The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe

Preface

Preface When I began this book, I intended it to be a study of the institutional history of the Cistercians in southern France. My primarygoal was to incorporate the evidence, fragmentary asit often is,for houses of Cistercian nuns that had been excluded from my earlier study of Cistercian agriculture.1 1 soon had to consider why, despite much local evidence to the contrary, historians had denied that women were part of the twelfth-century reformmovement. In so doing, I became awareof a seriesof dissonances in our traditional understanding of the early Cistercians that have led me step by step to a reconceptualization ofearly Cistercian history. I discovered that historians employed a "double standard" of proof with regard to Cistercian nuns. For women's houses to be deemed Cistercian, they had to be mentioned in the published statutes of the Order, but the same tests were not applied to men's houses.2 When I applied the same standards of proof to women's and men's houses, the required references in the early Cistercian recordswere found neither for houses of Cistercian monksnor for those of Cistercian nuns for any years before 1190. Such findings suggested that there was no Cistercian Order at allfor much of the twelfth century. This assertion turns out to be only aslight exaggeration of the main point of this book, namely that a Cistercian Order was only invented in the third quarter of the twelfth century. That Order aswe usually think of it, an administrative institution that united more than five hundred abbeys by 1215 (when its organization was held up by the Fourth Lateran Council as a model to be emulated), did not appearin 1119 or 1113 or 1098, the dates usually asserted.3 There was no GeneralChapter or set of dated statutes or way of affiliation with such an Order until sometime after 1150. There could not have been, because these administrative institutions had not yet been invented. Just asthe process of founding a new abbeyis a gradual one, events in the creation of a religious order did not happen allat once, but were gradual developments.4 Only in the n6os was a constitution written. Surviving statutes show order-building to have occurred over much of the ii8os. Thefivefiliationsto which abbeyswere tied as mothers and daughters began to be devised in the 11905 and later. Moreover, the concept of a religious order itself only appeared in the second half of the twelfth century. These conclusions are notably different from the conventional wisdom, xii Preface which has dated the promulgation of the Cistercian constitution, the Charter of Charity, to the decade of the 111osand allthe rest of the Cistercian Order's administrative institutions (General Chapter, statutes, internal visitation, etc.) to shortly thereafter. My findings about the Cistercian invention of the religious order and of the gradual creation of the Cistercian Order itself draw on my increasing understanding of the rapid expansionin wealth and numbers of Cistercian communities in the twelfth century. Before I had any sense of where this book was leading, I had begun to realize that the process of incorporation was more important to Cistercian expansion than earlier historians had thought.5 The foundation of abbeys whose agricultural practices I had investigated earlier had not occurred by colonization from Burgundy, but by incorporation of already-established local reformers, their communities, and their properties. Moreover, such evidence of the widespread incorporation by Cistercians of existing reform communities in southern France cannot be considered aberrant. That region represents about atenth of alltwelfth-century houses for men and a similar number of houses for women, thus a significant part of all Cistercian growth. Indeed, conclusions drawn from southern-French evidence and from other regions outside Burgundy about how the concept of an order grew, as well as about how the Cistercian Order itself grew, are probably more relevant than those from any study of Burgundy alone. In the latter region, the heartland of early Cistercian practice, most growth until 1153 was in the time-honored manner of congregations under the personal control of charismatic leaders. I have learned in this study to distinguish Burgundy from other regions. My investigation of Cistercians and incorporation has also now extended beyond the already considerable Cistercian territory of southern France to which I had confined my earlier monograph. Extensive reading of published primary materials and secondary works on Cistercians in a variety of places beyond Burgundy and southern France shows that Cistercian expansion by incorporation was widespread in the...