Syon at 1500: Observant Reform?

Abstract

Manifestations of the Observant movement, the (mainly) fifteenth-century effort that strove to change religious life both inside and outside the cloister, have largely been studied on the Continent, in Germany, Italy, France, and the Low Countries. It has generally been agreed that evidence of these currents in England has been scarce, despite the prominence of the single Birgittine house at Syon Abbey, England, and the alignment of the order’s founder, St. Birgitta, with Observant Reform. At the turn of the sixteenth century, however, the work of two Syon monks, Thomas Betson (d. 1516), Syon’s great librarian, and Richard Whitford (d. 1543), perhaps England’s best-known spiritual advisor, displays a consciousness of Continental activity as shown in the central channels of reform: catechesis and preaching. Betson’s two catechisms, Ars moriendi (1491) and A Ryght Profytable Treatyse (1500), print material from the Opus tripartitum of Jean Gerson (d. 1429), the reforming chancellor of the University of Paris, and the Dominican reformer St. Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419) is quoted in Betson’s sermons. Betson’s 1491 book initiated Syon’s fifty-year program of instructional publishing, perhaps the most successful element in Syon’s varied apostolic mission. Copies of Whitford’s two books, A Werke for Housholders (ca. 1512) and A Daily Exercyse and Experyence of Dethe (ca. 1513), do not survive until the 1530s, but recognition of their early composition and of their catechetical nature makes it possible to see Whitford, like Betson, as influenced by Continental catechesis and preaching and suggests the house’s understanding of its parallel role in English reform.