Cistercian Nuns in Medieval England: Unofficial Meets Official
Late twentieth-century scholarship on the Cistercian monastic order was dominated by the distinction between elite and popular. The terminology was specific to the Cistercian debate -namely, ‘ideals’ versus ‘reality’ rather than ‘elite’ versus ‘popular’ - but the logic of a high Cistercian culture a...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2006
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| In: |
Studies in church history
Year: 2006, Volume: 42, Pages: 110-119 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Late twentieth-century scholarship on the Cistercian monastic order was dominated by the distinction between elite and popular. The terminology was specific to the Cistercian debate -namely, ‘ideals’ versus ‘reality’ rather than ‘elite’ versus ‘popular’ - but the logic of a high Cistercian culture and a low Cistercian culture is one that students of any elite/popular debate will find familiar. The indispensable modern survey of Cistercian history, published in 1977, is the key promoter of this argument, with its title presenting an eloquent statement of its thesis: The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality. Although the focus of current investigations into elite and popular religion is undoubtedly the extent to which both varieties of religion are legitimate cultural forces which influence and depend on each other, the Cistercian argument was formulated in a much more hierarchical way and clearly saw the elite Cistercian life as the more legitimate of the two monastic expressions. The argument is that members of the Cistercian order exhibited a more or less ideal form of corporate religious life during the first one hundred years of the order’s existence, but that after the late twelfth century the order gradually lost its purity. Two aspects of popular life infiltrated the enclosed world of the cloister: first, the grubby realities of economics; and, second, interactions with women, generally meaning interactions with the increasing numbers of Cistercian nunneries. |
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| ISSN: | 2059-0644 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Studies in church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0424208400003880 |
