Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks: The Sacramental Imagination of Engelhard of Langheim. By Martha Newman

Abstract

Engelhard of Langheim, the Cistercian monk, may not be a household name—all the more reason then to welcome Martha Newman’s monograph on what she calls Engelhard’s ‘sacramental imagination’, as vividly displayed in the collection of stories he wrote in the late twelfth century for the community of Franconian nuns of Wechterswinkel (a community formally recognized as Cistercian in the early thirteenth century). These are stories which remind us that, strident and powerful though it was, St Bernard’s was but one of the many Cistercian voices to be heard within twelfth-century cloisters. The collection is notable not only for being ‘the earliest extant text that a Cistercian monk dedicated to Cistercian nuns’ (p. 2) but also for the particularities of Engelhard’s imagination. Engelhard confines himself to stories of events he has himself seen or of which he had first-hand knowledge (‘I wrote nothing for which I either did not give or could not give witnesses’, p. 65), but this hardly proves a limitation; Cistercian chapters provided plentiful times when stories could be collected, swapped, and passed on, and it is clear Engelhard knew how to keep his ear to the ground. It is also clear that there were times when, despite his protestations, he could not resist the odd embellishment, since, as he himself admits, ‘this is allowed to writers’ (p. 62).