Creating Cistercian Nuns - by Anne E Lester (Paperback)

About the Book

In 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.

Book Synopsis

In 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 of religious women in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, the order not only accommodated women but also responded to their interpretations of apostolic piety, even as it defined and determined what constituted Cistercian nuns in terms of dress, privileges, and liturgical practice. Lester reconstructs the lived experiences of these women, integrating their ideals and practices into the broader religious and social developments of the thirteenth century--including the crusade movement, penitential piety, the care of lepers, and the reform agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council. The book closes by addressing the reasons for the subsequent decline of Cistercian convents in the fourteenth century. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished archives, Creating Cistercian Nuns will force scholars to revise their understanding of the women's religious movement as it unfolded during the thirteenth century.

Review Quotes

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.

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.

The book will be a welcome addition to the academic study of monastic and church history and gender studies.

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.

About the Author

Anne E. Lester is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder.