Carta Caritatis—Verfassung der Zisterzienser. Rechtsgeschichtliche Analyze einer Manifestation monasticher Reformideale im 12. Jahrhundert (review)

The aim of this work is to compare and comment on three versions of the Cistercian charter of charity as it developed over the course of the twelfth century. The work presents in three parallel columns three versions of the Carta Caritatis, or CC. These are the CC Primitiva or CC1, apparently as derived from the Ljubljana manuscript, and dated according to the author to c. 1119 (because purported to be earlier than the 1135 date once given to the Trent manuscript). As I have shown in The Cistercian Evolution (Philadelphia, 2000), Trent begins with an 1135 manuscript but the CC materials are part of the remade manuscript to which has been attached various pages and first and last quires. Next in the book is the Summa CC published by Jean Leclercq in 1952 and attributed to c. 1125. Finally included is the CC posterior or CC2 attributed to after 1152, as argued by Edmund Mikkers in 1985.

This sequence and dating has been challenged by my work and that of the late Chrysogonus Waddell—although we have not always been in agreement. Monika Dihsmaier does not cite Waddell’s edition of the Consuetudines monachorum Cisterciensis, but includes under Waddel [sic] only an article, “The Exordium Cistercii and the SCC,” from Cistercian Ideals and Reality (Kalamazoo, 1978). She includes no reference to my examination of the manuscripts in The Cistercian Evolution. Many other relevant recent books in English such as Giles Constable’s The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (New York, 1996) are missing.

Even without any effort to review the much more complex manuscript evidence, the text itself suggests that apparent sequencing from CC1 to SCC to CC2 cannot be maintained. Although this may have little effect on the discussion of the various chapters as part of the development of a customary or law for the Cistercians with regard to other developments of canon law, challenges to the presumed dating obviate the claim on page 39 that the Cistercian Charter of Charity establishes a precedence for the development of Cistercian institutions over those of Chalais, Arrouaise, Prémontré, and Oigny. Indeed, abolishing the precocious dates for the CC claimed by the Cistercians obviates their claims of the Order’s precedence in the development of institutions. Indeed, it is obvious that twelfth-century monastic institutional developments once thought to be dated firmly by Cistercian documents need to be reassessed in light of our inability to date any longer the early Cistercian practices to the first quarter of the twelfth century.

There are many other difficulties. The chapter titles included for the CC1 are later than versions of SCC and CC2 that do not include those chapter titles. Although the author makes comparisons to canon law that may be useful (such as on the authority of father abbots over daughter-houses), she has not given attention to the later placement of father abbots in oversight of daughter-houses of nuns. Indeed, although the author does cite the evidence of Jean de la Croix Bouton, Benoît Chauvin, and Elisabeth Grosjean on le Tart, issues about Cistercian nuns are generally occluded.

If the study has a virtue, it is in placing divergent versions of institutional texts side by side, as on page 122 (“Quod si aliqua ecclesia pauperiem intolerabilem incurrerit. . .”), which is identical in CC1 and CC2, but wholly different in SCC. Perhaps this points to a variety of versions of the twelfth-century CC for which no sequential development may be argued. The overall treatment, however, has missed the discussion of at least a decade.