The Cistercian Order In Medieval Europe

Author : Emilia Jamroziak
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317341899
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe written by Emilia Jamroziak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe offers an accessible and engaging history of the Order from its beginnings in the twelfth century through to the early sixteenth century. Unlike most other existing volumes on this subject it gives a nuanced analysis of the late medieval Cistercian experience as well as the early years of the Order. Jamroziak argues that the story of the Cistercian Order in the Middle Ages was not one of a ‘Golden Age’ followed by decline, nor was the true ‘Cistercian spirit’ exclusively embedded in the early texts to remain unchanged for centuries. Instead she shows how the Order functioned and changed over time as an international organisation, held together by a novel 'management system'; from Estonia in the east to Portugal in the west, and from Norway to Italy. The ability to adapt and respond to these very different social and economic conditions is what made the Cistercians so successful. This book draws upon a wide range of primary sources, as well as scholarly literature in several languages, to explore the following key areas: the degree of centralisation versus local specificity how much the contact between monastic communities and lay people changed over time how the concept of reform was central to the Medieval history of the Cistercian Order This book will appeal to anyone interested in Medieval history and the Medieval Church more generally as well as those with a particular interest in monasticism.

Author : Janet E. Burton
Publisher : Boydell Press
ISBN 13 : 184383667X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cistercians in the Middle Ages written by Janet E. Burton and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cistercians (White Monks) were the most successful monastic experiment to emerge from the tumultuous intellectual and religious fervour of the 11th and 12th centuries. This book seeks to explore the phenomenon that was the Cistercian Order.

Author : Constance Hoffman Berman
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812200799
Total Pages : 407 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cistercian Evolution written by Constance Hoffman Berman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to the received history, the Cistercian order was founded in Cîteaux, France, in 1098 by a group of Benedictine monks who wished for a stricter community. They sought a monastic life that called for extreme asceticism, rejection of feudal revenues, and manual labor for monks. Their third leader, Stephen Harding, issued a constitution, the Carta Caritatis, that called for the uniformity of custom in all Cistercian monasteries and the establishment of an annual general chapter meeting at Cîteaux. The Cistercian order grew phenomenally in the mid-twelfth century, reaching beyond France to Portugal in the west, Sweden in the north, and the eastern Mediterranean, ostensibly through a process of apostolic gestation, whereby members of a motherhouse would go forth to establish a new house. The abbey at Clairvaux, founded by Bernard in 1115, was alone responsible for founding 68 of the 338 Cistercian abbeys in existence by 1153. But this well-established view of a centrally organized order whose founders envisioned the shape and form of a religious order at its prime is not borne out in the historical record. Through an investigation of early Cistercian documents, Constance Hoffman Berman proves that no reliable reference to Stephen's Carta Caritatis appears before the mid-twelfth century, and that the document is more likely to date from 1165 than from 1119. The implications of this fact are profound. Instead of being a charter by which more than 300 Cistercian houses were set up by a central authority, the document becomes a means of bringing under centralized administrative control a large number of loosely affiliated and already existing monastic houses of monks as well as nuns who shared Cistercian customs. The likely reason for this administrative structuring was to check the influence of the overdominant house of Clairvaux, which threatened the authority of Cîteaux through Bernard's highly successful creation of new monastic communities. For centuries the growth of the Cistercian order has been presented as a spontaneous spirituality that swept western Europe through the power of the first house at Cîteaux. Berman suggests instead that the creation of the religious order was a collaborative activity, less driven by centralized institutions; its formation was intended to solve practical problems about monastic administration. With the publication of The Cistercian Evolution, for the first time the mechanisms are revealed by which the monks of Cîteaux reshaped fact to build and administer one of the most powerful and influential religious orders of the Middle Ages.

Author : Mette Birkedal Bruun
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107001315
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order written by Mette Birkedal Bruun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the Order's figureheads, practical life and spiritual horizon, and its contribution to medieval Europe's religious, cultural and political climate.

Author : Constance Hoffman Berman
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812295080
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The White Nuns written by Constance Hoffman Berman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-04-04 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern studies of the religious reform movement of the central Middle Ages have often relied on contemporary accounts penned by Cistercian monks, who routinely exaggerated the importance of their own institutions while paying scant attention to the remarkable expansion of abbeys of Cistercian women. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Constance Hoffman Berman contends, there were more houses of Cistercian nuns across Europe than of monks. In The White Nuns, she charts the stages in the nuns' gradual acceptance by the abbots of the Cistercian Order's General Chapter and describes the expansion of the nuns' communities and their adaptation to a variety of economic circumstances in France and throughout Europe. While some sought contemplative lives of prayer, the ambition of many of these religious women was to serve the poor, the sick, and the elderly. Focusing in particular on Cistercian nuns' abbeys founded between 1190 and 1250 in the northern French archdiocese of Sens, Berman reveals the frequency with which communities of Cistercian nuns were founded by rich and powerful women, including Queen Blanche of Castile, heiresses Countess Matilda of Courtenay and Countess Isabelle of Chartres, and esteemed ladies such as Agnes of Cressonessart. She shows how these founders and early patrons assisted early abbesses, nuns, and lay sisters by using written documents to secure rights and create endowments, and it is on the records of their considerable economic achievements that she centers her analysis. The White Nuns considers Cistercian women and the women who were their patrons in a clear-eyed reading of narrative texts in their contexts. It challenges conventional scholarship that accepts the words of medieval monastic writers as literal truth, as if they were written without rhetorical skill, bias, or self-interest. In its identification of long-accepted misogynies, its search for their origins, and its struggle to reject such misreadings, The White Nuns provides a robust model for historians writing against received traditions.

Author : James G. Clark
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1843839733
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Benedictines in the Middle Ages written by James G. Clark and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The men and women that followed the 6th-century customs of Benedict of Nursia (c.480-c.547) formed the most enduring, influential, numerous and widespread religious order of the Latin Middle Ages. This text follows the Benedictine Order over 11 centuries, from their early diaspora to the challenge of continental reformation.

Author : Konrad (Abbot of Eberbach)
Publisher : Liturgical Press
ISBN 13 : 0879071729
Total Pages : 649 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Beginning of Cîteaux written by Konrad (Abbot of Eberbach) and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the closing decades of the twelfth century the Cistercian Order found itself in a world rather different from the one in which it had been founded and began to thrive. The Order was justifiably proud of its achievements and unparalleled diffusion across Europe. It had become an important ecclesiastical and economic power in Europe and developed an institutional structure meant to sustain a large, widespread organization. Yet it had lost its influential spokesman, Bernard of Clairvaux, and as the century drew to a close, religious sensibilities were changing. The new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and the impulses they embodied, were to shift the center of gravity in Christian religious life for centuries to come.

Author : Stephen Tobin
Publisher : Overlook Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cistercians written by Stephen Tobin and published by Overlook Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Throughout Europe, some of the most arresting sites are Cistercian monasteries, where even the most jaded travelers are bewitched by their breathtaking beauty and simplicity. This stunningly photographed architectural study is the most complete visual record available. The feeling of serenity this architecture evokes pervades every cloister, refectory and chapter house with an almost magical sense of harmony." "Stephen Tobin gives a detailed and insightful account of the founding and development of the Cistercian Order, which swept across Europe in the twelfth century. His discussion of architectural practice and the precepts of design behind these enduring monasteries is invaluable; maps covering all of Europe, instructive tables and over too magnificent photographs detail all the male abbeys founded during the Middle Ages, highlighting their style and accessibility. An appendix provides useful information on those converted into hotels, guest houses or restaurants."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Martha G. Newman
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812252586
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks written by Martha G. Newman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period. In analyzing Engelhard's stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman's study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.

Author : Constance H Berman
Publisher : Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN 13 : 1580445179
Total Pages : 147 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women and Monasticism in Medieval Europe written by Constance H Berman and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2002-09-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of documents, translated primarily from medieval Latin but occasionally from Old French, that shows how religious women and their patrons managed resources to make monastic communities - particularly a variety of Cistercian communities - work. The records help us reconstruct how nuns and abbesses of Cistercian communities in the thirteenth century organized and kept records, managed their properties, responded to attempts at usurpation, and balanced their lives between devotional practices, which were part of their cloistered world, and family and social responsibilities beyond the convent walls.