The Boundaries of Charity : Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098-1180

“This is a first-rate contribution to a new social/cultural history of religious institutions that has emerged in recent American scholarship. It is the first book that successfully explains the so-called paradoxes of twelfth-century Cistercian history, especially the fact that members of the order became intensely involved in political and ecclesiastical affairs while claiming that their religious life demanded withdrawal from the world. After reading Newman’s book, I feel that for the first time I really understand the twelfth-century Cistercians.”
- Sharon Farmer, University of California, Santa Barbara

This work explores how twelfth-century Cistercian monks maintained their tradition of social withdrawal yet played a pivotal political role in the world outside their monasteries. It argues that the Cistercians' political behavior was neither a betrayal of their monastic ideal nor evidence of some inherent Cistercian paradox, but that such public involvement grew out of the monks' conception of their monastic life, notably the cluster of ideas associated with Christian love, or caritas.

Skillfully integrating the religious, political, and economic components of Cistercian culture, the author shows that the boundaries of Cistercian monasteries were never impermeable to outside life. The Cistercian conception of caritas borrowed connotations from the aristocratic culture in which many of the monks had been raised, and the monks used caritas to express ideas about the interaction of individual introspection, group cohesion, physical transformation, and a longing for the divine that resonated in twelfth-century society.

Caritas provided an underpinning fro the Cistercians’ view of a Church bound by the spiritual progress of its members, and it explains the activities of those men who left their monasteries to enact this vision in the society around them. The author suggest that the monks’ image of social cohesion, which depended on each individual’s moral reform, held particular importance at a time when people struggled to understand the bonds uniting an abstract Church. By the late twelfth century, however, the Church’s new bureaucratic networks and reliance on abstract legal reasoning made the Cistercians’ image of a Church bound by caritas increasingly anachronistic.

Martha G. Newman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Cover photo: The cloister at Fontenay. Courtesy of Geraudon/Art Resourse, N.Y.

This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following edition:

Title The boundaries of charity: Cistercian culture and ecclesiastical reform, 1098-1180
Author Martha G. Newman
Edition illustrated
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1996
ISBN 0804725128, 9780804725125
Length 387 pages

Subjects 12th century
600-1500
Church history
Church history/ 12th century
Cistercians
Civilization, Medieval
Europe
History
History / Medieval
Middle Ages, 600-1500
Monasticism and religious orders
Monasticism and religious orders/ Europe/ History/ Middle Ages, 600-1500
Religion / Christian Church / History
Religion / General
Religion / Institutions & Organizations