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Charters, "Primitive Documents," and Papal Confirmations In this chapter, I argue that the work of "Order-building" by the earlyCistercians must be dated to shortly after the mid-twelfth centuryand thus after the first generation of leaders had passed away. Indeed, there are indications, discussed in the next chapter, that the creation of a Cistercian Order was in part a reaction to the continued dominance of Clairvaux after Bernard of Clairvaux's death in 1153. The conclusionthat a CistercianOrder was invented only in the n6os, and not in the mos as is usually thought, is based on an analysis of just when the institutions we associate with the Cistercian Order first begin to appear in surviving documents of practice, or charters, from southern France and elsewhere. The earliest references in the charters to the Cistercians asa group to which one could belong or whose practicescould be adopted, as well as their earliest references to a General Chapter, are found only in the mid-twelfth-century charters.Allthese indicatorsof the presenceof a Cistercian Order appear sporadically in documents from the last yearsof the H40S (in fact only in later cartulary copies of documents from 1146,1148, and 1149); diese indicatorsappear occasionally in the 11sos, and in the ii6os more consistently in more significant numbers. I also describe in this chapter my examination of the authenticity and dating of the manuscripts containing the "primitive Cistercian documents," which are normally cited as eyewitness accounts to the foundation events. These have often been used to argue for an early development of the Order, but I have found that the manuscripts and the texts of these constitutional documents do not date from earlier than the n6os. They represent the description that a later generation provided about the Order's origins. Finally, I show that the first papalconfirmation of the Cistercian Charter of Charitywas die papal bull, Sacrosancta, which appearsin aform not found until the time of Alexander III (and dated to 1163 or 1165). My analysis of die early manuscripts shows that what had been thought to be the very early confirmation of die Order's constitution,Ad hocinApostolicae, attributed to Calixtus II in 1119, 2 Charters, "Primitive Documents," and Papal Confirmations 47 is a forgery. Indeed, evidence in papal documents for an Order dated earlier than the late 11405 is nonexistent. All evidence points to the 11505 asthe era of the first General Chapters and to 1165 asthe date of the first Cistercian constitution . The situation is clarified considerablyonce the evidence of theso-called "primitive documents" of the Cistercians is carefully weighed and dated. The problem of the "primitive documents" has long been a vexing one, even in terms of definitions. There are several issues. First, these "primitive documents" were not created nearly as early as once thought. They are not "primitive" in the sense of being extremely early records, ashas been implied. They were written or collected in the course of "Order-building" an activity that happened in the second part of the twelfth century. Moreover, these texts are not really "documents" at all, but a varietyof legislativerecords and narratives . In fact, the term "primitive documents" is retained here only because it has become the standard designation for a certain group of problematic narrative and constitutional texts that have been the subject of debate over the last forty years. The texts of these "primitive documents" include an early narrativeaccount of the foundation of the new monastery at Citeaux, either the Exordium Cistercii or the Exordium Parvum, each accompanied by characteristicversions of the Charter of Charity as well as by collected statutes often called the Cistercian Institute*,. These "primitive" texts are usually accompanied in the manuscripts by a lay-brother treatise and sometimes by a papalconfirmation, the latter found immediately following the Exordium Parvum and the Charter of Charity. The entire group of "primitive documents" is usually found in manuscript codices whose major component is the little-discussed Cistercian liturgical order-book, the Ecclesiastica Officia. Such collections of liturgical ordines are a neglected source for the earliest Cistercian practices, but in fact they include far more than what we would consider the practice of liturgy, including much detail on the internal organization of monasteries, such asthe duties of various officials.1 Much more so than the texts found with either the Exordium Cistercii or the Exordium Parvum, it is these liturgical ordines that comprise the earliest Cistercian regulations. It is perhaps significant that such liturgical order-books, which concern the internal administration of individual...

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