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Reviews 187 Parergon 20.2 (2003) is edited and discussed by Miriam Rita Tessera. Between taking his crusading vow in 1175, and embarking two years later, Philip wrote to ask ‘“...if it would be useful for me to stay in that land or to return...”’ (p. 81), relying on Hildegard’s statecraft combined with her access to God. Helen J. Nicholson examines another hybrid group, the Templars, warrior monks whose devotion to female martyrs as role models is explained by their own vow to die as martyrs on the battlefield (which they did in large numbers), while their religious vows required them to cultivate the passive, feminised virtues. I found only two minor typographical errors in this interesting and wellpresented book. Mary Scrafton Adelaide, South Australia Fergusson, Peter and Stuart Harrison, Rievaulx Abbey: Community, Architecture, Memory, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xi, 282; 189 b/w, 35 colour illustrations; RRP US$85.00; ISBN 0300078315. The ruins of the Cistercian abbey at Rievaulx lie in Yorkshire, the north of England. Less than two generations before it was founded, William the Conqueror had laid waste to much of the countryside as punishment for continued uprisings. So complete was the devastation that a contemporary could ride for 60 miles in any direction and find no living being. England was a turbulent place, so it is no wonder that Rievaulx offered ‘everywhere peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world.’ It was so popular it was able to spawn five sub-houses and still retain some 60 monks and 90 lay brothers in residence. Fergusson is puzzled that ‘the influx of novices stalled in the later 1130s’, yet this is precisely when the first fierce confrontations of the Stephen-Matilda civil war occurred, probably in itself sufficient cause for the decline. There were ongoing issues between the monks and the lay brothers and mercenarii (or servants). Fergusson uses additions and alterations in the buildings to illustrate the changing relationships between them that escalated from the 1160s. Powicke suggested for every monk there were about two lay brothers and two servants, a one-to-four ratio in which the latter did most of the work – a source of irritation unless handled with great skill, and not all abbots were 188 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) skilful enough. At times the more numerous conversi were physically partitioned off from the monks in an anti-egalitarian move that was a long way from the original community spirit of the 1130s. Indeed, the urge to separate and to claim rank increased as the impulse towards mystic union that had been so strong early in the eleventh century gradually declined – a slide into greater materialism that in time altered the original inspiration for the Cistercian movement. Where the population of Rievaulx may have been close to 150 monks in the early days, this number gradually reduced until there were only 15 by the 1400s. Diminishing religious fervour, the Black Death and the various Scots wars were abetted by a dramatic downturn in farming in the 1270s – the abbey flock of 14,000 sheep producing 22,000 lbs of wool was so devastated by scab that the abbey had to be rescued by the king. This book covers all aspects of the growth of the abbey, its holdings that ‘taken together … ensured food, heat, wool, parchment, horses, oxen, fisheries, iron, stone and timber’, largely based on an enormous 6,400 marks borrowed from Jews. The first stone church of the 1130s was an austere affair, constructed of rough finished hammer-dressed ashlar, which was then covered in plaster and painted jointing. It may have been set out from a length of 9,103 mm, which is precisely 10 English yards, in modules of 10, 20 and 40 for all the major dimensions. The Chapter House 20 years later was unique, being designed like a small two-storey church with rib-vaulted aisles and a curved ambulatory. For the Cistercians there was ‘no place holier, no place more worthy of reverence, no place where the devil farther away.’ Fergusson compares this to much larger French buildings, such as Mantes-la-Jolie built...

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