Chapter Eleven
Monastic and Mendicant Communities
Christian monasticism has its biblical roots in the austerities of the forty days Jesus of Nazareth spent in the desert, but also in the community of his followers who lived together after his ascension. It is the institutional practice of a “higher” Christian life, today most often thought to encompass the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Early Christian monks or nuns sought closeness to God by pursuing lives of self-denial and austerity, or asceticism. Such Christians had parallels in Jewish ascetic groups such as the Essenes or the community at Masada, as well as in Greek philosophical communities.1 From the earliest Christian centuries there were ascetic Christian women who lived monastic lives as consecrated virgins or veiled widows in family homes, devoting their lives to prayer and chastity. Eventually communities of such women were founded, for instance, that at Bethlehem founded by St Jerome’s friend and patron, Paula.2 When the spokesmen for medieval Christian monasticism looked back to their origins, however, they pointed to the “desert fathers” as the founders of monasticism: St Anthony the hermit (d. c. 250), whose life was written by Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria (c. 298–373), and St Pachomius (c. 292–346), the converted soldier, founder of a monastic community at Tabennisa in the Egyptian desert, modeled on a Roman military camp.3 There was further identification by medieval monastics and mendicants with the vita apostolica, the life of the early apostles, and with the Gospel sisters Martha and Mary, who represented the active and contemplative lives respectively.4
To become a monk or a nun was to deny oneself marriage, family, political office, and clerical duties, to leave father and mother, sister and brother, possessions and worldly concerns, and bearing arms, to follow a higher Christian life. At first, monasticism was a flight from the life of the cities. The words “monk” and “monasticism” come from the Greek word monos for “alone,” and the monacus or monaca was originally someone living alone in the desert. Only later was a distinction made between those monachi who were organized into communities living a common life (koinos bios, hence cenobitic communities) and those who continued to live alone in the desert or eremus (hence hermits or eremitical communities). There were also those monastics who wandered from place to place (the gyrovagues) and those who traveled to holy places as pilgrims. The monastic life might be embraced by married couples, who took vows to live chastely within marriage, or by those who lived by begging (mendicancy). In late antiquity mendicants were one type of monks, and the life of begging or mendicancy one aspect of early monasticism.5
In the early centuries of Christianity, monastics often saw themselves as “athletes for Christ,” competing with one another in the practice of asceticism or self-mortification. They rejected clerical service in urban Christian communities in their search for a more perfect life of prayer. Monks were distinct from priests in not having been ordained, and in having no share in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, or in priestly ordination for celebration of the mass. Both monks and nuns took religious vows, and there was hence little gender distinction within early monasticism, although usually men’s and women’s communities were separate. On occasion such communities were “double” ones, with men and women living chastely together under a single roof, sharing a single church, but otherwise segregated. Such double communities appeared for brief periods in the West – the most famous being Whitby in seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England, early twelfth-century Fontevrault in Anjou, and the fifteenth-century Bridgittine house of Syon, which was part of an order founded by Birgitta of Sweden c. 1370.6
Early monasticism made its inroads primarily among the most devout within Christian communities. Although some monks or hermits, like the great desert saint, Simeon Stylite, who lived on a pillar in the Syrian wilderness for decades, became figures of great sanctity and authority, early monasticism was often viewed with dismay by Christian authorities. Such Christians “fleeing to the desert” abandoned familial and civic responsibilities, and in their failure to reproduce or hold civic office threatened the Roman social fabric and brought opprobrium on their religion. Monks wandering from place to place in a self-absorbed pursuit of their own salvation disrupted clerical attempts to gain legitimacy for Christianity, and they were often a burden on urban Christian communities. Hordes of monks are described as descending like locusts on the cities of the Empire, begging for food and shelter, involving themselves in ecclesiastical politics and elections, arrogant about their own celibacy and perfection, and respecting no authority but their own.7 Their praise of chastity and condemnation of priestly marriage pushed the clerical hierarchy toward increased celibacy, fear of contamination by women, and anti-feminism if not outright misogyny, leaving the role of women within early Christianity to be undermined and forgotten.8
But, while monastic praise of virginity and chastity increasingly monasticized the clergy, particularly in the West, monasticism itself was being tamed. It was soon defined as a life lived in community in obedience to a leader or rule. Monks and hermits who had once gone for years without seeing another soul were enjoined to participate in weekly celebration of mass, even if they then returned to their individual cells. Excessive self-mortification was replaced by moderation and humility. Monks and nuns were enjoined by bishops and other reformers to seek perfection by regular prayer for the souls of the larger Christian community, and to share a common table, a common purse, and personal poverty. Stability was adopted as a monastic virtue and would lead eventually to idealization of monastic enclosure, particularly for women. Monastic reformers evoking the discipline of the military camp or obedience to the paterfamilias of the great Senatorial household gradually brought the extremists of asceticism under control through obedience to an abbot or abbess, whose power mimicked that of the Roman father. Indeed the term abbot comes from the Hebrew word for father, ab (in Syriac abba, in Latin abbas, abbatis), and the abbess in this sense is not a mother, but a female father.
When persecutions of Christians ended in the fourth century, churches and communities had begun to spring up outside the walls of Roman cities on the burial spots of local martyrs and saints. Monastic prayers and burial in monastic cemeteries would become valued because of the vicinity of those saints.9 As monastic communities increasingly imitated the social organization of the late Roman family, so too did the typical monastery imitate the physical layout of the great Greek or Roman house, with its series of arcaded rooms looking inward on atrium and peristyle with its pools and colonnaded garden. The Roman domus was thus transformed into a monastic enclosure with the church adjoining a garden surrounded by a colonnaded cloister linking it to chapter house, refectory, scriptorium, and living quarters.10
Increasingly nuns and monks took religious vows of obedience to a monastic rule (regula); thus monks were henceforth considered “regular” clergy, in contrast to the “secular” clergy who had taken priestly orders (been ordained) but had not taken monastic vows. Rather than performing the mass (the exclusive activity of priests), monks and nuns punctuated their lives with regular prayer or praise, the Divine Office, celebrated at set times each day, the monastic hours. This Divine Office, which derived from Jewish recitation of the Hebrew Psalms, would eventually encompass the collective recital of the entire book of Psalms over the course of a week. It required no priestly intermediary and did not exclude monastic women, whose prayers were considered to be equal to those of men within the monastic life.11 In the early Middle Ages few monks were priests. Only from the ninth or tenth century would most monks be ordained as priests; reform movements tended to resist and reverse this clericalization of monasticism.12
Abbesses and abbots in late antiquity were those wealthy Christians who founded monasteries, using their own wealth to support and endow those communities. Gradually rules evolved about who should rule religious communities. Abbots and abbesses should be at least 20 years old. They could not inherit their positions. After the eleventh-century Gregorian reform, they were not to be appointed by a ruler. Instead they were to be elected by the community through electors, by direct ballot, or by compromise or scrutiny, or chosen by divine inspiration, as when a white dove descended onto the head of the appropriate candidate. Once selected, the abbess or abbot was consecrated by a bishop and charged with his or her duties as head of the community. A newly consecrated abbess, for instance, was enjoined to perform the Divine Office, to oversee the community with wisdom, intelligence, good counsel, courage, goodness, and understanding, to preserve God’s commandments day and night, to attend to sacred reading, spurn the worldly and ephemeral, practice good works, overcome pleasure or voluptuousness, love honorable chastity, practice virtue, use authority with modesty, and make an example of her life. Receiving the rule of her community in chastity, sobriety, goodness, moderation, and prudence, she was to rule without separating herself from the sisters in more luxurious apartments, eating separately from the sisters, or having favorites, but to correct faults with firmness and without either too much severity or too much laxity.13 Both abbesses and abbots were the spiritual leaders of their communities, but an abbot who was also a priest had additional functions: celebrating mass, hearing confession and granting penance, consecrating new members, or offering last rites to the dying.14
As for administration of property, it is likely that many abbesses carried a greater share of those duties than did abbots, for abbots were more able to delegate responsibilities to officers or obedientiaries: priors who assisted the abbot or ruled dependent houses, cellerars charged with providing food to the monastic table, and others administering monastic properties.15 Although there were great and wealthy houses of nuns, on average women’s houses were smaller, supported fewer nuns, and had less endowment to manage than men’s houses.16 Abbesses had to have priests to assist them in certain duties, but might consequently undertake a larger share of property administration. Nuns could be either virgins, chaste, veiled widows, or wives if their husbands also took monastic vows, and abbesses often ruled their communities because of their wealth or connections to the outside world – gaining authority through their status as members of a prominent family, or through earlier experience in the world as married women, although sometimes proving themselves by rising through community ranks. Most historians have concluded that enclosure of medieval nuns remained flexible enough to allow abbesses to leave the monastery when necessary for monastic business. The vitae of abbots of great monastic communities often praise their skill in acquiring property, constructing buildings, and managing resources, but abbesses too were adept in managing the monastic property with great skill – despite a tendency for the medieval monks who most often authored our narrative sources to downplay such abilities among monastic women.17 Indeed recent studies suggest that abbesses were less likely than abbots to incur debts, and more successful in juggling resources, to provide for both the poor at their gates and the needs of their communities. In times of famine, abbesses remitted rental payments owed by tenants; in good times they encouraged gifts from admirers to increase the properties they held already.18
If early monks and nuns took vows at all, those vows only vaguely resembled the later triad of poverty, chastity, and obedience. While the desert tradition of physical deprivation would continue to be celebrated in later monastic readings such as the Collationes of John Cassian (c. 360–435), the life of heroic asceticism was gradually replaced by the virtues of moderation, humility, and obedience to a rule and an abbot.19 Such moderated practices are associated with the great rules of monastic life established in late antiquity: advice by Basil of Caesaria (c. 330–79), still used by Greek monks today; the letters of Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa (354–430), from which the later Augustinian Rule derives, and in Italy both the anonymous “Rule of the Master” and the more famous Rule of Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 530). The Rule of Benedict, which became the most important monastic rule in the West, was long believed to be the work of a single inspired genius, but is now known to be a collation of earlier rules. It was spread quickly from his famous monastic house at Montecassino south of Rome, with the backing of Pope Gregory the Great (540–604, pope from 590), one of the great intellectuals of the transition between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, who included a Life of Benedict of Nursia in his widely read Dialogues.20 As for Benedict’s Rule, foremost was obedience to an abbot, who was to urge moderation and humility and manual labor to avoid boredom or listlessness, within a schedule of communal recitation of the entire book of Psalms each week. It also stressed private prayer, devout reading, and manual labor, an activity that in many Western monasteries came to be centered on copying in the scriptorium or writing room. Indeed, we owe the survival of most texts from the ancient world to the copying by such medieval monks and nuns.21 Benedict’s Rule was used by communities of women as well as men, and famous abbesses of late antiquity are associated with authors of monastic rulers: Macrina, the sister of Basil of Caesaria, and Scholastica, the sister of Benedict of Nursia, are both thought to have headed their communities of nuns.22 Much stricter than Benedict’s Rule, particularly in terms of monastic enclosure, was a rule written by Caesarius, bishop of Arles (d. 543), for use by his sister and her nuns at a community in that city.23 In general, however, the Rule of Benedict was successful because of its lack of excessive specificity, and communities using it could develop customs appropriate to their own needs.
In most of the West, where monasticism was established in former Roman provinces, monks and nuns were subject to the local bishop, who had replaced Roman civic authorities. That was different in Ireland, however, where Roman civilization had never penetrated and bishops lived in monasteries and were subject to abbots (and abbesses like Bridget of Kildare (c. 450–523); Celtic monks and nuns were famous for their manuscript copying and illumination, but followed more ascetic monastic practices than elsewhere.24 Among them was the ascetic practice of setting out to sea on tiny crafts to wash up on whatever shore, establishing hermitages and monasteries at Skelling Michael off the southern coast of Ireland, at Iona and Lindisfarne in northern Britain – whence they converted Britain from the north.25 They encountered the Benedictine Rule introduced by monks sent from Rome to convert Britain. Their influence traveled northward from Canterbury. In Northumbria, at the great synod of Whitby in 664 Roman practice triumphed over that of the Celtic in terms of monastic practice and calendrical calculations. Anglo-Irish monks and nuns continued missionary efforts to the Continent, establishing long-lived houses of monks at places like Luxeuil, and Bobbio, as well as assisting in the conversion of the Saxons at the time of the martyred monastic missionary Boniface and the emperor Charlemagne.26
Generally, the fierce Merovingian Franks were more sympathetic to nuns than their Carolingian successors, and great double monasteries ruled by abbesses at Chelles and Jouarre near Paris and the Benedictine nuns at the Holy Cross in Poitiers, founded by the Thuringian captive princess Queen Radegunda (d. 587), represent the height of the foundation of houses of nuns in Frankish lands until the tenth century. Indeed, women’s monasticism at the time of the Carolingians was limited by the reforms of monastic practices authored by the monk Witiza, better known as Benedict of Aniane (c. 747–821).27 During the chaos of Norman, Saracen, and Magyar raids of the ninth and tenth centuries, monastic communities of all types were threatened by non-Christian invaders, who had no respect for the religion that protected the treasure kept in monastic coffers.28 Abbesses in Britain and elsewhere encouraged their nuns to make themselves as unattractive as possible to avoid being assaulted by invaders. In France, communities of monks moved the relics of their saints further and further from the rivers and sea. In Britain, communities of nuns, like that at Whitby, disappeared in the Viking era only to be replaced later by houses of monks.29 The exception was in Ottonian Germany and Italy, where imperial women favored nuns’ houses in Rome, Brescia, and north of the Alps at places like Gandersheim (founded 852) and Quedlinburg (founded 936).30
As Europe emerged from the trauma of the later invasions, monasticism’s story turns to the foundation of the abbey of Cluny by the Duke of Aquitaine at a site in Burgundy bordering Empire, Francia, and the road south to Italy and Rome.31 Cluny became the most famous monastery in eleventh-century Europe, its growth and reputation a result both of dedication to St Peter and papal protection from local interference, and of a series of long-lived and saintly early abbots. It had close ties to the Reconquest of Spain, whose Christian leaders transferred some of the spoils to Cluny’s building program, and its leaders were involved in the events of the Gregorian reform. Its reputation for reform and the desire to have daughter houses of monks emulate its customs inspired lay patrons to give their monasteries to Cluny to be reformed. The invention of the feast of All Souls by Abbot Odilo (994–1049) added to Cluny’s fame as a liturgical center, offering impressive anniversary masses for the dead. Many asked to be buried in Cluniac cemeteries, or to enter Cluniac houses at the very end of life.32 Cluny gradually acquired a congregation of such once-independent monastic communities in which the abbot of Cluny was monarch and all Cluniac monks took their vows from him. Similar reform movements were found in the Empire, at Hirsau and Gorze, for instance, but it was primarily Cluny and its impressive church, its elaborate liturgical furnishings, and the constant prayers for the dead by its priest/monks that dominated eleventh-century Europe.33
Declining revenues and a disputed election in the early twelfth century led to claims by rivals that a crisis had developed in Cluniac monasticism, but recent studies have not confirmed this.34 Although its revenues from the reconquest of Spain may have been lower, Cluny’s ties to Spain, Italy, and other parts of Europe continued in the twelfth century.35 Cluny’s eighth abbot, Peter the Venerable (1122–156), was a powerful force in western Christendom, reorganizing the abbey’s finances, welcoming the dying Peter Abelard, writing powerful letters in response to Cistercian complaints, refusing to support the Second Crusade, instead writing treatises against Jews, against heretics, and against Saracens (for the last commissioning translations of the Koran from scholars in Spain) to assist in his creation of a “Christian armory” for propagation of the faith. Peter’s writings show that he saw himself and Cluny at the center of Christendom,36 but the Cluny cartulary too shows the abbey continuing to receive new gifts in the twelfth century, acquiring churches and tithes once in lay hands, and forging new relationships between its prayers and the community.37
The Cluniac monarchy was primarily one of monks, but in 1055 a Cluniac house for the female relatives of Cluny’s abbot, Hugh the Great (1049–109), was founded at Marcigny. It was to contain ninety-nine nuns, including a prioress, but no abbess. That it was asserted that the Virgin Mary ruled them from heaven and the abbot of Cluny on earth tells us much about Cluniac self-confidence.38 Marcigny was the only Cluniac house for nuns, but there were a number of eleventh-century foundations for religious women following the Benedictine Rule: le Ronceray founded in 1028 in Angers, the Abbaye-aux-Dames at Saintes in 1047, and that of la Trinité in Caen founded in 1062 by Matilda of Flanders, wife of the future king of England, William the Conquerer.39 Nonetheless, the spotlight of monastic history moves c. 1100 toward new groups of reformers seeking a more austere life in the “deserts” of Western Europe.40 The history of monasticism begins to be told from this point forward as an ever-repeating tripartite drama of reform, success, and decadence and then reform again. But such a cyclical narrative has limited credibility, drawing as it does from a Cistercian narrative justifying their break from the monastery of Molesme. It implies that Cistercians replaced the Cluniacs. Instead, newer groups supplemented the old, as a diversity of monastic opportunities arose in an expanding Western Europe. This new reform movement may have appeared first in the late eleventh century, when some Gregorian reformers began a critique of the older monasticism. New communities and congregations appeared at Fonte Avellano, Vallombrosa, and Camaldoli, then at la Grand Chartreuse in the Alps. Ideas were carried north to Grandmont, Molesme, Cîteaux and Prémontré and into the forests of Normandy and Brittany, where we see foundations by Vidal of Savigny, Bernard of Tiron, Gerald of Salles, and the double houses founded by Robert of Arbrissel at Fontevrault and Stephen of Obazine. Savigniac houses in Britain were important in the reign of Stephen, but it was also a period of hermits and anchorites, and the foundation of a new double house of sisters and canons by Gilbert of Sempringham. But there were also many independent foundations, often ephemeral, often swallowed up by the more successful.41
These new monastic reformers were inspired by Gregorian ideas about the separation of spiritualities and temporalities, about monastic ownership of churches and tithes, and whether as contemplative monks and nuns not providing for the care of souls they should be subject to tithes.42 They also worried about worldly wealth and power, about lordship over villages of dependent tenants that was no different from secular manorialism, and about how their vows of personal poverty squared with lives in wealthy communities, for the more poverty stricken a monastic house appeared, the more secular donors, identifying such poverty with sanctity, flocked to make gifts to those poor monks and nuns.43 In reformers’ eyes such support would lead only to wealth, ease, and monastic decadence. Taking their vows of poverty as seriously as Francis of Assisi and his followers would in the next century, these twelfth-century reformers thus attempted to divorce themselves from corporate wealth – in some cases refusing any endowment, including ownership of churches and tithes, and limiting ties to the feudal economy and growing cities.44 They struggled, too, with just how open their communities should be to provide for pilgrims and travelers, to offer education to the children of local nobles, or to care for the sick and the hungry. Many refused to adopt the elaborate architecture used to attract pilgrims, and the liturgy associated with anniversary masses, and argued that monastic vows of poverty, humility, and obedience could be fulfilled only if monastic buildings, food, clothing, and liturgical furnishings were austere and simple, and monastic communities isolated from the world.45
Thus many twelfth-century reformers retreated to the new deserts or wildernesses of Western Europe not only in search of solitude, but to live by the labor of their own hands. They were constantly plagued by followers emulating their sanctity but needing behavioural guidance from formal rules, or by patrons attempting to give them land, and such monastic reformers may be distinguished from one another by how they avoided ownership of property, villages, churches, and tithes, and the responsibilities for parishes.46 A variety of houses of monks and nuns, in addition to the Grandmontine hermits, did so by animal husbandry, which was less labor intensive than agriculture, and could rely on pasture lands belonging to others.47 Most limited the expense of monastic life by a return to the “primitive” simplicity and “apostolic poverty” of early monastic life in architecture and decoration, food and clothing, and efforts to avoid interactions with outsiders. In their efforts to avoid property ownership, some of the founders thus anticipated the thirteenth-century mendicants.
Some may be differentiated by their attitude toward the care of souls in parishes. The followers of Norbert of Xanten, the Praemonstratensian or Norbertine canons and canonnesses, as well as other “regular” canons, organized themselves into communities of priests living coenobitic lives, taking over abandoned churches and undertaking parochial care.48 Other reformers, including those who eventually became Cistercians, shared a common table and dormitory of coenobitic monasticism, turning their backs on the world around them in favor of the contemplative life, and denounced the elaborate liturgy of the pilgrimage churches and prayers for souls. They argued that monks should not hold tithes and should not undertake priestly duties, but should isolate themselves from the care of souls, and the associated income from altars, churches, tithes, and dependent tenants, but sought exemption from payment of tithes on the labor of their own hands.
Most other groups that were eremitical at the outset – the Arrouaise canons, the canons of Prémontré, and many of the smaller congregations that would be incorporated by the Cistercians had been eremitical at the outset but evolved into coenobitic monks and nuns sharing a common table and gathering at intervals each day for the recitation of the divine office.49 While many of these groups devised new reform customaries, others would revert to more traditional ways.50 Thus Gerald of la Sauve Majeure, who began as a hermit, was soon joined by canons from Bordeaux who had founded a new village and priory in the vicinity, and like other reformers accepted knights as adult converts to his community. Gradually La Sauve and its congregation reverted to practices similar to those of the earlier Cluniacs, co-founding villages with local lords, accepting child oblates, providing medical services to pilgrims and fighters to Spain, and accepting patrons for burial at the end of life.51
As the diversity of possibilities for the religious life increased in this period, it was accompanied by an increased specialization in charitable services that were gradually shifting from bishops, priests, and traditional monasteries to new smaller and more specialized religious foundations: hospices and hospitals for the sick or for travelers, leprosaria, and by the thirteenth century residences for students at university cities, all of which were founded in order to provide prayers for a patron family’s souls.52 Some of this increased specialization may have arisen as the duties once undertaken by the families of parish priests disappeared with the enforcement of clerical celibacy and the outlawing of clerical marriage in the first half of the twelfth century. There is evidence, too, that some of the new hermitages and independent monasteries had been founded by clerical families, those who chose to live together after taking vows of chastity, rather than being forced to live apart because of changing mores in the Church.53 Throughout the West, such new communities were established by patrons (including women) whose political roles sometimes precluded their own entrance into religious life, but others were founded by knights, peasants, urban artisans, or holy women who had themselves converted to that life.54
Tithes and churches were a potent issue. While the hermits of Grandmont in central France refused to own land, living on the increase of their flocks and herds held in pasture lands belonging to great lords, they also considered themselves laymen and subject to ecclesiastical tithes; at first control of their funds was vested wholly in the converts or lay brothers rather than the choir monks.55 The Carthusians also remained eremitical in the organization of their daily lives; unlike the Cistercians with their system of granges, the Carthusians attempted to create large walled enclaves from which all other owners had been expelled. They lived in separate apartments and ate alone, coming together only for mass in the church. These hermits originally lived at the top of a mountain in the Savoy, with lay brothers at the gatehouse at the bottom as a buffer with the outside world.56 The congregation of Tiron, on the other hand, which attracted primarily artisans, also acquired large numbers of churches.57 Hospitaller and Templar outposts in the West also attracted specialist knights and sergeants, but often had tithes and ecclesiastical incomes that might come up against the tithe exemptions of some of the new monks.58
The move toward new eremitical and monastic foundations in this period was associated with individuals of great charisma who became wandering preachers and reformers, often with notions of reviving the life of equality of early Christians. They began as clerics disenchanted with the new urban schools or converted knights and peasants or monks rejecting the social hierarchies of earlier monasticism fleeing to the “new deserts” and urging others to abandon earlier lives in a search for new monastic lives based on notions of equality of men and women, rich and poor, urban artisan and peasant.59 Whereas in an earlier age recruits to religious houses had been oblates (the children dedicated to monastic communities by parents), the new religious communities recruited adults who entered the religious life at mid-career, or founded reform communities after experiencing a mid-life crisis and conversion. Such conversions were by secular clerics, knights, and even the merchant, Godric of Finchale, who became a hermit.60 The knight Pons de Léras, founder of Silvanès, was typical. A “convert” to the religious life, he renounced his violence, determined to lead a religious life, converted his land into moveable assets, settled his wife and children in religious communities, and departed on a pilgrimage before founding a hermitage that eventually became a Cistercian abbey. His life encompasses the period over which the term “convert,” or “conversus,” came to mean a lay brother among the Cistercians, and the author of this Vita, confused by rapidly changing terminology, described Pons as having “out of humility” remained a lay brother or conversus rather than a monk.61 Among such conversion stories the most famous is that of early thirteenth-century Francis of Assisi, but there are many others, evidence of a rediscovery of the individual in twelfth-century Europe. Such conversion stories, like all narratives, have accepted conventions, but they differed by gender; for men such conversions meant a change to a new type of life, whereas for women such stories are often about achieving a long-sought-after religious life against family objections.62
For the twelfth century the most famous of such conversion stories is presented by the Cistercians as the story of their foundation; it is the interlocked account of two group conversions to the new and stricter religious life at Cîteaux. In the first, Cîteaux’s foundation in 1098 is described as accomplished by a group of reform monks seeking to live (or convert to) a stricter life who left the “decadent” monastery of Molesme to found the new monastery at Cîteaux. The second part describes how Cîteaux was rescued from obscurity by another group conversion, that of the secular cleric Bernard of Fontaines and his followers. Led by Bernard, who would become better known as Bernard of Clairvaux, these men left their secular lives to enter Cîteaux in 1112, and then were sent a year later to found the daughter-house at Clairvaux, where Bernard ruled as abbot until his death in 1153.63 Elevated to sainthood in 1174, Bernard of Clairvaux has been identified as a “Doctor of the Church” for his influential Latin sermons on such topics as the Song of Songs. Bernard’s charismatic preaching and active advocacy of the monastic life as lived at Clairvaux encouraged many individuals, among them the future Pope Eugenius III (ruled 1145–53), to enter that abbey, or to affiliate their own independent monastic foundations with Clairvaux and the Cistercians.64
By the end of the twelfth century an order of Cistercian monks and nuns was in place, with over 500 houses of monks and an as yet uncounted smaller number of houses of nuns.65 This was not by an overflowing of monastic foundations from Burgundy. The order’s success was created by Cistercian incorporation of independently founded congregations and houses, each with its local recruits and endowment, many of them intent on living monastic lives without dependence on the manorialism that had supported earlier monasteries. Most such houses and their associated granges were located in regions of long settlement, where Cistercians and others rationalized long-fragmented landholdings into consolidated farms or granges, practiced a newly intensive pastoralism, sought papal exemption from tithes on the fruit of their own labor, and used the labor of lay brothers and sisters (often recruited along with land purchases from earlier occupants) to provide products demanded by growing cities of the twelfth century.66
Bernard of Clairvaux and his followers were active among twelfth-century monastic reformers in emphasizing the duties of the abbot or abbess as a loving mother as well as a stern father.67 Their concern with monastic caritas, an attitude of love, respect, and equality owed to all members of a monastic community, would later be expanded to apply to the relationships among Cistercian monastic communities: no community should rule over another, or demand payment of taxes from another; all should contribute to the material aid of the needy.68 In this Cistercian idealism of the early to mid-twelfth century there was a brief moment when notions of social hierarchy were rejected. Since all were adult converts to the religious life, all were to be equal as brothers or sisters. Peasants who became lay brothers or sisters were treated as equal to the educated clerics or noble ladies who ruled monastic houses. Conversi (and conversae) were placed in charge of satellite farms (granges), so that monks (and nuns) could remain within the monastic enclosure, but they were equal in status to those choir nuns and monks, although receiving larger portions of food each day because they did more manual labor. Many of them were illiterate, but not all were peasants. There is evidence not only in the vitae, but in the charters, that knights with little education converting to the Cistercian life sometimes preferred lay-brother status and its abbreviated round of daily prayer. By the 1180s, however, such notions of equality among the Cistercians were disappearing, and knights were required to become choir monks. Cistercians also began to use the words conversus and conversa to mean lay brother or lay sister.69
As for these lay brothers and lay sisters, the Cistercians certainly did not invent this new “second class” of monks and nuns, but they were among the first to articulate descriptions of the purpose of these lay brothers in written documents. Such rules about incorporating lay brothers may have led other independently founded reform communities of the twelfth century to adopt Cistercian practices. Out of such shared practices would come the establishment of an annual, universal, and mandatory General Chapter of abbots gathering at Cîteaux each year and the developing notion of a religious order as an administrative institution. Although once believed to date to early in the twelfth century, the innovations that we associate with a religious order as enjoined on all monks and nuns in 1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 probably emerged a generation after the early charismatic leaders had disappeared, and most completely during the reign of Pope Alexander III (1159–81).70 Such an order as recommended in 1215 was distinct from earlier congregations organized around charismatic individuals like Bernard of Clairvaux or the monarchical principles of Cluny. The invention of such an umbrella group of monastic communities, characterized by a collective or individual head, written customs, internal visitation, exemption from local episcopal interference, and internal dispute resolution, was invented after much trial and error, borrowing and sharing among various reform groups, and, although by 1215 the Cistercians had emerged as the model, it is likely that most new reformers had contributed to the development.
Women were active in this reform movement. Although we have no evidence that women were among those leaving Molesme to found Cîteaux in 1098, there were women in the monastic community at Molesme, and a house at Jully was founded by Molesme in 1113 to accommodate those women who had also converted to the religious life and whose relatives had entered Clairvaux.71 Although not sharing in the deliberations of the abbots at Cîteaux, Cistercian nuns were part of the order, and, like those of monks, women’s houses were subjected to the regularizing influence of the General Chapter, particularly in the period from 1180 to 1250.72 A house of nuns was founded at le Tart in the early 1120s with the help of Stephen Harding, abbot of Cîteaux, and would have its own congregation of houses of nuns by the end of the century; Cistercian nuns at Montreuil near Laon reported c. 1150 by Herman of Tournai are described as “working in the fields like the brothers of Clairvaux, rather than spinning or weaving.”73 Cistercian affiliation of men’s houses brought incorporation of associated houses of nuns, but there were also new foundations like that at Las Huelgas in Burgos made in the 1180s by the king of Castile, who wanted to create a congregation of all Cistercian women’s houses in the parts of Spain under its authority.74 The opening of the thirteenth century saw a great surge of women’s houses founded or affiliated with the Cistercians, many supported by Blanche of Castile, queen of France (d. 1252), and her friends. By the thirteenth century’s end, Cistercian women’s houses outnumbered those for men.75
Cistercians were not alone in having women in their midst. In addition to the double communities of canons and canonesses founded by Norbert at Prémontré, Robert of Arbrissel at Fontevrault, and Gilbert of Sempringham, there were many other independently founded houses of religious women of the period, some headed by women of great intellectual strength who seriously examined what the religious life meant for them. The twelfth-century abbess of the Paraclete, Heloise (1098–162), complained to her former husband, Peter Abelard (1079–142), that the Rule of Saint Benedict was ill suited to women’s lives, but rejected the rule he wrote, which subjected religious women to men, for a rule she had written herself.76 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–179) provided texts of her visions and dressed her nuns in beautiful colors, as well as writing letters about theological subjects to the intellectuals of her day.77 Herrad, abbess of Hohenburg (1125–95) compiled an encyclopedia, the famous Hortus Deliciarum, for the education of her nuns.78 These three abbesses of new religious communities that have nonetheless been treated as traditional Benedictine houses had access to the latest educational trends. The next generations of religious women (not only nuns but beguines, anchorites, and penitents) were excluded not only from the clerical university but from much of the urban apostolate of the mendicant friars. Instead, living increasingly enclosed lives, they would be upheld as models of sanctity for their visions, their penitential lives, and their pious proof of orthodoxy against heresy.79
Such women seen as models of penitence are part of a shift c. 1200 toward an urban apostolate and the rise of the “mendicant” orders. Part of the shift was in location: from the twelfth-century abbeys in the countryside, with ties to the cities primarily through urban markets where they sold their surpluses, to a mission aimed more directly at the cities, with the remodeling, rebuilding, and restoration of urban churches and cathedrals, and new attention given to the spiritual needs of the urban population through preaching and indoctrination with the tenets of the faith.80 This is often presented in the history of monasticism as the result of the onset of decadence within new groups like the Cistercians, but this is only partially true, for communities of Cistercian nuns experienced their greatest expansion in the early thirteenth century. On the other hand, it was clear that Cistercian abbots, periodically engaged in preaching against dualist and anticlerical heretics, Cathars or Albigensians and others, in southern France, had been ineffective. Although the first mission to the south by Bernard of Clairvaux in the 1140s may be linked to the increased distancing of Cistercian monks from nuns in that decade, and a rhetoric associating women with heretics, later Cistercian abbots were ineffective in persuasion and ended up advocating force against Cathar perfects whose austere life styles allowed them to seize the higher ground in debate with Cistercian abbots who were increasingly viewed as wealthy, land-hungry, self-satisfied northerners taking sides in local affairs.81 It was, in fact, in the attempts to find a new self-presentation in such preaching against heresy, as well as in biblical injunctions to preach the Gospel, that new “mendicant” groups arose in the early decades of the thirteenth century. Their early history is obscure, based on lives written for sanctification. As with earlier groups like the Cistercians, moreover, there is a tendency to read later institutions back into earlier events, accompanied by conflation between the two main groups, the followers of Francis and Dominic, eventually the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, and the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans. Although traditionally called mendicants because they are said to reject monastic ownership of property, what is most striking about these new religious orders is their lack of any pretense of monastic stability, except for their nuns. The men of these preaching and mendicant groups all struggled with the tension that had exercised Bernard of Clairvaux before them, between the active life of preaching as exemplified by the biblical Martha and the contemplative life of monastic prayer represented by her sister Mary, as well as the issue of the cura monialium, the care of nuns’ souls.82 The men as well as the women also identified with Mary Magdalene as the representative of a life of penitence and a universal hope that even such a sinner could convert and be saved.83
Dominic de Guzmán (c. 1170–221), probably a regular canon, passed through southern France when he accompanied his bishop Diego of Osma on a trip to Rome. Perceiving the ineffectiveness of Cistercian preaching, he proposed that debate with the Cathar heretics would be more successful if it were to be conducted by poor, wandering Christian clerics, dressed in simple garb, looking as poor and holy as the Cathar perfects.84 He gained the attention of the former Cistercian abbot Fulk, bishop of Toulouse.85 Together they inspired an existing house of Catholic nuns at Prouille to support their mission of preaching against those with Cathar ideas in the vicinity; Prouille would become the first Dominican community. When Fulk granted houses in Toulouse for Dominic and his fellow preachers in 1213–14, those became the core of the first Dominican community of friars. Later, c. 1221, a house of Dominican nuns would be founded at San Domenico e Sisto in Rome by Honorius III and placed under the care of Diane d’Andalo, who had made her profession in Dominic’s hand before his death in 1221.86 Such communities of Dominican nuns were endowed like traditional nuns and strictly enclosed from the start.87 By the mid-fourteenth century there were probably more communities of Dominican sisters than of friars, the latter tending to be limited to one per city. Some of the German communities of nuns provide us with important group lives in the form of sister books.88
From the outset, then, the emphasis of Dominic’s charisma was on preaching against heresy by poor wandering clergy, well educated in the theological issues at stake and the supervision of a certain number of enclosed nuns. This led naturally to the organization of an international order, the establishment of houses for preachers in the major cities, hostels as institutions of higher learning, the studia generale in major university centers, and an association with the proving of the faith through the medieval Inquisition. Dominicans followed the Augustinian Rule, possibly because this had been Dominic’s original affiliation, but also because new orders had been prohibited by the Fourth Lateran Council. The specific customs established in the 1220s led to the creation of an order. Like that of the Franciscans, there was a single head, a procurator-general of some sort, as well as provincial chapters; this was also the form for the military–religious orders.89 While called mendicants, the emphasis for Dominicans was on preaching and eventually on university study, rather than on the rejection of property. In many ways this Dominican way of life became the model for all other new mendicant, preaching, teaching orders – most notably the Carmelites and Austin Friars, as well as for the more orthodox “conventuals” among the Franciscans.90
The origins of the Franciscans are less precise, although thirteenth-century conversion stories are epitomized by that of Francis of Assisi (1181/2–226), their founder.91 Growing up in a wealthy bourgeois family in Assisi, Francis eventually decided against chivalry and the life of the knight to convert to the religious life. This conversion was not so different from earlier such conversions, but Francis’s was a much more dramatic tale. Renouncing his family and possession in the central square of his native town, stripping himself bare of even his fine clothing, Francis began teaching the Gospel, wandering from place to place, restoring churches, living without property as a beggar or day laborer, enjoining upon his followers never to save anything for the following day. His miraculous ability to discern the hidden resources saved by those followers and his growing popularity led him in 1209 to seek papal authorization from Innocent III (1198–216) for the preaching of his “little brothers.” Innocent III is often described by later historians as having by his authorization of Francis and his followers wisely co-opted a potentially heretical group.92 Encouraged to write a rule to be approved by the Pope, Francis’s third attempt was approved by Honorius III (1216–27) in 1223. Francis’s followers, like those of Dominic, gradually became a religious order.
Although the story of the conversion of Francis of Assisi is well known, tracing the early history of the Franciscans is more difficult because of early fractures among Francis and his followers about the notion of “apostolic poverty.”93 These early debates led to revised Vitae and suppressed earlier texts. Francis, moreover, seems to have been anticipated in some ways by earlier groups such as the Waldensians and the Humiliati, both of which had been given papal approval at least for a limited time.94 Many Franciscan communities had originally been communities of penitents, some of them subject to customs established for penitent women (called the Order of San Damiano) c. 1218 by Cardinal Hugolino, the future Pope Gregory IX (1227–41). This seems a deliberate obfuscation, given that Francis had settled his companion, Clare of Assisi (1194–253) at the church of San Damiano, where she and her nuns were strictly enclosed. Eventually a rule by Clare, the Forma Vitae was approved for her own community, which differed from both that of Francis and that of Hugolino.95 Clare maintained that her nuns should own no property. They had to do this at the cost of being enclosed and thus living on the proceeds of the begging of the brothers rather than begging themselves. This was maintained only until her death. Most of the Franciscans gradually came to be “conventuals” involved in the foundation of conventual houses located near cities and universities with their own studia. A legal fiction allowed the Franciscans, like the Dominicans, to own buildings, settle in communities, and build great hall churches like that of the Jacobins in Toulouse, for their preaching.96 As a variety of penitential groups came to be included under the Franciscan Order, some of the most radical practitioners of absolute poverty, including some (called Spirituals or fratricelli) inspired by Francis himself, were thrust out of the order and declared heretical.97
From the inception of mendicant orders grave doubts were expressed about the propriety of women’s preaching or begging, and women were not only actively discouraged from such a religious life, but increasingly enclosed and separated from contact with even their priests. The establishment of nuns’ choirs, grills, and screens to isolate the nuns from the celebration of mass often limited their ability to see the crucial moment of the elevation of the host.98 Perhaps in part because of this exclusion, it was religious women of the thirteenth century who orchestrated notions of a feast of Corpus Christi and increasingly revered the Eucharistic wafer as a relic of Christ, one that must be carefully protected.99 Concerns about enclosure, separation, and adequate income to avoid having to leave the cloister soon extended to all houses of nuns, and abbesses were somewhat hampered in their administrative tasks after Boniface VIII issued Periculoso, “On the Enclosure of Nuns,” in 1298 as part of his volume of church law, the Liber Sextus. Begging by religious women was forbidden, and there were limits on the admission of women over what a monastic endowment could support, but the enforcement of Periculoso remained limited until its reissue in 1263 by the Council of Trent.100
Finally, what was it like to live in medieval monastic and mendicant communities? While the Rule of Saint Benedict at first glance seems to cover every possibility, it was its flexibility about the local details of monastic life that would make it so popular over the centuries. There is abundant work on the liturgical practices, monastic customaries, and scriptoria for houses of monks and increasingly for houses of nuns as well; Barbara Rosenwein has discussed Western monks engaged in perpetual prayer and Alison Beach the collaboration of monks and nuns in scriptoria.101 Particularly in the enclosed atmosphere of the medieval nunnery, it must have been difficult for most nuns when one of their sisters received the gift of tears or had mystical experiences leaving her bedridden and in the care of the rest of the community, and many must have prized the quiet of a religious life without such saintly companions.102 The sister books and accounts of late medieval nuns, on the other hand, suggest the various artistic patronage and activities of such religious women and their secular patrons, whether sponsoring chapels or initiating pious practices, such as the use of the rosary or devotion to the Body and Blood of Christ, and there is considerable evidence not only for monks, but also for nuns, as artists, composers and copyists of music, and authors of monastic chronicles, or books for their community’s education.103 Recent work has suggested that the constant worries among abbesses to ensure that priests were available to provide for the Cura Monialium were mitigated to some extent by theories among some priests and monks that such care of nuns’ souls was not only an obligation, but an opportunity for salvation. Finally, in the accounts and account books for German and other nuns and in the survival of manuscripts and artifacts from their houses, we are beginning to realize that medieval nuns not only produced manuscripts and manuscript art, but important textiles, particularly for the altars of their own and other churches.104 In such communities of monks and nuns much attention was given to devotional innovations – to the celebration of particularly favored saints or particular times of the liturgical year, in windows and chapels, in dramas and liturgical innovations, including in music, and in meditations on particular art or relics, and even in special meals funded by patrons to celebrate anniversaries or significant moments in a monastery’s history.
Such monastic and mendicant communities were central institutions of the medieval Church. They served as missionaries converting the pagans, and as copyists preserving the legacy of the ancient world. Most importantly these communities provided places for men and women to pursue religious lives, whether as enclosed contemplatives or as active preachers, knights, inquisitors, and educators. Many religious communities offered specific social and religious services to members of the surrounding society – praying for the souls of the dead, caring for the sick or poor or lepers, educating the children of the laity, or preaching against heresy. While by the end of the Middle Ages the active life of the mendicant orders in the towns had become different from the prayer and contemplation of monks and nuns living in isolated communities, such distinctions between monastic and mendicant communities were a relatively late development in the history of medieval monasticism.
Notes
1 On such “pre-Christian” monasticism, see Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society; on Greek philosophical asceticism, see Long, Hellenistic Philosophy.
2 On ascetic women within early Christianity, see Clark, Women in the Early Church, and McNamara, A New Song.
3 A detailed and nuanced account is Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century, but see also Nelson, “Medieval Monasticism.” Such modern surveys as Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism, tend to recount that history in terms like those of medieval narratives such as Eberbach, Le Grand Exorde de Cîteaux.
4 See Constable, “The Interpretation of Mary and Martha.”
5 The Rule of Saint Benedict in English, trans. Fry, where ch. 1, p. 20, describes the four types of monks; see also Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims.
6 For details on such nuns, the standard account is McNamara, Sisters in Arms.
7 Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks.
8 On Gregorian reformers in this light, see McNamara, “Canossa and the Ungendering of the Public Man.”
9 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints.
10 Horn, The Plan of St Gall; Hales, The Roman House.
11 On liturgy, see, e.g., Boynton and Cochelin, eds, From Dead of Night to End of Day; on women’s communities, see Sorrentino, “In Houses of Nuns, in Houses of Canons.”
12 Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century; on increased clerical hegemony in central and later Middle Ages, see R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society.
13 Parisse, Les Nonnes au Moyen Age, provides the details.
14 Increasingly there was resistance to abbesses arrogating such duties – see, e.g., the issue of the abbess of las Huelgas, in Les Registres d’Innocent IV, ed. Berger, no. 589, to be discussed further in Berman, The White Nuns, forthcoming.
15 The duties of such officers are outlined in detail in such monastic customaries as Les “Ecclesiastica Officia” cisterciens du XIIe siècle, ed. Choisselet and Vernet.
16 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession.
17 Abbots’ lives are often the source for modern histories; on attitudes to nuns, see Berman, “The Labors of Hercules.”
18 See Oliva, The Convent and the Community, on making ends meet; for increasing property donations and other gifts because of the poverty of the nuns, see Berman, “Abbeys for Cistercian Nuns.”
19 On reading Cassian, see The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Fry; on such asceticism, see, e.g., The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, trans. Ward.
20 The most accessible account of new findings on the rule is still Knowles, “The Regula Magistri and the Rule of Saint Benedict”; The Dialogues of Gregory the Great Book Two: Saint Benedict, trans. Uhlfelder, sect. 33, is about Scholastica’s death.
21 Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 75–9.
22 On such monastic sibling pairs, see Schulenburg, Forgetful of their Sex, and, more recently, Griffiths, “Siblings and the Sexes.”
23 The Rule for Nuns of St Caesarius of Arles, ed. McCarthy.
24 On Irish monasticism, see Bitel, Isle of the Saints.
25 See Horn, The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael, and Brown, The Lindesfarne Gospels.
26 Fuhrmann, Irish Medieval Monasteries.
27 Wemple, Women in Frankish Society.
28 Certainly this is the account of the monks writing The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. Garmonsway.
29 Schulenburg, Forgetful of their Sex, pp. 144–54; “The Wandering Relics of Saint-Philibert,” in Herlihy, ed, The History of Feudalism, pp. 8–12.
30 Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity; on Brescia, see Wemple, “S. Salvatore/S. Giulia”; on Rome, see Hamilton, “Monastic Revival in Tenth Century Rome.”
31 This is the account of the Exordium Magnum (see Les “Ecclesiastica Officia” cisterciens du XIIe siècle), found in standard histories.
32 Hillebrandt, “Le Doyen à Cluny”; Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter.
33 Hallinger, Gorze-Kluny.
34 Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Coenobitism’ Reconsidered.”
35 Duby, “Le Budget de l’abbaye de Cluny.”
36 Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, pp. 338–57.
37 Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny.
38 Wischermann, Marcigny-sur-Loire.
39 Cartulaire de l’abbaye royale de Notre-Dame, ed. Grasilier; Cartulaire de l’abbaye du Ronceray d’Angers, ed. Marcegay; on La Trinity in Caen, see Chibnall, ed., Charters and Custumals of the Abbey of Holy Trinity Caen, ed. Chibnall, and Charters and Custumals of the Abbey of Holy Trinity Caen, part 2, ed. Walmsley.
40 Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism.
41 Milis, Angelic Monks and Earthly Men; Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham; on smaller communities being swallowed up, see Berman, The Cistercian Evolution.
42 Constable, Monastic Tithes.
43 On Cistercian ideals, see Lekai, The Cistercians, Ideal and Reality.
44 For instance, the early Grandmontines as described by Becquet, “La Première crise de l’Ordre de Grandmont.”
45 Conrad Rudolph, “The ‘Principal Founders’ and the Early Artistic Legislation of Cîteaux,” pp. 1–45.
46 Lackner, Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux.
47 On pastoral economy’s advantages for small groups, see Berman, The Cistercian Evolution, pp. 189–96.
48 See Miller, The Formation of a Medieval Church, and works by Caroline Walker Bynum, including Docere verbo et exemplo.
49 Lackner, Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux, passim.
50 As, for instance, Les “Ecclesiastica Officia” cisterciens du XIIe siècle.
51 Le Grand Cartulaire de la Sauve Majeure, ed. Higounet.
52 See Mundy, “Charity and Social Work in Toulouse,” or Berman, “Monastic Hospices in Southern France.”
53 On family conversions, see Cartulaire de l’abbaye cistercienne d’Obazine, ed. Barrière, for example, no. 103 (1150–9).
54 Regarding countesses of Flanders, for instance, see Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage.
55 Lackner, Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux; on Grandmontines, pp. 196–203; on Carthusians, pp. 203–14.
56 For enclosures, see Cartulaire de la Chartreuse de Bonnefoy, ed. Lemaître.
57 Cartulaire de l’abbaye de la Sainte-Trinité de Tiron, ed. Merlet.
58 See Carraz, L’Ordre du Temple; on disputes over tithes and pastures, see Berman, Medieval Agriculture, pp. 50–2; for nuns, see Berman, The Cistercian Evolution, pp. 193–5.
59 See, e.g., Venarde, ed., Robert of Arbrissel.
60 On Godric, see Reginald of Durham, Libellus de vita et miraculis S. Godrici.
61 On Pons, Kienzle, “The Tract on the Conversion of Pons of Léras,” and Berman, “The Life of Pons de Léras.”
62 A series of such conversions are described in Self and Society in Medieval France, ed. Benton; cf. The Life of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot.
63 See Elder, ed., The New Monastery, pp. 9–18.
64 On affiliations to Clairvaux, see Pacaut, “La Filiation clarevallienne.”
65 See Bondéelle-Souchier, “Les Moniales cisterciennes et leurs livres manuscripts,” and Barrière et al., eds, Cîteaux et les femmes; there is no gazetteer of women’s houses like Janauschek, Originum Cisterciensium, which lists all houses of monks, but the nuns’ houses tend to be included in van der Meer, ed., Atlas de l’Ordre cistercienne.
66 Berman, Medieval Agriculture, passim.
67 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 110–69, or its earlier journal version, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,” the latter republished in Berman, ed., Medieval Religion, pp. 20–48.
68 See discussion of the Charter of Charity in Martha Newman, The Boundaries of Charity, and Stock, The Implications of Literacy.
69 Berman, “Distinguishing between the Humble Peasant Lay-Brother and –Sister.”
70 This is the central argument of Berman, The Cistercian Evolution.
71 Berman, “Were There Twelfth-Century Cistercian Nuns?”
71 See Berman, “Beyond the Rule of Saint Benedict.”
73 De miraculis sanctae Mariae Laudenensis of Herman of Tournay, in Patrologia Latina (PL), ed. Migne, 156: 962–1018, col. 996.
74 Conner, “The Abbeys of Las Huelgas and Tart and their Filiations,” but see also Barrière, “Obazine, monastère double en Limousin.”
75 See n. 65 above.
76 McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess”; Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society, pp. 121–4, for discussion of those letters; see also Griffiths, “ ’Men’s Duty to Provide for Women’s Needs,’ ” repr. in Berman, ed., Medieval Religion, pp. 290–315.
77 Newman, Sister of Wisdom.
78 Griffiths, The Garden of Delights.
79 Elliott, Proving Woman; Mary of Oignies, Mother of Salvation, ed. Mulder-Bakker.
80 Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy.
81 Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade.
82 Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi.
83 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen.
84 Thouzellier, Hérésie et hérétiques.
85 See also Schulman, Where Troubadours were Bishops.
86 On Diana d’Andalo and Jordan of Saxony, see To Heaven with Diana!, trans. Vann.
87 Cartulaire de Notre-Dame de Prouille, ed. Guiraud, no. 1; on Dominican women more generally, see Lehmijoki-Gardner, Dominican Penitent Women.
88 Lindgren, Sensual Encounters; on sister books, see “Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen,” ed. König; “Der Nonne von Engeltal Büchlein von der Gnaden Uberlast,” ed. Schröder; “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen von Kirchberg bei Sulz Predigerordens,” ed. Roth; Das “St Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch,”; ed. Meyer; “Die Stiftung des Klosters Oetenbach,” ed. Zeller-Werdmüller and Bächtold; “Aufzeichnungen über das mystische Leben der Nonnen,” ed. Roth; Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töss beschrieben von Elsbet Stagel, ed. Vetter; “Les ‘Vitae sororum’ d’Unterlinden,” ed. Ancelet-Hustache; “Mystisches Leben in dem Dominikanerinnenkloster Weiler bei Eßlingen,” ed. Bihlmeyer.
89 See Riley-Smith, Hospitallers;, and Housley, ed., Knighthoods of Christ.
90 On mendicants in the university, see Courtenay, Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century, and Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order.
91 Brooke, The Image of Saint Francis.
92 See Moore, Pope Innocent III or Bolton, Innocent III.
93 Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order; Brooke, Early Franciscan Government.
94 Brasher, Women of the Humiliati; Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent; on the Cathar threat in Ialy, see Lansing, Power and Purity.
95 Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, 25–55, but see also Mueller, The Privilege of Poverty.
96 On Italian mendicant architecture and religion, see Thompson, Cities of God; on Dominican architecture more generally, see Sundt, “Mediocres domos et humiles habeant fratres nostri.”
97 Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans.
98 Bruzelius, “Hearing is Believing.” Wealthy houses could be exceptional; for Naples see Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples, and Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi, pp. 114–21.
99 Rubin, Corpus Christi.
100 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women.
101 Rosenwein, “Perpetual Prayer at Agaune,” and Beach, “Claustration and Collaboration.”
102 McNamara, The Ordeal of Community, has suggested that living in community with sisters or brothers not chosen by oneself would often have been difficult.
103 Bynum, Wonderful Blood; the collection of articles in Mews, ed. Listen, Daughter and Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose.
104 On art, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists; on chronicles, Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles; on textiles made by nuns, see the forthcoming work on heath monasteries by June Meacham.
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Further Reading
Recommended readings range from standard histories of monasticism telling a very traditional tale based on medieval monks’ own narratives, such as David Knowles, From Pachomius to Ignatius: A Study in the Constitutional History of the Religious Orders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), to the more innovative work of Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe, 1000–1150 (London: Macmillan, 1984), Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), and the works of Caroline Bynum and Giles Constable, all listed in the Bibliography above. For those who read French, Michel Parisse’s Les Nonnes au Moyen Age (Le Puy: Bonneton, 1983) is particularly valuable; Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Late Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), both provide interesting insights on monastic life and relics. On the mendicants, the most interesting studies are Lezlie Knox, Creating Clare of Assisi (Leiden: Brill, 2008), David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), and Rosalind B. Brooke’s new volume, The Image of St Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).