Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne, edited by Anne E. Lester

Abstract

Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women 's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne, edited by Anne E. Lester. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2011. xxiv, 261 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). With appearance of Anne E. Lester's Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne, project to re-frame dominant (and largely gender-blind) narrative of Cistercian order's foundations is substantially advanced. Lester's study traces development of female religious communities in Champenois heartland of reformed Benedictine movement from their informal beginnings in early decades of 1200s through their re-formation and institutionalization along Cistercian lines in mid-century. She has focused, for most part, on crucial fifty years which bracket well-known--and deeply problematic--1228 Cistercian ban on establishment of new female houses. As Lester argues, prohibition is problematic precisely because it was never fully implemented or enforced. Thus, it has served primarily to buttress assumption that White Monks had a fraught relationship with mulieres religiosae who aspired to join their ranks. It has also, as Lester demonstrates, contributed to general shape of historiography of early Cistercian order. Indeed, continued proliferation of female vocations after 1228 was a near-insoluble puzzle for scholars who studied order's earliest expression without benefit of a gender analysis. It caused a number of (otherwise impeccable) historians to assert misshapen narratives in an attempt to reconcile seemingly refractory data: prohibition on one hand, proliferation on other. For instance, both Joseph Greven and Herbert Grundmann, scholars whose work serves as a point of departure for Lester, attempted to square circle by insisting that, after 1228 ban, most women turned to other institutional outlets to satisfy their spiritual aspirations. Both scholars argued that women's religious movement was almost globally reformed within ranks of fledgling mendicant orders and beguine movement. As Lester notes, however, despite this claim, Grundmann was ultimately forced to concede that the relationship of Cistercian order to women's houses [has] never been fully clarified. In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Lester has gone a long way towards clarifying relationship that bedeviled Grundmann (as well as more recent scholars writing in Grundmann tradition). Applying Peter Brown's notion of micro-Christendoms to culture of thirteenth-century church, Professor Lester has asserted that women's religious movement of twelfth and thirteenth centuries was subject to a series of distinct micro-reforms (p. 12) rather than wholesale absorption into ranks of a single order or movement. Thus, previously informal groupings of female penitents in Italy were reinvented as Poor Clares, while German women's communities were largely integrated into regionally ascendant Dominican culture of era. According to Lester, women of central France, subject to immense gravitational force exerted by local Bernardine culture, developed a penitential piety that accorded strongly with that of White Monks. …