation of the Whittington Almshouse, the furnishing of the Guildhall Library and the sponsorship of the Daunce of Poulys. These were civic projects prompted by an awareness of personal mortality and the desire to educate future generations of Londoners who would continue to populate and govern the city. The pious motives of Richard Whittington (d. 1423), four times London mayor, and John Carpenter (d. 1442), common clerk, are not tangential to our understanding of how London was governed in this period but, as Appleford argues, essential. The lessons depicted in Whittington's deathbed scene in the Ordinances for Whittington's Almshouse are writ large in the very fabric of the city. Chapters 3 and 4 examine lay appropriation of ascetic spiritual traditions. They begin with a survey of the contents of MS Douce 322, commissioned by William Baron (teller to the Exchequer from c. 1445 to c. 1469), before examining the manner in which asceticism shaped the discourse of death in Hoccleve's Series. Finally, chapter 4 offers a survey of the fifteenth-century ars moriendi. Appleford argues that Baron's pious reading and Hoccleve's poetry promoted a culture of interiorization in which the soul was to be ‘less reliant on the potentially mechanistic economy of purgatorial prayers’ (p. 136). The notion that the spirituality of literate Londoners was insulating them from traditional channels of commemorative culture is fascinating but spiritual sophistication and ‘parish piety’ (as Appleford describes community-dependent purgatorial-oriented spirituality) were not mutually exclusive. Baron sought burial in the London charterhouse as other patrons sought to have their names above the doors of individual cells, not only because he shared a spiritual affinity with the Carthusians but because, as others have demonstrated with the example of the London Grey Friars, the piety and respectability of full-time religious made them an attractive proposition for those seeking commemorative prayer. Baron's spirituality was not necessarily of a ‘different order’ (p. 108) from his fellow Londoners. It might instead be seen as a new form of personal devotion intended to complement his wider commemorative strategies. Chapter 5 looks ahead to the 1530s and reimagines the public nature of death, no longer in the deathbed, but at the hands of the king.

This is a book that is going to have a broad appeal and that deserves to attract a diverse readership. It is also a dense and intricately wrought piece of literary analysis dealing with a number of unfamiliar texts. The introduction might have done more to frame Appleford's discourse of textual authority and spiritual instruction for those readers simply looking to further their knowledge of civic culture in late medieval London. There are also some omissions which may have furthered the discussion more effectively than the later materials examined in chapter 5. William Caxton translated and printed the Book of Good Maners (1487), for instance, at the request of a fellow mercer, William Pratt. The Book of Good Maners contains discourse on household governance and preparation for death and was evidently circulating in French and English among the sorts of men who dominate Appleford's work. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating study of pious motive and civic obligation written with flair and enthusiasm. Appleford demonstrates that in late medieval London the urban elites did not simply learn how to die, they learned how to govern.