When the University of Notre Dame purchased at auction a copy of the Speculum devotorum, or Mirror to Devout People, from the private collection of the Foyle family in 2000, they made available an invaluable record of the Carthusian/Syon axis of textual production and exchange. The manuscript contains three works: the Speculum devotorum, a fifteenth-century Middle English devotional work written for a sister at the Birgittine Syon Abbey by an anonymous Carthusian at Sheen; the O Intemerata, a Latin prayer to Mary and John the Evangelist; and the Book of the Craft of Dying, a Middle English work in the ars moriendi tradition. The sources used in the Speculum suggest a complex system of literary exchange between the Carthusians on the royal manor of Sheen and the Birgittines who resided across the River Thames. Further, an initial on the opening folio of the manuscript displays the impaled arms of two families, the Scropes and the Chaworths, which suggests that the distribution of texts between the Sheen Charterhouse and Syon Abbey extended beyond their cloistered walls to lay readers.

Jill Mann, having taken up an endowed chair at the University of Notre Dame in 1999, played an important role in acquiring the Speculum manuscript by encouraging the University to begin adding examples of Middle English manuscripts to its already impressive medieval and early book collections. In 2001 an inaugural conference for Jill Mann and Michael Lapidge entitled ‘Medieval Manuscripts at Notre Dame’ was held, at which many of the papers addressed textual and cultural issues found in the newly acquired Notre Dame MS 67.