Constance H. Berman

Clearly the result of decades' worth of archival work, The White Nuns will likely be the go-to reference for those working on Cistercian women's monasticism in the thirteenth century. Constance Berman has brought together a great mass of material which will no doubt fuel further work in the area. However, in many ways this book reads like an appendix to her earlier The Cistercian Evolution, a rather disjointed and argument-free corpus of evidence which serves to prop up part of that book's thesis but which fails to cohere on its own.… (meer)

This is a collection of more than 60 documents, translated from the original Latin or Old French, which relate to the history of Cistercian nuns and their (female) patrons in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Berman provides an introduction for each collection of documents, contextualising them both in the history and the historiography, though perhaps some more thorough footnoting would have been useful. That it's in the vernacular probably argues against the use of this volume in graduate classes, and it's likely too advanced for beginner undergrad classes, but it would probably be highly useful in upper level undergrad classes.… (meer)

Berman's book challenges the received wisdom about the foundation of the Cistercian order. Instead of an early foundation, swift expansion by means of a process called 'apostolic gestation', and a centrally organised, male leadership, Berman argues that the surviving sources tell a much different tale—of a later foundation, expansion by absorption of loose monastic networks which already existed, and an order which had active and independent-minded female members.

I found Berman's thesis quite plausible, especially when there is documentation which she can cite to back up her theories. However, there are aspects of Cistercian development which are not well documented, and which can only be inferred; while Berman's inferences often seem the most plausible, in the absence of any evidence there must of necessity be a question mark next to any of her conclusions. This is also not a book for a layperson, or at least someone who does not already have a keen interest in medieval monasticism, Cistercians and agriculture—there are some rather obscure agricultural terms, for instance, which are not defined, and Berman takes some academic debates as understood. Nonetheless, a very interesting and scholarly work.… (meer)