The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (review)

REVIEWS Constance Hoffman Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Inven- tion of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 2000) xxiv + 382 pp.; 49 b/w illustra- tions; 5 appendices. The Cistercian Order represents the most amazing success story of twelfth-century Europe, and perhaps of the entire history of monasti- cism. As such, it has attracted the scholarly attention of generations of academics, who interpret the early history of the Order generally as follows. Fostered by the general milieu of religious reform and by the charismatic writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, the Order grew from humble beginnings at Citeaux into a network of abbeys radiating out- ward from Burgundy with astonishing speed. New monasteries were founded by a process called “apostolic gestation,” whereby a small group of monks leave the mother house to found the daughter house, and were characteristically located in remote places, according to the ideal of the “desert.” In her monograph The Cistercian Evolution, how- ever, Constance Hoffman Berman gives a significantly different inter- pretation to the received tradition of the early Cistercian Order. Her main thesis is that the Order was officially established in the third quarter of the twelfth century, and not the first quarter. Its main form of propagation, moreover, was not “apostolic gestation,” but rather the incorporation of existing religious communities. She also challenges the traditional view that there were no Cistercian nuns in the twelfth century. In fact, her research into this particular question revealed fea- tures in the sources that were irreconcilable with the traditional history of the Cistercian Order as a whole. Attention to primary sources—in- cluding narrative accounts, charters and other documents—and ar- chaeological evidence governs the focus of her research, and her insis- tence on always returning to the manuscript evidence helps reveal the inadequacy of the traditional view of Cistercian beginnings. The monograph is divided into five chapters, the last of which serves as a conclusion of her argument and a reiteration of her thesis that the Cistercian Order did not emerge as an organized monastic order until the third quarter of the twelfth century. Chapter 1 covers the debate over the early narrative sources and examines architectural remains, particularly for women’s abbeys, which do not usually leave behind as

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