7 - Nuns

Summary

What do we mean when we refer to a medieval Cistercian nun? How many houses of Cistercian nuns were there in the Middle Ages? The answers to these questions are not clear-cut. Ever since the nineteenth century, when Leopold Janauschek produced his influential listing of Cistercian abbeys, the study of medieval Cistercian nuns has been a study of inconsistencies, confusions and omissions. Janauschek intended to produce a survey of Cistercian women’s houses but, in fact, never published this work. His influential Originum Cisterciensium therefore includes male abbeys only, and thereby paved the way for a modern scholarly tradition which tended to treat medieval Cistercian nuns as peripheral players in the wider Cistercian story. One of the great editorial projects of twentieth-century Cistercian scholarship, Canivez’s publication of the General Chapter’s statutes, had the unintended consequence of confusing the study of Cistercian nuns even further. Many Cistercian nunneries are absent from the statutes, despite having existed for centuries. With modern scholars paying such close attention to the statutes, and with the statutes referring rarely or never to a certain female house, for many years it was easy to believe that the Cistercian Order’s approach to the religious lives of women was one of neglect (at best) or suspicion and rejection (at worst). The first statute reference to nuns being ‘incorporated’ (formally accepted into the Order) was in 1213. Despite the fact that the 1213 statute refers to nuns ‘already’ incorporated, the inference has often been drawn that the Order refused to admit women as members until the early thirteenth century. Likewise, the statutes for 1228 state that no monasteries of nuns were to be built in the name or under the jurisdiction of the Order, nor were female houses to be united to the Order. The same statute mentions that nuns were free to emulate Cistercian customs, but that the General Chapter would take no responsibility for their spiritual care or visitation. For many scholars, this statute seemed to sum up perfectly an Order which, in its foundational medieval period, was reluctant to include nuns within its fold.