medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The Anglo-Saxon Harding was a monk of Sherborne in Dorset who in the later eleventh century moved to the Continent, where he studied in France and took the name Stephen. After a pilgrimage to Rome he entered the abbey of Molesme in about 1085. Strict as life at Molesme was, it was not strict enough for Stephen, who joined a secession that in 1098 founded the abbey of Cîteaux. In 1108 or 1109 he was elected abbot there; through the arrangements he made with his house's first four daughters he had a formative role in the creation of the Cistercian order. Those houses (La Ferté , Pontigny, Clairvaux, and Morimond) all were male, but in the early 1120s Stephen played a major part in the establishment of the first Cistercian house for women, the convent at Tart near Cîteaux. Stephen's efforts in co-ordinating these and other houses founded during his tenure found lasting expression in a system of visitations and general chapters as well as in the provisions for uniformity laid out in the brief, organisational _Carta caritatis_ ("Charter of Charity") attributed to him. In 1133 he resigned his office for reasons of ill health; his death followed in 1134. His cult is thought to have commenced not long afterward. Never papally canonized, he was publicly listed as one of the order's saints in 1489 and was so depicted in 1491; in 1586 Bl. Cesare Baronio entered him under today in the first papally approved edition of the Roman Martyrology at the level of Saint. Cistercians now celebrate Stephen liturgically on 26. January along with the other founders of their order, Sts. Robert of Molesme and Alberic of Cîteaux.
Some period-pertinent images of St. Stephen Harding:
a) as depicted (at right, presenting a church to the BVM; at left, abbot Henry I of St. Vaast) in an earlier twelfth-century copy of St. Jerome's commentary on Jeremiah (ca. 1125; Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 130, fol. 104r):
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht6/IRHT_094059-p.jpg
http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/image_gallery/pages/0191.php
b) as depicted (at right, giving alms; at left, the emperor Henry V) by Pierre Remiet in a late fourteenth-century copy of books 25-32 of Vincent of Beauvais' _Speculum historiale_ in its French-language version by Jean de Vignay (1396; Paris, BnF, ms. Français 314, fol. 110v; the matter on Stephen and the _Carta caritatis_ occurs on fol. 111r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8451115j/f226.item.zoom
c) as depicted (bottom register, second from right) among his order's founding saints in a full-page woodcut in a late fifteenth-century printing of the _Privilegia ordinis Cisterciensis_ (Dijon: Petrus Metlinger, 4 July 1491, fol. a2v):
http://www.mckittrickrarebooks.com/mckittrick/images/items/8046.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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