Description
Book SynopsisIn Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century. Focusing on the county of Champagne in France, Lester reconstructs the history of the women's religious movement and its institutionalization within the Cistercian order.
The common picture of the early Cistercian order is that it was unreceptive to religious women. Male Cistercian leaders often avoided institutional oversight of communities of nuns, preferring instead to cultivate informal relationships of spiritual advice and guidance with religious women. As a result, scholars believed that women who wished to live a life of service and poverty were more likely to join one of the other reforming orders rather than the Cistercians. As Lester shows, however, this picture is deeply flawed. Between 1220 and 1240 the Cistercian order incorporated small independent communities
Trade Review
Anne Lester's Creating Cistercian Nuns is a wonderful achievement. This book reconstructs ground-up a whole new socioreligious landscape in and around the country of Champagne while also contributing broadly to a new and evolving narrative of women's religious life in the thirteenth century. Lester's craft in this first monograph is remarkably mature, an ability to construct landscape and narrative out of the raw stuff of documentary records and to do so in pleasing prose.
-- John Van Engen * Speculum *
Lester examines the transition and transformation of informal communities of religious women living the apostolic life—characterized by charity, penitential piety, and poverty—into organized communities of Cistercian nuns after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).... The author concentrates on Champagne, where some twenty Cistercian convents were established in the 13th century, and her impressive analysis of unpublished archival sources offers new perspectives on the dynamics of religious reform and the monastic life after 1215.
* Choice *
The book will be a welcome addition to the academic study of monastic and church history and gender studies.
-- Mary Forman * ABR *
With Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne Lester has made a vital contribution to our understanding of the deeply nuanced relationship between the thirteenth-century women's religious movement in Champagne and the apparatus of the Cistercian order. It fills several important lacunae and reconfigures the historiography. This is a book that will be read for some time to come.
-- David Winter * Canadian Journal of History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
On Currencies, Names, and Transcriptions
List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
Introduction: Written Fragments and Living Parts
1. Concerning Certain Women: The Women's Religious Movement in Champagne
2. Cities of Refuge: The Social World of Religious Women
3. Under the Religious Life: Reform and the Cistercian Order
4. The Bonds of Charity: The Special Cares of Cistercian Nuns
5. One and the Same Passion: Convents and Crusaders
6. A Space Apart: Gender and Administration in a New Social Landscape
Epilogue: A Deplorable and Dangerous State: Crisis, Consolidation, and Collapse
Appendix: Cistercian Convents and Domus-Dei of Champagne
Bibliography
Index
