Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xm8r8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T04:14:35.761Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘Hid Diuinite’: The Spirituality of the English Syon Brethren

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Vincent Gillespie
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
E. A. Jones
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Get access

Summary

IN THE YEARS LEADING up to the suppression of Syon Abbey in 1539, Thomas Bedyll, a Commissioner of the King, monitored the activities and attitudes of the house. He regularly reported back on the progress of the campaign against it to his master Thomas Cromwell, chief architect of the dissolution of the monasteries. At this time Syon was one of the wealthiest and most influential monasteries in England and therefore a notable target in the developing war against monasticism. In 1534, early on in the campaign of harassment, Bedyll closely observed sermons given in the abbey church by the Brethren of Syon. Their subject was Henry VIII's claim to supremacy over the Church. Bedyll noted that ‘the Confessor there hath preched twice, sythens my Lord of London and I wer at Sion, and dyd his dutie, concernyng the said title accordingly’. The Confessor-General of Syon in 1534 would have been John Fewterer. A scholarly soul who possessed a copy of the first printed Hebrew concordance, Fewterer was also the author of The Mirror or Glass of Christ's Passion, printed the very same year that Bedyll's letter was written, which draws in an antiquarian way on the affective contemplative piety of the Stimulus Amoris, Ludolph of Saxony and Simon of Cassia. With his interest in the scriptural scholarship of the New Learning and his affinity with the devotional traditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Fewterer exemplifies the cautious and conservative scholarship typical of the Brethren of Syon.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England
Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004 [Exeter Symposium VII]
, pp. 189 - 206
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×