Scholarship and Activism at Cîteaux in the Age of Innocent III

Abstract

This study considers the embrace of academic theology at Cîteaux, mother house of the Cistercian Order, in the early decades of the thirteenth century. Scholars have traditionally portrayed the Cistercians as distrustful of the scholastic enterprise. The manuscript evidence from Cîteaux suggests, however, that by around 1200 the white monks had established significant contacts with the schools. Recruited to evangelize among heretics, Jews, and the neglected laity during Innocent III’s pontificate, they began to copy, purchase, or receive as donations glossed Bibles, scholarly preacher’s aids, academic sermon anthologies, and collections of scholastic quaestiones. The monks of Cîteaux made practical use of these works in religious confrontation and pastoral care. In the age of Innocent III the Cistercians experimented with academic study as a foundation for the sort of active monastic vocation that would soon find mature expression among the mendicant orders.