All the extant writings of John Audelay are preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, compiled c. 1426–31, which, according to Susanna Fein, ‘consists of four genre-based mini-anthologies, each with its own internal arrangement in planned sequence’. The four sections are, respectively: a series of didactic and meditative poems entitled the ‘Counsel of Conscience’, a series of salutations, a sequence of religious carols, and a small section consisting of devotional prose and verse at the end of the codex. It has been pointed out that Audelay's poems abound in references to illness and its cure, and do so with personal urgency. Admonition or counsel to the readers often ends with what is called the ‘signature stanza’ in which the author names himself almost obsessively as the blind Audelay. In addition to loss of eyesight, he seems to have been suffering from prolonged sickness with no immediate cure as he was assembling his book. He explains in the ‘Epilogue to the Counsel of Conscience’ that he was called to write this book as he lay sick, dreaming. In view of this apparently terminal condition, it is understandable that the corpus of his writing is characterised by the close link between physical and spiritual illness at both literal and metaphorical levels and that Audelay often refers to Purgatory when he speaks of remedy against spiritual illness. Purgatory for him is both his next destination and a metaphor for penitential process, and by analysing the contexts in which this word is used, we can see how he understood the illness of the soul and its cure.

Fashioning himself as a sick and blind man at the end of his life, Audelay employs the whole spectrum of themes and motifs of death in his codex, including a vision of the afterlife (a version of the Visio S. Pauli), the Three Living and the Three Dead, ‘visitatio infirmorum’ as well as lyrics and carols on approaching death and Marian intercession. Sudden death is a repeated theme which he sometimes evokes in a plain didactic manner, or with reference to recent plague, or to a historical figure such as King Robert of Sicily. The immanent danger of sudden death, combined with his bodily affliction, leads him to despise his flesh, claiming, in the ‘Timor mortis’ carol’, that ‘Of myselfe nothyng I se, / Save filth, unclennes, vile styng’.