Reviewed by: The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys for Women in Medieval France by Constance Hoffman Berman Bruce L. Venarde The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys for Women in Medieval France. By Constance Hoffman Berman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 345. $89.95. ISBN 9780812250107.) With her excellent The White Nuns, Constance Hoffman Berman completes a trilogy of revisionist books on medieval Cistercians. Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians (1986), conclusively demonstrated that the standard account of early Cistercians as rural pioneers who settled in and cleared waste wilderness is a myth; The Cistercian Evolution (2000) showed that the Cistercian Order was not a spontaneous institution fully formed in its first decades but was invented gradually across the twelfth century. Here Berman expands upon her article-length work about Cistercian women going back thirty years. Part I asks, "Were There Cistercian Nuns in Medieval Europe?" The answer, debunking more myths of Cistercian history and historiography and looking across Europe, is a resounding "Yes." Berman's examination of official Cistercian statutes and evidence ranging from papal bulls to the nuns' own records means the burden of proof will hereafter be on scholars whose answers to the question have been "Maybe" or even "No." Part II, [End Page 620] almost four times as long, tightens the geographical focus. It decisively demonstrates the "economic success" (p. xi) of Cistercian nunneries in the Archdiocese of Sens—which reached from Champagne in the east to the Ile-de-France in the north and as far west as Chartrain in the west and the middle Loire Valley in the south—from the late twelfth to late thirteenth centuries. Berman examines some 3,000 charters, about half of them published, the others housed in fifteen repositories in four countries. In addition, an account book of ca. 1250 from the abbey of Maubuisson is beautifully analyzed. These documents demonstrate that patrons from bourgeois men and women to Blanche of Castile worked patiently and painstakingly, alone and in concert, to build and endow houses for Cistercian nuns. Subsequently, there is a repeated pattern in which, to quote the description of Cour-Notre-Dame, "charters … show abbesses acquiring lands at a variety of places and carefully consolidating these acquisitions into larger holdings" (p. 208). Cistercian nuns, then, relied on immense entrepreneurial skills to create agricultural and viticultural conglomerates, amass urban patrimonies, and acquire ownership and rights to mills and the industries they underpinned. The emphasis varied according to locale: houses in Champagne, for example, concentrated on vineyards, whereas Saint-Antoine-des-Champs, just outside the twelfth-century walls of Paris, owned scores of properties in the city. In addition to the general conclusions of Parts I and II that "Cistercian nuns were part of the order, and … they were rarely poor or ephemeral" (p. 30), Berman finds "considerable evidence about the activities of the great feudal dominae … of the thirteenth century, who were founders, patrons, and even occasionally abbesses of these communities of nuns" and furthermore that the patrons of Cistercian nuns considered these women's prayers highly effective (p. 223). Part III, "Comparisons and Conclusions," is comprised of one brief chapter, "Cistercian Nuns and Their Predecessors." Here Berman juxtaposes thirteenth-century Cistercian nuns to twelfth-century women's monastic federations, finding a great deal of similarity in both management of properties and recruitment of nuns. In conclusion, Berman notes that all too often, modern historians have taken at face value frequently misogynist medieval accounts of nuns, Cistercian and otherwise. That points to the immense value of this study: it examines thousands of records that show what these women actually did, as opposed to what men said they did (or didn't do). If you are interested in medieval monasticism, the Cistercian Order, or medieval women in general, please read The White Nuns. This long-awaited book does not disappoint. [End Page 621] Bruce L. Venarde University of Pittsburgh Copyright © 2021 The Catholic University of America Press
Read full abstract
Dec 23, 2022
Rabeh Khalfaoui + 2
Open Access