ABSTRACT
The Cistercian Order was the most successful of the new reform monastic orders of the twelfth century, but its early history has been obscured by a tendency to read back its thirteenth-century practices on to its twelfth-century origins. The one exception to this has been the history of its women, who were excluded altogether from that earliest history. Indeed, it has been a truism in the history of medieval religious orders that the Cistercians only admitted women late in the twelfth century and then under considerable outside pressure. This view has posited a twelfth-century “Golden Age” when it had been possible for the abbots of the Order of Cîteaux to avoid contact with women totally. Only later did the floodgates burst open and a great wave of women wishing to be Cistercians sweep past abbots powerless to resist them. This chapter reassesses narrative accounts, juridical arguments, and charter evidence to show that assertions about the absence of any twelfth-century Cistercian nuns are not only incorrect, but are based on mistaken notions of how the early Cistercian Order developed, as well as on a biased reading of the evidence, including a double standard for proof of Cistercian status-made much higher for women’s houses than for men’s. In fact, evidence from which it has been argued that nuns were only imitating the Cistercian Order’s practices in the twelfth century contains exactly the same language, which when used to describe men’s houses has been deemed to show that they were Cistercian. If approached in a gender-neutral way, the evidence shows that abbeys of Cistercian women appeared as early as those for the Order’s men. Formal criteria for incorporation of women’s houses into the Order in the thirteenth century, moreover, are irrelevant to a twelfth-century situation in which only gradually did most communities of monks or nuns eventually identified as Cistercian come to be part of the newly developing institution. The argument in this chapter was extended from beyond the case of nuns in Constance Hoffman Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-century Europe (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); it was originally published in a slightly longer form in Church History 68 (1999):824-64.
