Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150-1220 (review)

Reviews 225 Parergon 20.1 (2003) Freeman, Elizabeth, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150-1220 (Medieval Church Studies 2), Turnhout, Brepols, 2002; cloth; pp. x, 245; RRP EUR50.00; ISBN 2503510906. As a religious order, the Cistercians are not often thought to have been as conscious of history as the Benedictines. This study by Elizabeth Freeman firmly demonstrates the erroneous nature of such an assumption, by looking at a range of Cistercian historical writing from the time of Aelred of Rievaulx to Ralph of Coggeshall in the early thirteenth century. Cistercians tend to be remembered either for the radical polemic of traditional Benedictine monasticism that surfaced in their early years, for their ideals of spiritual love as propagated by Bernard of Clairvaux or other heroes of the movement, or for the institutional expansion of the Order after 1150. Freeman’s survey does not focus on the great debates surrounding the genesis of the Cistercian Order, stirred most recently by Constance Berman’s The Cistercian Evolution (2000) but she does recall the important role of historical memory in shaping a cohesive self-image to the Cistercian Order in the second half of the twelfth century. Her emphasis is rather on the way historical narrative serves to shape Cistercian self-identity during the period of consolidation of the Order in England, particularly in Yorkshire. She transfers key insights from the thinking of Benedict Anderson about imagined communities and of Hayden White about the interpretative function of even the most elementary forms of historical writing to a body of texts that has never been given sustained attention. These theoretical models lead her to conclude that these narratives not only helped inculcate a sense of continuity in a society that had experienced some powerful ruptures with the past, but also a provided framework for coming to terms with the reality of historical change. The strength of Freeman’s study lies in her ability to link close attention to the historical and codicological context of the particular narratives under study to broader theoretical questions about the role of narrative in imposing a sense of continuity on a disturbed and broken past, coming to terms with the reality of change. The chapters on individual historical texts tend to be quite separate from each other, as each narrative presents its own hermeneutic questions. The first part of the book deals with two major historical texts by Aelred of Rievaulx. She argues that Aelred’s Relatio de standardo, an account of the battle between Scots and English, is designed for both a lay aristocratic audience, notably for Walter Espec, and internal monastic consumption. With the Genealogia regum 226 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) Anglorum, she looks at the way Aelred establishes continuity over a turbulent hundred years of English history, by explaining how he sees kings as representing the nation and their queens more as ciphers to transmit a fundamentally gendered model of kingship. As an intellectual, Aelred towers head and shoulders over many of the other historical writers studied by Freeman. In a second section, dealing with the period after Aelred, she considers a broader corpus of historical writing produced or preserved within Cistercian houses, documenting very clearly how so many Cistercian communities saw themselves as guardians of the history of the nation, as much as of their own Order. A great strength of this section is the close attention paid to manuscript evidence. The third section, ‘Foundation Histories and Invented Tradition, 12001220s ’, deals with two relatively localized historical texts, describing the foundation of the abbeys of Kirkstall and of Fountains. She works hard to identify deeper methodological concerns in these texts, above all a Cistercian desire to resolve uncertainty about the past and to discern a higher meaning to history, beyond the flow of everyday events. The final section looks at Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum, a narrative that adopts a broader canvas, the history of the nation, often through relating stories evoking wonder and amazement. Freeman’s study demonstrates that even the most apparently humdrum historical narratives are rich in significance. Stories about strange events fit into a larger picture of the world, often by marginalising that which falls...