Megan Cassidy-Welch has given due attention to the early Cistercian customary, the Ecclesiastica Officia, and in so doing has carved out a space for herself in which to talk about Cistercian monasticism, or more precisely the notions of Cistercian life current among thirteenth-century monks, with emphasis on eight monasteries in Yorkshire. The study does not quite match its title, being much more about boundaries than space per se, and more about imaged boundaries and spaces than about the actual monastic space of Yorkshire monastic communities. And it is apparent in the final chapter -- one that might well be looked at first -- that part of her concern is how Cistercian sites are treated by modern institutions. It is a book well worth looking at for it does discover new things to be said about the lives of Cistercian monks, and goes far beyond simply repeating the findings of Janet Burton or Sally Thompson on institutions for monks and nuns, or that of Glyn Coppack, Peter Fergusson or Roberta Gilchrist, among others on monastic architecture. Chapters cover the cloister and enclosure walls, the organization of the church, the chapter house and disciplining of monks, the infirmary and controlling the body by periodic bleeding, the lay-brothers, apostasy (with some discussion here of novices and abbots), and death, burial and commemoration. This very interesting and unexpected book begins by taking seriously the recent theorization of space and everyday life by Michel de Certeau, Pierre Nora, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, and introduces their notions to the many monastic scholars who may not yet have encountered them. Theory about space is nicely tied to work written some time ago by Henri Lefebvre and more recently the work on the living and dead by Patrick Geary. This is as much a book about mental spaces as physical ones, about creating categories and boundaries that defined who was inside or outside the mental walls with which Cistercians girded themselves. Even in discussions of church organization, precinct and cloister walls, lay-brothers' quarters, siting of infirmaries and monastic health and notions of the body, Cassidy-Welch emphasizes the relative unimportance of physical barriers compared to internalized notions, for instance of enclosure. But as Cassidy-Welch presents it, the fact that enclosure is a mental construct created in the mind of the monk as he seeks holiness means that notions about apostasy, the presence of the dead with the living within the monastic compound, or differences between monks and lay-brothers are also mental constructs. That enclosure is a mental state, as important to monastic men in their own self-definition as it was to monastic women and to the ecclesiastics writing about the need for enclosure of monastic women, is something too often forgotten by historians of monasticism who tend to equate enclosure with nuns. This is one of the points that is gained by Cassidy-Welch's insistence on treating monastic men alone, an insistence that sometimes gets in the way of her understanding -- for instance, marginalization of lay-brothers (see below).
The author concentrates her gaze not on all English Cistercian monasteries, but on eight Yorkshire monasteries for Cistercian men, Fountains, Byland, Kirkstall, Rievaulx, Jervaulx, Roche, Sawley, and Meaux and primarily on the writings that we have from the last decades of the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The viewpoint that she integrates is then that of a series of thirteenth-century voices that have been discussed by earlier historians, but usually only separately. Here Hugh of Kirkstall, Stephen of Sawley, and Matthew of Rievaulx, are treated as part of a thirteenth-century Cistercian tradition to which are added stories from Caesarius of Heisterbach, the Exordium Magnum, and anonymous stories such as those published by Christopher Holdsworth, those dreams associated with Statford Langhorne, and those included in studies by Brian Patrick McGuire. Evidence from the Statuta is used with care and is supplemented by evidence from English Royal and episcopal documents. Citations to the Ecclesiastica Officia are frequent and very useful for understanding the internal life of these monasteries. But one wishes that given her emphasis on thirteenth-century Cistercian practice she had corrected her citations, which are from the Griesser edition of Trent 1711 usually dated to circa 1135, to cite the more recently edited text, that published by Choisselet and Vernet in 1989, which uses as its base Dijon 114, which is the circa 1185 text. Occasionally too one wonders whether she consistently keeps track of different authorial voices. For instance, in the Fountains chronicle written by Hugh of Kirkstall ca. 1200, Hugh tells us that he consulted the aged monk Serlo, by then in his nineties, about what had happened earlier at Fountains. This is a typical narrative ploy in medieval chroniclers. The addition in monastic or other narratives of the authority of an aged monk to a description of early times is commonplace -- one sees it, for instance, in the Silvane's chronicle or Life of Pons de L'eras. But whether or not the voice of Serlo in the chronicle is actually Serlo's or Hugh's (and it is as likely to have been Hugh's as not), Cassidy-Welch still needs to keep firmly in mind that the voice describing what happened at an earlier date is still speaking circa 1200, not in the 1130s or 1140s. It can legitimately be treated as a thirteenth-century voice, just as she does with the letters attributed to Thurstan of York and Bernard of Clairvaux in that collection, which are also actually thirteenth-century voices. Some of this comes with the territory of confronting a Cistercian mythology which has produced a time-honored standard narrative which counter-histories like this one are only beginning to challenge. Not surprisingly, then, Cassidy-Welch finds difficulty in weighing the authority of different views on apostasy, when one is in the letters of Bernard of Clairvaux and the other later Statuta.
Cassidy-Welch explicitly excludes the women's houses from Yorkshire although recognizing their existence: "Women's religious houses were certainly founded in Yorkshire during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, according to the principles of Cistercian monasticism and despite the order's initial reluctance to recognize them. However, I believe that a useful study of the space of Cistercian nunneries would both require and constitute a different project for this present study" (12). Her decision to exclude women's houses altogether must be recognized to be a response to the suspicion among traditional Cistercianologists of the inclusion of women's houses as Cistercian when the original dissertation was written. This is a legitimate exclusion from a first book or a dissertation and one which I applaud as an advisor of graduate students. But it makes me uneasy that apt comparisons are lost -- and particularly since to establish all these legitimate reasons for leaving out women nonetheless leaves out women. To propose as Cassidy-Welch does that the Yorkshire Cistercian women's houses deserve and can be treated in a separate study which has not yet been written is probably naive, perpetuating yet again the refusal to mainstream women into the history of monasticism. The very fragmentary documentation for women's houses in Yorkshire has already received scrutiny by Janet Burton, Sally Thompson, Roberta Gilchrist, and Sharon Elkins. There is probably little more to be said about those nuns or their occupation of space or monastic boundaries, but the fragments that exist could have entered the discourse if they had been included here when appropriate. Thus, while not claiming that one could treat nuns in Yorkshire on an equal footing with the great powerful Yorkshire Cistercian men's houses (and indeed, it is impossible to treat the eight men's houses here equally either), there might have been a moment when including discussion of women within the Order should have been discussed in a more general way, for the Cistercian nuns are the obvious basis of comparison when Cassidy-Welch turns to the lay-brothers and wants to discuss lay-brothers as increasingly marginalized within the thirteenth-century Order. In her own marginalizing of women Cistercians and abbeys of Cistercian women from her study, setting them aside to be treated elsewhere, it may be that the author misses important points of comparison, for instance between revolts of nuns against the increasing repression by the Order (as witnessed, for instance in the Statuta of 1243) and the lay-brothers as important points of contact between men's and women's houses, particularly in the requests by women's houses to have lay-brothers deputized to them by neighboring abbeys whose abbots were father-visitors.
The establishment of boundaries for her work, which exclude consideration of land acquisitions, grange agriculture, and economic resources for these abbeys and consider only marginally the bequests made by patrons for prayers, burial and other religious benefits results both in Cassidy-Welch's misunderstanding of lay-brothers and possible liturgical changes in attention to the dead. She sees Cistercians making a conscious decision to limit masses for the dead to ten times a year from earlier limitless commemoration, but if this is true, was it a conscious Cistercian decision or forced on the Order because of changed circumstances in terms of who were patrons and what they were demanding? She also seems to confuse causes for effects in the discussion of what she sees as an increasing marginalization of lay-brothers in the attitudes of Cistercian communities of monks in the thirteenth century. She suggests that granges were put out to rent and lay-brothers were replaced by tenant farmers because, consciously or not, Cistercian monks increasingly marginalized lay-brothers. In not giving adequate attention to the literature on Cistercian agriculture, however, she has missed the close relationship that I and others have shown between land-acquisition and lay-brother recruitment (see Medieval Agriculture, the Southern-French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians [Philadelphia, 1986], esp. 54 ff.). While early charitable attitudes toward lay-brothers that treated them as equal with monks began to disappear by the 1180s, many of the changes regarding how farms were cultivated came about because lay-brothers were simply not being recruited; that they were not recruited any longer was simply because land was not being acquired any longer.
Despite these concerns, there is much that is new and interesting in this volume. Cassidy-Welch has not often fallen into the trap of the old assumptions about Cistercian history, provides good evidence for going beyond the standard Cistercian-generated sources to understand the Order, and has brought to bear on the monastic space that Cistercians occupied some of the theoretical notions of Foucault and others. She has made the case for the continued study of Cistercians beyond the time of the Fourth Lateran Council which in itself is to confront standard narratives of monastic history which rarely look beyond the time of Bernard of Clairvaux when considering the Cistercians. This is a book to be much commended for shifting our gaze.