medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
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Received: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:40:46 AM EDT
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Subject: TMR 12.10.25 Burton and Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages
(Newman)
Burton, Janet, and Julie Kerr. <i>The Cistercians in the Middle
Ages</i>. Series: Monastic Orders. Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY:
Boydell & Brewer Press, 2011. Pp. viii, 244. $45.00. ISBN-13:
9781843836674.
Reviewed by Martha G. Newman
The University of Texas at Austin
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<i>The Cistercians in the Middle Ages</i> provides a much needed
introduction to one of the most successful and influential monastic
congregations in medieval Europe. The last such survey of the
Cistercian order in English was Louis Lekai's volume, initially
published in 1953 and revised in 1977 as <i>The Cistercians: Ideals
and Reality</i>, but it, like Marcel Pacaut's <i>Les moines blancs</i>
(1993), covers the history of the Cistercians into the twentieth
century. Over the last decades, we have come to new understandings of
the early Cistercian documents, of the monks' economic activities and
their use of space, of the place of women in the order, and of the
relationship between the monks' spirituality, their social
interactions, and their material culture. This volume, part of
Boydell & Brewer's series on Monastic Orders, engages with this recent
scholarship. Janet Burton and Julie Kerr offer a detailed and
readable account of the Cistercians' origins and an analysis of the
distinctiveness of the medieval Cistercians' way of life.
The book is divided into an introduction and eight chapters. The
first quarter of the book unfolds chronologically: in the introduction
and the first two chapters, the authors discuss the order's origin and
spread. The remaining chapters present six topics: sites and
buildings, administration, daily life, spirituality, economic
practices, and relations with "the world." Throughout the book the
overarching theme is the question of Cistercian distinctiveness. This
is a welcome choice as both the Cistercians and their monastic
contemporaries asserted Cistercian difference. But an analysis of
"distinctiveness" is difficult to sustain without comparisons with
other monastic congregations, and the authors seldom make these
differences explicit. As a result, two other themes re-emerge out of
an older Cistercian historiography--the contrast between Cistercian
ideal and reality and the discussion of Cistercian impact and
influence--and the question of Cistercian distinctiveness gets lost.
There is much praiseworthy about this book. In the introduction and
first chapter, Burton and Kerr place the Cistercians in the context of
late eleventh- and early twelfth-century movements of monastic reform
and renewal. They suggest that the Cistercians, like other new
monastic groups, were inspired by both the ideal of the desert and a
desire to find a pure observance of the Benedictine Rule. But they
also argue that the Cistercians differed from their contemporaries
because the New Monastery at Cîteaux was more a secession from an
existing community than a movement following an inspired holy man.
They astutely point out that, in some ways, Cîteaux should be seen not
as a beginning but as the last of Robert of Molesme's many monastic
experiments, and they emphasize the cooperation of ecclesiastical and
temporal authorities in promoting Cîteaux's foundation.
In presenting the order's origin and its spread, Burton and Kerr
judiciously pick their way through the difficult problems of the early
Cistercian documents. They rely on Chrysogonus Waddell's dating of
the <i>Exordium parvum</i> and the <i>Exordium cistercii</i>, and they
retain the long-standing position that Stephen Harding did indeed
write the Charter of Charity and thus created not just a Cistercian
"way of life" but the first monastic "order." They do, however, ask
what the Cistercians' idea of <i>ordo</i> meant in the 1120s,
suggesting that we should see in a variety of documents the
Cistercians' own sense of their distinctiveness and the set of
mechanisms by which they transmitted this self-identity and created
uniformity. The authors question elements of this Cistercian self-
presentation, agreeing with Constance Berman that much Cistercian
expansion entailed incorporating already existing communities rather
than establishing abbeys <i>de novo</i>; they also note that the
spread of Cistercian monasticism often corresponded with the
territorial ambitions of centralizing lords, whether in Wales, the
Baltic region, or Iberia. And they recognize that, even in the
twelfth-century, women as well as men considered themselves
Cistercians.
In the excellent chapters on the Cistercians' buildings and their
economic practices, Burton and Kerr succeed in demonstrating
Cistercian distinctiveness while showing regional variations and
change. The chapter on sites and buildings emphasizes the placement
of Cistercian abbeys in rural locations, the symbolic and practical
significance of these sites, and the simplicity and purity of
Cistercian buildings, but it also offers examples of regional
variations in design and décor, concluding that the monks
"accommodated change whilst preserving the Cistercian spirit" (81).
In the long discussion of the Cistercians' economic practices, the
conclusions are similar. Burton and Kerr stress the flexibility of
the order: they illuminate regional differences in the ways the monks
accumulated their lands, organized their granges, and compacted their
estates, and they discuss the ways in which many communities, by the
thirteenth-century, moved toward indirect exploitation of their lands
and commercial and industrial activities. And they conclude that the
order's "economy was Cistercian at the core but took on a regional
gloss as communities responded to their environment" (187).
Burton and Kerr are especially interested in Cistercian practice, and
they present lovely examples of the monks' building techniques and
water works, their continued reverence for relics, their dietary
observances, their participation in mining and manufacturing, their
consolidation of lands, and their charitable offerings to the poor.
We also get a strong sense of regional variations. But some of the
topical chapters do not synthesize their material particularly well.
In addressing the Cistercians' administrative structure, Burton and
Kerr recognize the importance of the Cistercians' Chapter General and
their abbots' visitations, but they vacillate between depicting the
move away from these practices in the later middle ages as a sign of
decline and presenting it as evidence of the order's survival and
adaptability. Further, they discuss in much detail the authority of
the abbot, the role of monastic officials, and the process of monastic
discipline, but they note neither the similarities with other
Benedictines nor the small differences in organization that
contemporaries found so important. The same problem emerges in the
chapter on the monks' daily life. There we get a detailed account of
monastic observances, including discussions of food, dress, manual
labor, and liturgical practices, but the authors do not compare these
with the observances and customs of other communities. And, even in
the chapter on the Cistercians' economic practices, we learn that the
monks' "most enduring legacy" came from their reorganization of
settlement patterns on the land (188), but we do not learn whether
these patterns were unique to the Cistercians.
More troubling to me was the chapter on the Cistercians' spirituality.
The Cistercians' articulation of religious ideas is not the authors'
focus: their book provides one paragraph on Bernard of Clairvaux's
Song of Song's commentary (142) while devoting several pages to the
Cistercians' manufacture of clay tiles (179-181). They nowhere
discuss Bernard's conception of "experience," and only briefly present
the Cistercians' devotion to the humanity of Christ; Rachel Fulton's
work on twelfth-century affective spirituality is absent. The authors
do consider the Cistercians' Marian devotion, but like many others,
they confuse Bernard of Clairvaux's later reputation with his own
expressions. For Kerr and Burton, Cistercian spirituality is a form
of "mysticism, " a term that they define, quite narrowly, as a
"temporary fusion of the human soul with the Divine" (140), yet
nonetheless consider broad enough to encompass contemplation,
spiritual friendship, a devotion to the person of Christ, and the
ecstatic (and sometimes disruptive) behaviors of lay brothers and
women. Rather than analyzing Cistercian sermons and treatises or the
constructed quality of the saints' lives they use to depict ecstatic
behaviors, the authors again focus on practice, reminding us of the
continued importance of saints' cults, relics, and even pilgrimage
shrines for Cistercian religiosity.
The decision to organize the majority of the book topically rather
than chronologically is a wise one, given the Cistercians' many
contributions to medieval society and culture. However, Burton and
Kerr often cull examples ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth
century as if the period were static. Although they at times discuss
the process of change and questions of decline, they do not usually
offer conclusions. This lack of attention to chronology occasionally
leads to sloppiness: a shortage of lay brothers appears as early as
1208 (175), the lay brotherhood reached the highpoint of its power in
the mid-thirteenth century (159), it experienced its "demise" in the
late thirteenth-century (152), and yet its "decline" was exacerbated
by the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth (159). And while I
appreciate the authors' efforts to present examples from across Europe,
there is an overemphasis on the British Isles; the Cistercians in
Germany and Italy, for instance, are nearly absent.
<i>The Cistercians in the Middle Ages</i> emphasizes monastic practice.
Burton and Kerr provide a picture of Cistercian diversity and depict
the everyday lives of Cistercian monks rather than analyzing the ideas
of their extraordinary men--they give us much less information about
the everyday lives and observances of Cistercian women. It may be
that the Cistercians' economic practices had a greater impact on
European society than did their abbots' spiritual writings. Certainly,
R. A. Donkin and others have long stressed the Cistercians' economic
and geographic significance, and Geraldine Carville's work on the
Cistercians in Ireland has reinvigorated this argument. It also may
be that the Cistercians, as "reformed Benedictines," were not as
distinctive as they claimed and that the religious observances and
outlook of the great majority of Cistercian monks and nuns differed
little from their contemporaries. But the authors merely gesture
toward both these arguments; they neither make them explicit nor
develop the comparisons needed to make them convincing. As a result,
students reading this volume will learn much about the Cistercians'
monastic observances and economic activities, but they will be hard
pressed to articulate the distinctive qualities of the medieval
Cistercian Order.
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