The High Medieval Era · 1098-1300 · Burgundy, then Europe
Cistercian Monasticism
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About This Movement
In 1098 a group of monks walked out of the great Burgundian abbey of Molesme because they thought Benedictine life had grown too comfortable — Cluny and the other rich houses above all. And settled in a marshy clearing called Cîteaux to keep the Rule of St Benedict as plainly as they could: bare churches, simple food, no elaborate liturgy, and their own hands in the fields. Within a generation the reform had a constitution, the Carta Caritatis, binding every daughter house to the mother house through annual visitation and a yearly general chapter, and after Bernard of Clairvaux arrived in 1113 the order spread across Europe at extraordinary speed. Much of the actual labour was done by lay brothers, the conversi, who took vows but lived a separate, largely manual life alongside the choir monks on farms called granges. The order never ended, and its writers — Bernard on the Song of Songs, Aelred of Rievaulx on friendship — stayed among the most-read spiritual authors of the Latin West for centuries afterward.
Sources
- Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Citeaux (ed./trans. Chrysogonus Waddell, Studia et Documenta 9, 1999) (primary) — Latin/English facing texts of Exordium Parvum, Exordium Cistercii, Carta Caritatis. The authenticity and dating of the founding narratives is contested — see Constance Berman's work below.
- Pauline Matarasso (trans.), The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (Penguin Classics, 1993) (primary) — Bernard's letters, Song of Songs sermons, the Apologia, William of St Thierry, Vita Prima selections, exemplary stories - Bernard's voice plus communal texture in one in-print volume.
- Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (trans. Braceland, Cistercian Fathers 5); with Walter Daniel, Life of Aelred (primary) — The Life gives an abbot seen up close by his own monk.
- Chrysogonus Waddell (ed.), Cistercian Lay Brothers: Twelfth-Century Usages, with Related Texts (Studia et Documenta 10, 2000) (primary) — The conversi's regulated world — the order's ordinary, manual-labor half, made concrete.
- Janet Burton & Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Boydell, 2011) (secondary) — Current standard survey. Read with Constance Berman, The Cistercian Evolution (2000), which argues the founding documents are later constructions.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 4 'Monastic and religious orders, c.1100-c.1350' (B. P. McGuire) (reference)