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4 Charters, Patrons, and Communities Many treatments of benefaction attempt to identify the sources of monastic support, pointing to the social classeswho were most interested in the advent of a new monastic community and showing how beneficence to monastic communities served to legitimize the power of such patrons. Studies of medieval monasticism often compare levels of bequests to various abbeys in regional studies or trace benefactors who became members of the monastic communities in life or at death.1 Given the arrangement and tenor of the documents recording such bequests (discussed below), historians have tended to ascribe agency in patronage relationships to the outsiders rather than to members of monastic communities. In concentrating on the patrons' needs for sociallegitimation and religious salvation, such considerations often forget the monks and nuns who were also involved in these transactions.Yet many patrons crossed the invisible divide between secular and religious life to become members of monastic houses. Relationships betweenpatrons and monastic personnel wereoften those of brothers and sisters by blood, and monastic administrators often had to balancethe demands and needs of their monastic communities with those of their families of birth living nearby. Careful study of the monastic charters can clarify some of these issues. Idealized versions of early Cistercian history such asthe Exordium Parvum have contaminated not only historians' portrayals of how the Cistercian Order grew, but our views of Cistercian interaction with their patrons. Our views of patronage have been distorted as well by inferences from the thirteenthcentury filiationtrees about single foundation dates, single founders, or "apostolic gestation" of religious communities, as well as by the assertions of charters and cartularies about who were the most important founders and patrons. This chapter's analysis of pre-Cistercian and Cistercian relationships with patrons will attempt to go beyond earlier pious quantification of donors and their gifts. It examines how monks and nuns actively sought to create an endowment by interactions with secular neighbors in areas into which they 162 Chapter 4 came or where their houses werelocated, although the activeroles of members of religious communities in such land acquisition are often muted or masked in the monastic charters. Charter-Making and Southern-French Society The realityof Cistercian relationships with their neighbors may be discovered by looking very closely at the charters produced by specific houses of these reformed monks and nuns. Here I undertake a detailed consideration of the records of three such communities: the scattered survivingcharters for nuns at Nonenque in the Rouergue, who seem never to have made a cartulary, and charters found in the cartularies for two houses of Cistercian monks, Gimont in Gascony and Valmagne near Montpellier. All three abbeys had adopted Cistercian practices by sometime in the third quarter of the twelfth century. The charter evidence confirms that their benefactors came primarily from the knightly class and cooperated in the foundation of new religious houses in which their daughters and sons could take religious garb. It was also to these abbeys that such patrons themselves might retire before death. While it appears that the social level of donors and recruits to the nuns of Nonenquewas slightly higher than was that of patrons for Gimont and Valmagne, all three received little patronage from those at the level of titled lords such as the Raymonds, counts of Toulouse, at least not before the end of the twelfth century. Such charters convey more than land alone, for they both illuminate and obscure our understanding of social relationships. For example, a Valmagne charter for 1185 tells us that Adelaide, wife of the late Bernard of Saint-Pons, gave to Valmagne and to abbot Amedeus the entire honor or property that her son, Peter Raymond, had relinquished to that abbeyin the last days of his life. The charter depicts this widow, undoubtedly grief-stricken at having lost her son, pressing the monks of Valmagne to accept a gift made by him on his deathbed. But isthis really how the scenehad playedout? The poignant drama of a son's death and his mother's confirmationof a gift for his burial are part of what lies behind such a charter, in whichAdelaide's gift comes to resemble all other gifts. What totally disappears from view in this case is the spectacle of the monks of Valmagne rushing to the deathbed of Peter Raymond to receive his gift, after which Adelaidemay have had little choice except to confirm this gift for his soul and his burial.2 Such a situation is not mentioned in...

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