A Typical Periphery: England in Late Twelfth- and Thirteenth-century Cistercian Texts from the Continent

Summary

The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were the age of Robert Bartlett's Europeanisation of Europe, the emergence of a broader Europe-wide cultural community, shaped by extensive contacts that led to a form of homogeni¬sation of culture and the creation of a ‘shared framework of ideas’. This was facilitated by institutional and personal connections that enabled an exchange of knowledge between various regions of Europe. In the Paris schools, students from all over Europe met with each other. Cistercian abbots travelled to the General Chapter. These were great hubs of information exchange, which gave stimulus to cultural unity. In this context, I want to look at the peripheries of emerging Europe, specifically at England. In some ways, for example in respect of its economy, England might be considered part of the European ‘core’. But this is not how continental Cistercians depicted it. In their texts, it was one of many marginal and uninteresting regions. The inclusion of English tales thus did not arise out of intrinsic interest in England itself but because the tales in question happened to tackle ideas and themes that were pertinent more generally to continental Cistercians.

The basis for this discussion of the depiction of England will be two popular and influential exempla collections: Herbert of Clairvaux's Liber Miraculorum and Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum. Herbert was born around the 1120s and became a Cistercian before 1157. He wrote Liber Miraculorum around 1178 and probably died in the 1180s. Caesarius was born around 1180 in or close to Cologne and died after 1240. He wrote Dialogus Miraculorum between 1219 and 1223, followed by 64 Sunday Homilies and another text, VIII Libri Miraculorum. In addition to the exempla-collections, I will also look at Alberic of Trois-Fontaines's chronicle, which related the history of the world from Creation to 1241. Alberic had read both Herbert and Caesarius. Born in the late twelfth century, he was a monk, first in Clairvaux and then at Trois-Fontaines itself. Mireille Schmidt-Chazan has pointed out that he was probably born in Liège.