Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (review)

Like those who participated in the women’s religious movement elsewhere in Europe, the pious women of thirteenth-century Champagne aspired to lives of penitential asceticism coupled with service to the sick and the poor, the vita apostolica. Their earliest communities in Champagne, like those created by mulieres religiosae in other regions, were informal and unaffiliated with any monastic order—facts that garnered their members a share in the hierarchical suspicion generally accorded these groups. But unlike their counterparts in Italy and in the Low Countries, the women of Champagne left behind neither hagiographical texts extolling an exceptional leader (they had no St. Clare of Assisi or Mary of Oignies) nor a body of regulatory literature that might shed light on their collective aims and goals. To explore the evolution of this regional variant of a broadly based and influential type of piety, Anne Lester has used what the women of Champagne and their patrons did bequeath, and in some abundance. By analyzing charters, and petitions, along with the receipts of sales and donations, she deftly tells an untold story of the “lived experience of religious ideals and reform at work” (p. 4).

Given the traditional historiography concerning the Cistercians and religious women, Lester’s story has a surprising twist. Scholars have long argued that the Cistercian statute of 1228, which effectively banned the creation of new female houses, forced quasi-religious women to turn instead to the “new orders” for spiritual oversight. As Poor Clares, Dominican penitents, or tertiaries, these women brought vital spirituality to their institutions, whereas existing thirteenth-century Cistercian nunneries became increasingly decadent and devoid of religious idealism.

In contrast, Lester finds that the ideals of the women’s movement in Champagne meshed so well with those of the Cistercians that informal communities of women were consistently transformed into Cistercian nunneries: “With rare exceptions, nearly all of the Cistercian convents founded in the county of Champagne between 1226 and 1239 trace their beginnings to earlier communities of unaffiliated religious women” (p.19). The order displayed a commitment to manual labor and charity, as did the women whose hospices and leper houses became Cistercian convents in the 1230s. Cistercian identification with, and prayerful support for, the crusading movement also appealed to the pious women of Champagne.

Cistercian ideals were so compatible with their spirituality in fact that petitions for incorporation into the order steadily increased even after the promulgation of the 1228 exclusionary statute. But, as the author is quick to note, that watershed did mark the end of an era. The flexible, readily modified strategies that had been employed in forming associations with women would give way to a new formalism in the next decade: “After 1228, religious zeal had to contend with the administrative realities of building fabric, gifts, endowments, rents, taxes, and all the matters of daily life that ensured stability, regulation and claustration” (p. 96). Indeed, the seriousness with which affiliated nunneries took Pope Boniface VIII’s strict cloister regulation of 1298 appears to have contributed to their decline in the disaster-ridden fourteenth century.

Creating Cistercian Nuns explores the nuanced relationships that made it possible to establish austere, exemplary, and permanent monastic communities for women in thirteenth-century Champagne. Lester goes beyond legislative rhetoric to describe the vital links forged between Cistercian monks and quasi-religious religious women—bonds based on kinship, friendship, or simply (and perhaps most tellingly) a common spiritual identity.