The Cistercians and the Glossa Ordinaria

Abstract

The Catholic Historical Review VOL. LXXXVIAPRIL, 2000No. 2 THE CISTERCIANS AND THE GLOSSA ORDINARIA BY Constance B. Bouchard* The intellectual Renaissance of the twelfth century is usually seen as composed of two distinct strands. One strand was made up of the monastic "love of learning," to use Jean Leclercq's phrase, most commonly presented as devoted almost entirely to a reading and contemplation steeped in traditions that went back to the early Middle Ages. The Cistercians, the major new monastic order of the twelfth century, may have differed from the black monks in many respects, including a greater emphasis on spiritual experience in their theology, but they were still Benedictines, and their overall approach to study and scholarship is assumed to have been fully within a traditional framework.1 The other strand in this paradigm, in contrast, was composed of the new "scholastic"learning of the schools and the emerging universities,where texts were taken apart, critically analyzed, and discussed with the use of logic.2 It is to these schools of secular clergy, not to the monasteries, "Dr. Bouchard is a professor of history in the University ofAkron. She presented a preliminary version of this paper at the Thirty-second International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamzoo, in May, 1997. She acknowledges the help given her by Professors Karlfried Froehlich ofPrinceton Theological Seminary and E.Ann Matter of the University of Pennsylvania when she was beginning her study of the glossa ordinaria. Preliminary research was made possible by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a return trip to Troyes was funded by the University ofAkron Faculty Research Committee. Jean Leclercq, The Love ofLearning and the Desirefor God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 1961). David Knowles, The Monastic Order in Englandfrom the Time ofSt. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940-1216, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 211-212. Jean Leclercq, François Vandenbroucke, and Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality ofthe MiddleAges ("A History of Christian Spirituality,"Vol. 2 [New York, 1968]), pp. 187-242. M.-D. 183 184THE CISTERCIANS AND THE GLOSSA ORDINARIA that scholars have attributed the development in the middle of the twelfth century of the extensive commentaries on and analyses of the Bible, written in its margins and between its lines, which have collectively become known as the glossa ordinaria. This article will challenge this paradigm, which has been so widely accepted for over a generation that its underlying assumptions have never been re-examined.3 As I shall argue here, principally on the basis of glossed biblical manuscripts of the twelfth century, the history of the first fifty years of the glossa ordinaria indicates that the two main strands within twelfth-century thought, the monastic and the scholastic , were not as distinct as has often been thought. Specifically, I shall demonstrate that although the glossed books of the Bible in the early twelfth century were originally a product of the schools, much of their development and dissemination was due to the monks of the Cistercian order. And, even more importantly, the study of the glossa and the Cistercians together provides new insights into the intellectual advances of the twelfth century. Some preliminary comments on the nature of the glossa ordinaria are necessary. The idea of writing commentaries on books of the Bible is, of course, a very old one. In the West,Augustine's commentaries on a number of different books both laid the basis for much medieval theology and provided a model on which later commentators could develop their own exegesis. Commentaries by Origen and Gregory the Great on certain books of the Bible were also influential. Bede especially continued this tradition, three centuries after Augustine, by writing a number of his own commentaries on books of the Bible. By the Carolingian period , scholars such as Hrabanus Maurus were creating biblical comChenu , Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans.Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago, 1968), pp. 270-309. 5A new biography of the Cistercians' most influential leader states categorically that"he had no affinity with Scholasticism"; Adriaan H. Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1996), p. 15.A similar assumption...