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MEDIEVAL-RELIGION  June 2013

MEDIEVAL-RELIGION June 2013

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Subject:

Fw: TMR 13.06.18 France, Separate but Equal (Bouchard)

From:

Rosemary Hayes-Milligan and Andrew Milligan <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:14:18 +0100

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text/plain

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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "The Medieval Review" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, June 14, 2013 4:31 PM
Subject: TMR 13.06.18 France, Separate but Equal (Bouchard)


France, James. <i>Separate But Equal:  Cistercian Lay Brothers, 
1120–1350</i>  Series: Cistercian Studies 246.  Collegeville, Minn.: 
Liturgical Press, 2012.  Pp. xxviii, 372.  $39.95. ISBN-13: 9780879072469.

   Reviewed by Constance B. Bouchard
        University of Akron
        [log in to unmask]


Cistercian lay brothers have remained very little studied, even though they 
probably constituted at least half of the men who joined that religious 
order in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  They were called 
<i>conversi</i> in medieval Latin because they had converted from the life 
of the secular world, but they were not truly monks.  These brothers took 
vows as did the choir monks, but they served essentially as auxiliaries, 
devoting their lives to manual labor or to a monastery's business (such as 
buying and selling at market), rather than to the liturgical round.  They 
also tended to be of lower social and economic status and to be less well 
educated than the monks.  They appear overall to have joined the order for 
the same religious reasons that motivated the monks, but for some it was 
also a way out of the harshness of biting poverty.  In this book James 
France provides the first modern overview in English of the lay brothers, 
incorporating the "Statutes" of these brothers as recently edited by 
Chrysogonus Waddell. [1]

The book's purpose is to describe the functions and lives of these lay 
brothers.  They were a part of the monastery yet always somewhat separate, 
as symbolized, for example, by their concentration on granges away from the 
main monastic house.  The book begins by defining lay brothers' backgrounds, 
attributes, and activities, then goes on to discuss their appearance in a 
variety of different sources.  For the most part the focus is on the twelfth 
and early thirteenth centuries.  In the final chapter, however, France 
addresses the decline of the institution of lay brothers as Cistercian 
monasteries began leasing out their lands in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries, rather than working them with their <i>conversi</i>, and as the 
new orders of friars began outcompeting all Benedictines.

The use of varied sources is one of the book's strengths.  Part of the 
reason that lay brothers have remained so little studied is that, other than 
their "Statutes," very little was directly written about them--and those 
"Statutes" are short, scarcely a dozen pages in English translation 
(helpfully provided in Appendix 3).  In addition, none of the texts about 
the lay brothers were written by the brothers themselves, for they were 
almost always illiterate.  France seeks to fill in the gaps by using other 
kinds of sources, such as the architecture of their quarters ("ranges"), 
which included dormitories and refectories--some still exist, as at 
Clairvaux, Pontigny, and Fountains.  Their architecture suggests the 
"separate but equal" of the book's title, for the lay brothers essentially 
had a separate monastery of their own, including their own choir within the 
church.  In addition, France finds and discusses references to lay brothers 
in Cistercian miracle stories and sermon <i>exempla</i>, as well as in the 
rulings of the order's chapter-general.  He also reproduces several images 
of carvings of monastic busts on claustral buildings and granges which he 
believes represent lay brothers because they have beards; monks did not 
normally have beards, but lay brothers did.

Although provided with the normal scholarly apparatus of footnotes and 
bibliography, the book is not really aimed at scholars, but rather at a more 
general audience, including modern-day Cistercians interested in their 
order's history.  There is no central argument or thesis, other than that 
the lay brothers need to be better understood.  France differs from previous 
scholars primarily in being able to create a much broader and more nuanced 
picture of the lay brothers, although he also argues convincingly, against 
what he characterizes as a "consensus" in the historiography (xvii, 269), 
that these brothers were not inherently more rebellious or undisciplined 
than were the choir monks.  But scholars of medieval monasticism will find 
much of interest here, just because the topic has been so widely ignored, 
and the book would be good for graduate students.  France writes clearly and 
well, although his organization is not always clear, and the twenty-four 
illustrations are a nice addition, even though the subject-matter of most of 
them dates to the end of the Middle Ages, after the period of the book's 
chief focus.

France begins with the paradox of the lay brothers' incorporation into the 
Cistercian order.  On the one hand, the Cistercians insisted that they were 
adhering more closely to Benedict's original Rule than were the black monks, 
including its emphasis on manual labor; and yet on the other hand, the use 
of lay brothers was a novelty, unanticipated by Benedict, and their presence 
meant that the choir monks were less involved personally in agriculture 
after the first generation or two of the order.  (The Cistercians' other 
major deviation from Benedict was in not allowing child oblates.)

Although the Cistercians probably ended up with more lay brothers than any 
other monastic order, they had not originated them initially.  As France 
details, it was not until two or three decades into the order's history that 
the monks decided that they could not continue celebrating all the canonical 
hours while acting as full-time agricultural laborers unless they had some 
help.  <i>Conversi</i>, originally a sort of half-way status between a monk 
and a hired hand, had been found at Camaldoli in Italy since the early 
eleventh century, and other Italian and German houses had adopted something 
similar in subsequent years.  Perhaps the most important influence on 
Cistercian practice would have been the Carthusians, who had had lay 
brothers since the 1080s, and one wishes France had been able to give more 
space to this influence.

The whole question of the original nature of the Cistercian order is 
complex, since the monks' own accounts of their foundation were 
retrospective, often written by men who had not even been there in 1098. 
Scholars have frequently relied on the narrative provided by Orderic 
Vitalis, even though he wrote over a generation after the fact and was not a 
Cistercian himself.  It would have been useful for France to address more 
directly the nature of all these accounts as acts of creative memory, rather 
than using them simply to try to determine at what point lay brothers became 
a standard feature of Cistercian houses.

One of the chief values of this book (although not France's chief purpose) 
is that it counters the old assumption that the Cistercian order fell into 
decline during the twelfth century--some scholars have assumed from the 
middle of the century on, others indeed from the 1120s.  Even while 
discussing the role of the lay brothers, France is careful to make clear 
that their presence did not mean that the monks themselves had abandoned 
manual labor.  Rather, his book treats the lay brothers and their activities 
in the context of an order attempting to maintain its ideals in the face of 
often difficult circumstances, numerous temptations toward laxity, and some 
debate as to what those ideals even entailed.

---------------
Note:

[1]  Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., <i>Cistercian Lay Brothers: Twelfth-Century 
Usages with Related Texts</i> (Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses, 2000).


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


> The Medieval Review
> https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3631
> 

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