SOURCE: Berman, Constance H. “Introduction: Religious Women and Religious Reform in the High Middle Ages, with an Emphasis on Cistercian Nuns.” In Women and Monasticism in Medieval Europe: Sisters and Patrons of the Cistercian Reform, edited by Constance H. Berman, pp. 1-14. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications and The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages, 2002.

[In the following essay, Berman provides an overview of the history of women's religious communities. Parenthetical numerical references in the text refer to documents presented in Berman's edition.]

Women played a role in the history of monasticism from its origins in early Christianity. Early medieval communities of nuns were often “double monasteries”—women's houses and an attached men's house—and they were frequently ruled by a powerful abbess who came from a noble or royal family. However, many of these communities were destroyed in Viking invasions of Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries. In England, with the “monastic reform” movement of the eleventh century, communities of nuns often were replaced by houses of monks. While double monasteries, in this particular and full sense, generally are seen as institutions of the early Middle Ages, any community of nuns must be a double monastery in some respects, being dependent on at least one male to be its priest—since no woman could administer the sacraments or lead all the services. After a.d. 1000 new experiments in reform monastic life again included monastic communities not segregated by sex. Many of these new foundations may have been family monasteries to which priests and their wives retired in the face of strictures against clerical marriage during the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century. As some forms of monasticism reached into the world and provided “social services,” some of the new communities staffed the hospitals that began to undertake some of the activities formerly performed by wives of priests.

The history of monastic women's role in the great reform movements of the High Middle Ages is only beginning to be written. We now believe that women were much more efficient at managing their properties than once was thought, and that many houses of nuns were in fact not poor. There has been considerable change in our theoretical approaches to nuns' acquisition and management of property—the topics on which the documents of practice throw most light. But this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of new thinking about religious women, the efficacy of their prayers, the favor which their houses were shown, and the strictness of their enclosure.

Religious women's history during the High Middle Ages has been neglected because it was assumed that during what was characterized by Marc Bloch as a Second Feudal Age there had been a decline in the numbers of cloistered religious women. Older scholarship and work on monastic records seemed to confirm this. Documents from male houses certainly predominate in the materials published over the last century by local history societies. However, this reflects editorial and social bias, not the reality of what has been preserved (or of the medieval situations). There are many more documents about women and women's houses than is apparent at first glance.

Charters preserved for monastic communities of women provide a good starting place for elucidating the medieval history of religious women. Charters are private documents that began to appear in the early Middle Ages; they record legal agreements including gifts, sales, arbitrated settlements, and agreements about property, mostly of land conveyances between religious communities or other ecclesiastics and their neighbors. Some record transactions made between two monastic communities, but more often they record interactions between such communities and their secular neighbors. They tend to result from a specific incident—when religious houses are founded, when a patron dies and leaves property to that community in expectation of prayers, or because of a dispute that both sides attempted to resolve. These types of documents survive in relatively large numbers for the Middle Ages because they were written on parchment, which in comparison to paper is virtually indestructible, and because they often were copied into parchment books of charters, called cartularies. Most were written in Latin rather than the emerging vernacular languages, but often there are vernacular intrusions. Because they incorporate legalese, often in shortened form, they sometimes are virtually impossible to understand, but the greatest barrier to their use is that they can be excessively boring. Large numbers of them must be read through to extract bits of interesting evidence. However, most were recorded for the internal needs of religious communities and so have relatively less self-interest in their rhetorical presentation than we might find if, for instance, there were more autobiographies or chronicles from the time. In fact, for much of what we can know about medieval religious women, they are all that we have. I have chosen a sample of the more interesting ones.

We have charters relating directly to women's houses: their founding, their subsequent endowment, their external relations, their governance. Charters that do not seem to talk of a nunnery, or have been produced for it, still may tell us much about women's houses. Indeed, the archives for men's houses often include references to houses of nuns—sometimes such references to nearby women's houses are the only evidence we have for short-lived communities of nuns. The archives for men's houses show that women could be important patrons of monks; thus women's activities can be found among the “men's sources,” and much can be learned about women and monasticism even from the published materials on men's houses.

But it is important to realize that the omission of nuns from standard histories in the past is not just a story of unpublished archives or too much reliance on medieval chroniclers. We should not ignore the fact that there are deeper reasons for the relative neglect of women's houses and nuns in the tale of eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic life and reform. Nowhere is this more obvious than with regard to the Cistercians.

The most famous reform Order of the twelfth century was that of the monks of Cîteaux, who were called Cistercians. These reformers often are described as having originated in a group splitting off from an earlier reform community at Molesme, who left there to pursue lives in harsher, more austere circumstances. Those secessionists moved to the site of what would become a new monastery at Cîteaux, citing as their reason for departure the lack of rigor with which the reform monastic life was practiced at Molesme. This is probably a justification developed out of hindsight, for there had been frequent foundations of satellite priories from Molesme. Unlike Cîteaux, most of those priories did not break away from the mother-abbey.

The first thing that most people know about the Cistercians is that their leader in the mid-twelfth century was Bernard of Clairvaux (died 1153, canonized in 1174). But Cistercian historians usually tell us that it was not Bernard who founded the first house of their practice. He was instead an adult convert to the religious life, whose powerful intellect and charismatic preaching led to the expansion of a congregation of houses under the control of his own Clairvaux. Only later would other houses associated with Cîteaux gradually coalesce into a Cistercian Order. By the beginning of the thirteenth century the Cistercians would be held up as the model of a new phenomenon, the religious Order, an “umbrella group” of individual abbeys. These individual abbeys were granted certain exemptions from local episcopal rule in return for establishing a regularized practice and undertaking a certain amount of “self-policing” in the form of regular internal visitation, to replace visitation and dispute resolution by bishops. Cistercians were undoubtedly important in the twelfth century, but we are beginning to question the pious platitudes that usually have been presented to explain their contributions to the development of religious Orders. My own work has questioned those old stories about the Cistercians primarily because the traditional explanations allowed no room for the many communities of women who were Cistercian nuns.

Scholarship on the Cistercians has had trouble accommodating the role of women in this new order. This is ironic given that abbeys of Cistercian women may have constituted the largest group of new religious houses for women founded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Cistercian historians, falling back on a narrow reading of the juridical situation of women within the Order, generally have denied or minimized the role of nuns. Nuns have been ignored from the beginning, for instance in the mainstream Cistercian historiography, which may be traced back at least to the Exordium Magnum written circa 1200 by Conrad, abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Eberbach and formerly a monk at Clairvaux. This has meant that many materials, such as those collected here, lay untouched in archives for many years, even after women's history became an acceptable sub-field of medieval history in the last third of the twentieth century. In France there is still much that remains to be discovered in archives that were brought together following the French Revolution, and this is true for houses of Cistercian women from other parts of medieval Europe as well. Less survives of the churches themselves, but there are ruins, such as those for the abbey of nuns at le Lys, near Melun, founded by Queen Blanche of Castile ….

Cistercian historians and many secular scholars who relied on traditional narrative accounts either denied the existence of Cistercian nuns or described those women as less than full members of the religious Order created by the Cistercians. It is precisely by using the documents of practice, the charters featured here, that we can show that there were indeed Cistercian nuns, and that they were a strong and valuable presence both within the Cistercian Order and within European religious practice in the Middle Ages.

What makes the particular charters presented in this booklet so interesting is that they prove or demonstrate the existence of those Cistercian women. They bring to light the many communities of Cistercian women that previously had been virtually invisible, showing that Cistercian nuns must be counted among the many types of religious women who existed in the High Middle Ages. In limiting my purview to Cistercian women, then, I have provided an example that is a good litmus test for assessing women's spirituality, activity, independence, and agency within the monastic world. At the same time, these documents tell us much about the medieval relatives of Cistercian nuns, the brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers who were founders, donors, and patrons of the women's communities, who made demands on their abbesses, and who expected to share in the benefits of their prayers.

Modern historians of monasticism have cited the inability of cloistered women to manage property and to perform mass; they have seen these as explanations for alleged financial difficulties in houses of nuns as well as for their limited autonomy. We do know that bequests to women's religious communities—whether for foundation or for subsequent support—were often smaller than those to men's, and that the churches and buildings constructed for women's communities were often smaller. Even those built by a queen, Blanche of Castile, could be relatively modest, at least in the case of le Lys. Recent scholarly work has shown, however, that some nuns' houses were generously endowed, that nuns could be particularly able in the management of property, and that it was held by many in medieval society that the prayers of religious women were especially efficacious. As we see in documents for Rifreddo (nos. 7-12), or Maubuisson (nos. 25-26), houses for Cistercian women were established by the most powerful laywomen of the thirteenth century.

Some critics of the time, and the modern scholars who have followed their line of argument, have seen nuns as subservient to the male clerical hierarchy, whereas we now interpret this as a way for them to concentrate on their religious vows. We shall see that subservience to men by these religious women is far from apparent in most cases, given the restraints of medieval society; even if they had lay-brothers to take care of business outside the enclosure, nuns like those of Rifreddo (see nos. 7-12) certainly did not give up control over property. When religious women did give up control of their material resources to men, it was often because such women were seeking to lead more Christian lives by practicing corporate or collective abnegation, as well as personal poverty, as we see at Coyroux (nos. 37-49).

Although members of religious orders were only a tiny fraction of the population of medieval Europe (perhaps one half of one percent), those nuns and monks produced most of the surviving administrative documents for the period up to 1250. One of the misconceptions about the production of such records, however, is that they were hardly ever produced by nuns. In addition to copying liturgical books and the classics of monastic education and spirituality, however, we have evidence that women themselves dictated charters, copied cartularies, and organized their archives in ways to best exploit their economic resources.

This volume consists of documents that I have chosen to translate from among the many thousands—mostly in medieval Latin, but occasionally in old French—I have read as part of my research about medieval religious women. There are two basic types of administrative documents here. Besides the charters that I have already explained and the medieval charter-books or cartularies in which those charters survive, I include several extracts from rent and account rolls. These show religious women and their patrons intent upon managing resources well. Whereas the accounts presented to Queen Blanche of Castile by the overseer of construction at Maubuisson (no. 62) may be most interesting for the light they shed on materials used, their cost, and on the methods by which monies were accounted for at the time, the rent rolls for Port-Royal (no. 60) and Saint-Antoine (no. 61) are interesting for what they say about the nuns as acquisitive managers of property. The records for Port-Royal, in particular, reflect efforts to organize monies due (or owed) by date and by type of payment; materials found in charters have been extracted and rearranged so as to facilitate rent collection. The list of Saint-Antoine's Parisian properties reflects somewhat less manipulation of the materials; it is more map-like—with properties listed by street and with rents due at various terms mixed together. But the Saint-Antoine list reflects the enormous wealth held by the nuns of that abbey, whose charters show that they acquired property rights within holdings that once had belonged exclusively to king, to bishop, or to the great Benedictine monasteries, and that they lent cash to tenants to improve their holdings—in return for permanently increased rents (no. 14).

There were often early links among such Cistercian women's communities. Those between le Tart or las Huelgas and their congregations or filiations often are discussed, but Saint-Antoine too seems to have been the head of a mini-congregation. Not only were nuns from Saint-Antoine sent by Blanche of Castile to found her abbey at Maubuisson but also Blanche later sent nuns from Maubuisson to le Lys, so that le Lys became in some sense the “granddaughter” of Saint-Antoine. Similarly, in 1225 nuns from a group of women near Sens who had been nursing lepers at Viluis were settled at la Cour-Notre-Dame and tied to the customs of the Cistercians as practiced by the nuns of Saint-Antoine. There were probably links as well among houses founded and supported by the countesses who ruled between 1206 and 1280 in Flanders, Jeanne and Marguerite of Constantinople. … There are hints in the records of the thirteenth-century General Chapter that such ties among women's houses may have allowed them to resist some of the regularization that the ruling abbots attempted to impose on the Order's houses of nuns (no. 66).

The Cistercians were supposed to be one of the last rurally based religious Orders; this is how they always are presented in contrast to the urban reformers, like the Franciscans, of the thirteenth century. In fact, the situation is more complicated. Cistercians are well known for their managerial activities and economic success on granges in the countryside. But even in the twelfth century that success was tied to urban markets and changes in demand associated with the revitalization of cities in the twelfth century. Growing diversity in diet in western Europe in the twelfth century may have meant that demand for cereals flattened somewhat, but Cistercian entrepreneurs could overcome these marketing difficulties because of improved net yields. By regrouping fragmented agricultural holdings into granges on which lay-brothers produced surpluses, the new reformers still could sell excess grain profitably in nearby towns. Moreover, demand for meat and other animal products increased at the very moment when reform nuns and monks were tying pasture-rights together into efficient systems of transhumant pastoralism in which they optimized pasture use by taking animals to the mountain pastures in the spring and back down in the fall (such rights are mentioned in nos. 1 and 8, for instance).

By the thirteenth century it was clear that rural-based houses of monks and nuns such as those of the Cistercians also had to own urban properties from which to sell their produce; some eventually became Cistercian colleges. Thirteenth-century foundations for Cistercian women seem to have been located somewhat more in the proximity of cities than had been twelfth-century houses for either monks or nuns. Perhaps this is a result of the propensity of the Order to incorporate small hospitals located just outside the gates of major cities, some with lay-sisters and lay-brothers, many of them nursing lepers. Nowhere is this transformation of an independently founded hospital for men and women into a Cistercian abbey more striking than in the case of what became the abbey of nuns of Saint-Anthony-of-the-Fields, or Saint-Antoine-des-Champs-lez-Paris, just outside the eastern walls of Paris.

The documents offered below are typical of the vast numbers that can be found, still unpublished, in archives in Europe, or else published in various collections that I cite. To get to the heart of these sources one must wade through masses of formulaic, fairly standardized clauses to reach bits of information about the property holding and wealth of Cistercian women's houses. Many contracts do no more than confirm a pattern that only occasionally is made explicit in these documents. For an introduction to such materials, I have selected the more unusual, richer examples, which can cast light on communities and their patrons. In general, there is a glaring dearth of evidence on the actual everyday lives of religious women within the documents of practice, and few glimmers that illuminate their spirituality.

Reading charters for the evidence they provide regarding religious women—some of it direct and explicit, some indirect and muted—is an art or skill one learns in working with these materials. To facilitate comprehension in this introductory approach to what such documents can tell us and how they can be used, I have arranged the groups of documents to run from the least problematic and least difficult to the more obscure. This means starting with some thirteenth-century charters, since they are less ambiguous than those of the twelfth century. I have selected documents that give examples of the variety of communities of Cistercian nuns in terms of wealth or situation, or origins. Although most come from France, I have provided some indication of the widespread importance of Cistercian nuns by including documents from England, Italy, Germany, Spain, and even Cyprus. Charters are included for communities of women that were considered royal foundations, because they were made by Queen Blanche of Castile or her parents, but there are also documents for isolated rural houses of nuns that were originally hermitages. A few documents show how communities of Cistercian nuns often were closely tied to the medieval bourgeoisie in the thirteenth century. Of particular interest are the still unpublished records for the community of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs, which became one of the richest Parisian abbeys in the early modern period. Its surviving medieval documents show a community of Cistercian women increasingly supported by the patronage of wealthy Parisian citizens whose ambitions for their daughters had profound effects on the internal workings of the community.

Editorial conventions employed here are as follows: I have tried to include full documents, but in a few cases indicated in the head notes or by ellipses I have left out repetitive phrases or some of the excessive legalese that was creeping into documents by the thirteenth century. For clarity I sometimes have employed tense changes or rearranged the order of sentences. I try to indicate whether we are dealing with an original document or a cartulary copy and where placement in a cartulary provides additional evidence. I have identified kings and popes with their standard numbers and use Arabic numbers even though dates in the charters were written out in Latin words or roman numerals; I have done the same with the accounts. I give modern versions of dates whenever possible, but sometimes the day and month are not given. It is thus possible that a charter bearing the date 1101 was actually done early in the year 1102 because the day on which the New Year began varied from place to place in the Middle Ages (most often it fell in March, not January). Where days of the month are given in ancient and medieval forms, citing kalends, ides and nones, or saints' days, I have left them in that form in the charter text but have given the modern calendar date in the heading; see, for example, charter 5, in which the 3 nones of November (that is the third day before the ninth day before the ides) is, in fact, November 3.

I have translated the medieval Latin terms used for money into pounds, shillings, and pennies. The pounds and shillings in the charters were money of account with 12 pennies to the shilling, and 20 shillings to the pound, or 240 pennies per pound. Most pennies were by this time only about one-fourth pure silver. Although in the mid-thirteenth century, Louis IX began issuing a silver coin worth 12 pennies, the gros tournois, until circa 1250 only silver pennies were minted. By 1250 or so, all money circulating widely in France consisted of either the royal pennies of Paris or those of Tours; the royal pennies of Tours remained more valuable than those of Paris. Because most documents here refer to the coinage of Paris, only if some other mint is mentioned do I leave in reference to it. After the mid-thirteenth century Italian cities began to issue gold coinage for use in international trade, and France eventually did so as well, but the only gold coin mentioned here is an earlier Byzantine gold coin, the byzant, or bezant. The late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw a rapid fall in the value of silver currencies; it was not a good time to be paid in money, as the nuns of le Lys realized (no. 31).

A few words require explanation. The word monastery was not used in a gendered way in the Middle Ages; a monastery could be a house of nuns. The Latin word conventus means community and is translated thus. Little distinction was made between priory and abbey, except that one had a prioress or prior and the other an abbess or abbot; there were priories of Cistercian nuns until at least the middle of the thirteenth century, as we see in the case of Moncey, discussed in note 36 below. Thereafter a regularizing trend within the Order led to the elevation of all priories of nuns into abbeys and their heads into abbesses. Often the charters use the nearly impossible-to-translate word mansus; I have allowed it to stand, but it originally meant a farmstead with lands sufficient to support a single peasant family. Similarly, the term villa in Latin still usually meant an estate, but it was beginning to mean a village. There are also a variety of terms for measures of volume, weight, and expanses of land that I have defined in a glossary at the end, which also includes various saints' days mentioned in the text.

The story told by these charters is that of 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 the devotional practices that were so much a part of their cloistered world and the claims that continued to be made on them by family members outside the convent walls. The records available should help to reconstruct how women in the Middle Ages coped with wealth and with poverty—whether personal wealth and obligations (which they had inherited from parents), or familial property, which laywomen often managed for the lineages into which they had married.