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Past Models and Contemporary Concerns: the Foundation and Growth of the Cistercian Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Janet Burton
Janet Burton*
Affiliation:
University of Wales, Lampeter
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Extract

Of all the medieval monastic orders the Cistercian has undoubtedly received the most attention from historians, and this engagement with the White Monks shows no sign of abating. In the words of David Robinson in his recent volume on the Cistercian abbeys of Wales, ‘to turn one’s back on the subject, even for a moment, is to lose the plot’. Current scholarship continues to be concerned with a range of issues. However, much of the most controversial scholarship has centred on the dating of key Cistercian documents: the narratives of the origins of Citeaux, that is, the Exordium Parvum and the Exordium Cistercii, as well as various versions of the Cistercian constitution, the Carta Caritatis, and successive capitula, that is, the pronouncements of the Annual General Chapter. The debate is not new. For over seventy years scholars, including in an English context Dom David Knowles, have sought to unravel the textual and manuscript complexities of the documents relating to the foundation and growth of the mother house itself and of the order. In the last six years two significant contributions to this area of scholarship have appeared, the first more controversial than the second. First, Constance Berman argued that the key Cistercian documents were inventions of the latter part of the twelfth century, designed to create a past for the Cistercian order, an organization which, she argues, did not exist before the mid-twelfth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 44: Revival and Resurgence in Christian History , 2008 , pp. 27 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2008

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References

1 Robinson, David M., The Cistercians in Wales: Architecture and Archaeology 1130–1540 (London, 2006), x Google Scholar.

2 The bibliography is exhaustive. The issues were addressed by Knowles, David, ‘The Primitive Cistercian Documents’, in Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963), 197–222 Google Scholar.

3 Constance Berman, Hoffman, The Cistercian Evolution: the Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for instance, the review articles: McGuire, Brian Patrick, ‘Charity and Unanimity: the Invention of the Cistercian Order; A Review Article’, Citeaux: Commentarii Cistercienses 51 (2000), 285–97 Google Scholar, and Waddell, Chrysogonus, ‘The Myth of Cistercian Origins: C. H. Berman and the Manuscript Sources’, ibid., 299–386 Google Scholar.

5 Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Citeaux, Citeaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, Studia et Documenta IX (1999) [hereafter: Narrative and Legislative Texts]; idem, Cistercian Lay Brothers: Twelfth-Century Usages with Related Texts, Citeaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, Studia et Documenta X (2000); idem, Twelfth-Century Statutes from the Cistercian General Chapter, Citeaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, Studia et Documenta XII (2002).

6 Among many articles and papers that treat these questions, see Leclercq, J., ‘The Intentions of the Founders of the Cistercian Order’, in Pennington, M. Basil, ed., The Cistercian Spirit: a Symposium, Cistercian Studies Series 3 (Spencer, MA, 1970), 88–133 Google Scholar. Editions and translations of the Summa Cartae Caritatis, Carta Caritatis Prior and Carta Caritatis Posterior are included in Narrative and Legislative Texts.

7 See the important articles: Cantor, Norman F., ‘The Crisis of Western Monasticism, 1050–1130’, American Historical Review 66.1 (1960), 47–67 Google Scholar; Leclercq, J., ‘The Monastic Crisis of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Hunt, N., ed., Cluniac Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages (Hamden, CN, 1971), 217–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Engen, John van, ‘The “Crisis of Cenobitism” Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150’, Speculum 61.2 (1986), 269–304 Google Scholar.

8 Narrative and Legislative Texts, 197–231 (introduction), 233–59 (text), 417–40 (text and translation).

9 Auberger, Jean-Baptiste, L’unanimité cistercienne primitive: mythe ou réalité, Citeaux: Commentarli Cistercienses, Studia et Documenta III (Achel, 1986), 42–52 Google Scholar. For further discussion, in particular of the impact of Abbot Stephen Harding on developments at early Citeaux, see Cowdrey, H. E. J., ‘Quidem Frater Stephanus nomine, anglicus natione’, in Elder, E. Rozanne, ed., The New Monastery: Texts and Studies on the Earliest Cistercians, Cistercian Fathers Series 60 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998), 57–77 Google Scholar.

10 Narrative and Legislative Texts, 137–61 (introduction), 179–81 (text), 399–404 (text and translation). Auberger, l’unanimité cistercienne, 52–7, argues for a Clairvaux origin for the Exordium Cistercii.

11 Narrative and Legislative Texts, 399–400.

12 Ibid., 400.

13 Ibid., 401.

14 Ibid., 418.

15 Ibid., 419.

16 Ibid., 430.

17 Ibid., 421.

18 Ibid., 434–7.

19 Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Book II, conveniently translated by Uhlfelder, Myra L., The Dialogues of Gregory the Great, Book Two, Saint Benedict (Indianapolis, 1967)Google Scholar. For Benedict’s sister, Scholastics, and her burial in Benedict’s monastery, see ibid., 42–4.

20 Narrative and Legislative Texts, 43 5.

21 For the phrase see, for instance, the Narratio de Fundatione of Fountains Abbey, printed in Memorials of the Abbey of St Mary of Fountains, I, ed. J. R. Walbran, Surtees Society 42(1863), 2.

22 Narrative and Legislative Texts, 423.

23 See, for instance, Lekai, Louis J., ‘The Rule and the Early Cistercians’, Cistercian Studies 5 (1970), 243–51 Google Scholar.

24 Berman, Cistercian Evolution, 9–23, esp. 10.

25 On the significance of the word, see Leclercq, , ‘Intentions of the Founders’, 90 and 101–1 Google Scholar.

26 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: the History of the English Kings, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998–9) [hereafter Gesta Regum], 1: 576–85. The pope referred to is Calixtus II, who confirmed the Carta Caritatis in 1119. The editors of Gesta Regum note the accuracy of William’s account of the Cistercians (2: 288–94).

27 Berman, Cistercian Evolution, 69,101, discounts the witness of William of Malmesbury as evidence of the nature of the Cistercian order, stating that he wrote only of Citeaux and not of Cistercian monasteries, despite William’s evidence that at the time of writing Stephen Harding had founded sixteen abbeys and begun seven more (Gesta Regum, 1: 583). The editors of Gesta Regum suggest that William’s knowledge of the Cistercians came from a French Cistercian house, possibly L’Aumône (2: 291).

28 Gesta Regum, 1: 579.

29 Ibid., 1: 581; Narrative and Legislative Texts, 399–400.

30 Gesta Regum, 1: 580–3 (‘ita regulae incubantes ut nec iota unum nec apicem pretereundum putent’); Narrative and Legislative Texts, 408–9 (Summa Cartae Caritatis), 444 (Carta Caritatis Prior).

31 The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall, 6 vols (Oxford, 1969–80), 4: 312–27.

32 Daniel, Walter, The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, ed. and trans. Powicke, F. M. (London, 1950), 10–13, at 11–12 Google Scholar. I have preferred the translation by Matarasso, P., The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (Harmondsworth, 1993), 153—4 Google Scholar.

33 Printed in Memorials of Fountains, I.

34 L. G. D. Baker, The Genesis of English Cistercian Chronicles: the Foundation History of Fountains Abbey’, 1, Analecta Cisterciensia 25 (1969), 14–41, and 2, Analecta Cisterciensia 31 (1975), 179–212; Freeman, Elizabeth, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220 (Turnhout, 2002), 151–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Latin text in Memorials of Fountains, I, 5–6, my translation. The reference to the land of Moab is to Josh. 13:32, the division of the land of Canaan.

36 ‘Professis siquidem sanctam Regulam, an citra eius puritatem sistere gradum tutum sit, ipsi sensistis’: Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais, vols 7 and 8, Epistolae (Rome, 1974–7), 7: 246–7 (letter 96), translated in The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. B. Scott James (London, 1953), 240–1 (letter 171).

37 However, see Lekai, , ‘Rule and the Early Cistercians’, 248–51 Google Scholar.

38 Letter i, Leclercq and Rochais, eds, Opera, 7: 1–11, at 6; James, Letters of St Bernard, 1–10, at 6.

39 Narrative and Legislative Texts, Instituta Generalis Capituli, LXXX (361, 490). This fixed the minimum age for entry into the noviciate at fifteen. It was later raised to eighteen.

40 Cistercians and Cluniacs: St Bernard’s Apologia to Abbot William, trans. Michael Casey, Cistercian Publications (Kalamazoo, MI, 1970), 45–52, at 45.

41 Ibid., 46–8.

42 Ibid., 50.

43 Aelred of Rievaulx, The Mirror of Charity, trans. Elizabeth Connor, Cistercian Fathers Series 17 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1990), III, 35 (279–87).

44 Ibid., 282.

45 Narrative and Legislative Texts, 408 (Capitula), 435 (Exordium Parvum), 458 (Instituta).

46 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Chibnall, 4:327.

47 Map, Walter, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, rev. edn Brooke, C. N. L. and Mynors, R. A. B. (Oxford, 1983), 92–3 Google Scholar.

48 Translated in Matarasso, The Cistercian World, 30–1. For St Benedict, his cave, and the shepherds who found him there, see Uhlfelder, Dialogues of Gregory the Great, 4–6.

49 Apologia, 54.

50 Ibid., 58–9.

51 Gesta Regum, 1: 584–5.

52 Narrative and Legislative Texts, 438; Apologia, 63–6.

53 Ailred, Mirror of Charity, II, 24 (212–15, at 212).