Past Models and Contemporary Concerns: the Foundation and Growth of the Cistercian Order

Abstract

Of all the medieval monastic orders the Cistercian has undoubtedly received the most attention from historians, and this engagement with the White Monks shows no sign of abating. In the words of David Robinson in his recent volume on the Cistercian abbeys of Wales, ‘to turn one’s back on the subject, even for a moment, is to lose the plot’. Current scholarship continues to be concerned with a range of issues. However, much of the most controversial scholarship has centred on the dating of key Cistercian documents: the narratives of the origins of Citeaux, that is, the Exordium Parvum and the Exordium Cistercii, as well as various versions of the Cistercian constitution, the Carta Caritatis, and successive capitula, that is, the pronouncements of the Annual General Chapter. The debate is not new. For over seventy years scholars, including in an English context Dom David Knowles, have sought to unravel the textual and manuscript complexities of the documents relating to the foundation and growth of the mother house itself and of the order. In the last six years two significant contributions to this area of scholarship have appeared, the first more controversial than the second. First, Constance Berman argued that the key Cistercian documents were inventions of the latter part of the twelfth century, designed to create a past for the Cistercian order, an organization which, she argues, did not exist before the mid-twelfth century.