In 2004 twelve manuscript books from the library of Syon Abbey were placed on permanent deposit at Exeter University Library. The acquisition – a very rare accession of pre-modern research material at a time when the acquisition even of new imprints is severely constrained – was marked with a symposium, from which this collection of essays, after a lengthy gestation, has emerged. The literary remains of this remarkable convent have consumed critical attention for as long as there has been revisionist interest in the pre-Reformation Church. Indeed Syon, England's only Brigittine convent, a legacy of the modish spirituality of the Lancastrians, has come to symbolise the renewal of religious culture on the brink of the break with Rome: a creative encounter between old modes of monastic observance and a new reading public animated at first by the Indian summer of scribal production, and subsequently, by print. The outlines of its early institutional and intellectual history are now well established and the books and writings of its brethren – the more publicly prominent portion of what was a double monastery – have been (largely) edited and much examined. The focus of this collection is upon the dynamic forces that shaped and sustained Syon's extraordinary enterprise, one which extended beyond the Dissolution and into a long and itinerant exile: its personnel, the brothers and, in particular, the sisters, so often overlooked, who were the key to its Counter-Reformation survival, and, of course, its books, in manuscript and print, the source of its unstinting intellectual energy and also of its powerful sense of corporate identity, which endured over three centuries and eventually drew the convent back to England, and to Devon, within the catchment of the Exeter Library. Presented in four thematic parts, the eight essays divide attention more or less evenly between the conventual community and its books. Virginia Bainbridge and Peter Cunich follow the sisters and their better-known brethren from the foundation (1415) into the Reformation; Cunich's forty-odd pages offer a comprehensive history of Syon's priests to their extinction in 1695; Bainbridge underlines the ties of Syon's sisters to the social and intellectual establishment, although as individuals they still seem somewhat out-of-focus. The shadows are clear in Claire Walker's lively telling of their post-Dissolution dramas, their temporary respite in France and the Low Countries before their recourse (1594) to Portugal (Lisbon) where they remained for a further 267 years; Portugal was a pragmatic and not wholly comfortable harbour for the women but as Caroline Bowden demonstrates their original culture of lectio divina survived; a number of the Exeter books bear witness to this period. Two essays provide fresh insights into the foundations of this unique book culture. Drawing on Thomas Betson's Registrum of the library which he published in 2005, Vincent Gillespie reconstructs the pattern of purchases of incunabula at Syon, adding further detail not only to the picture of the conventual library in its formative phase but also to the record of England's reception of early Latin printing; Annette Grise revisits Syon's involvement in the production of devotional literature in the vernacular, affirming the commitment of the community to popular pastoral instruction, although she does not accept that it was a co-ordinated programme. Claes Gejrot and Ann Hutchison close the collection with accounts of the key documents that enshrined the convent's history over these four momentous centuries: the Martyology (BL, ms Add. 22285) begun in the fifteenth century but still receiving entries in 1645, and a succession of narratives telling of the convent's peregrinations, the work, inter alia, of two anonymous nuns of the late sixteenth century, Robert P[a]ersons, and an antiquarian medic, John Rory Fletcher (d. 1944). There is much rich detail of this kind to ensure the interest of Syon's many students, and a smattering of fresh insights – from Cunich, Gillespie, Walker – to merit the attention of those with wider historical interests.