A Library Learnings “extra”
“Sitting under a tree with a book is starting to sound pretty good”
Early this month, the Daily News from the University of Alberta posted online an article which it had issued originally in March of last year…when your librarians failed to see it. But not this time. Well-written by Bruce Gierson, “The most famous abbey you’ve never heard of”—admittedly lengthy: it’s 48 paragraphs long—can be found at https://www.ualberta.ca/augustana/news/2023/03/the-most-famous-abbey-youve-never-heard-of.
It’s one of those writings which tell a story within which another narrative is unfolded. The outer tale introduces the reader to a young teaching-award-winning scholar, Brandon Alakas, an associate professor of English on the university’s Augustana campus in Camrose. It’s he who tells the inner yarn of a saint in the Middle Ages, Birgitta of Sweden, who founded a new religious order of nuns, the Birgittines; they established the Syon Abbey in London. Gierson calls it “a bastion of independent thinking, with a wild whiff of humanism.”
Below, this inner tale is presented: it describes a “delicious indulgence”—books—which makes it so appropriate for SSUC’s Library bibliophiles.
Ken Fredrick
The sisters and brothers of Syon lived pious and ascetic lives, praying and working and giving every extra penny they earned to the poor. But they did have one delicious indulgence: books. “The Birgittine community was the only one that allowed women in particular to have as many books as they wanted,” Alakas says. At a time when there were strict prohibitions against private property, this was pretty subversive.
And it’s this part of the story that really lights Alakas up—as it would any bibliophile.
Consider that there weren’t actually a lot of books qua books floating around at the time. “Syon Abbey kind of straddles this interesting moment in history, the transition from the manuscript to the printed book,” Alakas says. Because many of the Birgittines came from aristocratic families, they had the resources and connections to amass rare and important works. And so the Syon Abbey library was, by all accounts, one of the finest, and most important, in all of England. Sir Thomas More, English statesman and politician who eventually ran afoul of Henry VIII, used to visit to do work. Erasmus, “the greatest scholar of the Northern Renaissance,” according to Britannica, would drop by to avail himself of the collection.
With the monks doing the actual writing, and the nuns largely steering content by salting the curriculum with the priorities they felt were most urgent to women, the books became a cornerstone of religious observation. They also became a thriving business. In its first century, the Abbey was a kind of boutique publisher, pumping out high-quality devotional guides, many of which became bestsellers and were reprinted multiple times in the 1520s and 1530s. In a sense the Birgittines were like that small band of Harvard undergraduates who produced those Let’s Go travel guides that were snapped up like hotcakes by adventurous hipster travellers in the 1970s. The difference is, instead of maps to explore the world “out there,” the Birgittines created guides to explore the inner world.
And this is maybe the most interesting thing about these nuns: the kind of reading they were doing and promoting. You might think of Syon Abbey as a kind of cradle of the “deep read.” Sitting quietly under a tree reading scripture was the new touchstone of a Christian life. One of the most famous texts of the Birgittines’ describes reading scripture to oneself as “talking to God,” unmediated.
This brand of intense, immersive, devotional reading is as different from the way most people received the Word of God at the time as a freedive is from a 10-second shower. Until then, devotional practices were aural and mediated by a priest, to whom devotees listened passively. In contrast, the Birgittines espoused lectio divina, a multi-stage process of burrowing increasingly deeply into the warp and weft of a text. And though lectio divina had been practised since antiquity, it was typically practised only by men.
“The Birgittine nuns’ great contribution was that they made these elite spiritual practices accessible to anyone who could read,” Alakas says. Their “ideal reader,” you might say, would have been Birgitta herself. The practice of lectio divina, by the way, is sometimes applied to reading poetry or popular fiction.
Alakas’s nuns may have been cloistered but with their practices of deep religious reading, their minds were liberated. It’s no stretch to say a
kind of nascent feminism was happening here, 300 years before we think of feminism as actually being a thing. Yet another myth busted! Turns out feminism was not a light that suddenly came on at the end of the 19th century. Rather, “the authority women possessed in society ebbed and flowed throughout the Middle Ages,” Alakas says. And here, at Syon Abbey, at this point in the 16th century, the wave was surging onto the shore….
So why should we care about any of this in 2023?
A short answer is that the Middle Ages—specifically medieval devotional culture—had plenty of lessons for how to live today.
Even in an increasingly secular time, Christianity still matters…. The template for much of western society as we know it now originated here, in the contemplative practices that sprang up during this period. […] “The period might seem long ago and far away,” says Laura Saetveit Miles, a professor of British Literature at the University of Bergen and an editor at the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, “but it gives us a mirror into a coherent literary tradition that is still ongoing today.”
[…]
For a lot of us, sitting under a tree with a book is starting to sound pretty good again.
