Richard Whitford: The Pipe or Tun of the Life of Perfection

Richard Whitford’s Pipe or Tun of the Life of Perfection is the most important text produced at Syon Abbey in the period immediately preceding the English Reformation. A member off the spiritually elite community of Birgittine priest brothers, Whitford wrote the Pipe to assist his initial audience of female religious, first, to better understand their vocation and, second, to defend religious life against increasingly forceful attacks from evangelical reformers. Published in 1532, three years before Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Whitford’s Pipe provides a detailed vision of late medieval monastic spirituality, as well as responses to evangelical critiques of religious life and the Catholic Church. The Pipe was read by both religious and lay audiences and highlights how Whitford and the Birgittine community blended traditional monastic practice with humanist pedagogy and piety to encourage religious renewal on the cusp of the English Reformation. The Pipe or Tun of the Life of Perfection moves beyond contemporary sixteenth-century texts that seek to renew religious life or adapt it for a devout laity. Instead, it offers readers one of the most comprehensive guides to monastic devotion available at the end of the Middle Ages—a devotion that Whitford positions as an alternative to the evangelical doctrines driving the English Reformation forward. This major new critical edition provides an extensive Introduction covering orthodox reform in the Late Middle Ages, the Birgittine Order, Henry V, religious reform and Syon Abbey and monastic responses to the Reformation, together with the text itself and accompanying notes.