It is a great privilege to read and review a book that is so clearly the fruit of many years of careful research, writing, and editing. Martha Newman’s Cistercian Stories is a must-read for medieval monastic historians, theologians, and scholars of religion. It delighted and excited my imagination from beginning to end. By analyzing the late twelfth-century story collection and other extant writings of Engelhard, a relatively unknown monk at the Cistercian monastery of Langheim in southeastern Germany, Newman offers fresh insights into how members of this monastic order exemplified their religio to form true and lasting fides through the stories they told, composed, circulated, and read.
Engelhard had initially sent a libellus of stories to his close epistolary companion, Erbo, abbot of the Hirsau-affiliated community of Prüfening, just before 1188; however, a few years later, he sent a gift of an expanded version of this collection with thirty-four stories, an introductory letter of dedication, and a concluding writer’s apologia to the nuns at the abbey of Wechterswinkel, one of the oldest communities of Cistercian women east of the Rhine. Engelhard’s collection has never been edited or translated. This fact alone makes Newman’s study invaluable. She provides ample quotations from her English translation of this work to support her analysis and includes the Latin from the extant manuscript witnesses (chiefly from Poznán, Biblioteka Raczyńskich, Rkp. 156, s. xiii, prov. Paradyz) in the endnotes.
By writing and transmitting his collection, Engelhard joined a venerable tradition of story collecting in Christian monastic communities that stretched back to late antiquity. In the last quarter of the twelfth century, this practice was embraced by Cistercian monks, especially at Clairvaux and its affiliated abbeys, as an effective means to preserve and spread their shared history and culture. Notable examples of this practice that Newman sets in dialogue with Engelhard’s collection include the Collectaneum exemplorum ac visionum Clarevallense (assembled c. 1174), Herbert of Clairvaux’s Liber visionum et miraculorum Clarevallensium (c. 1178), Conrad of Eberbach’s Exordium magnum (started at Clairvaux and completed at Eberbach sometime between 1180 and 1125), the Collectio exemplorum Cisterciensis (compiled around 1200 by monks in a northern French monastery affiliated with Clairvaux), and Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum(completed in the second and third decades of the thirteenth century). Like these story collections, Engelhard’s seeks to preserve and spread the history and culture of the Cistercian order, but it does so in ways that are, in many respects, completely unlike its predecessors and successors.
Engelhard wrote his collection in a Cistercian monastery that was not affiliated with Clairvaux; none of his stories feature Bernard of Clairvaux, the great, recent saint of the order; he only recorded those tales that he had seen himself or heard from others; he dedicated his collection to a community of nuns; and, quite surprisingly given the views about the proper spiritual care of nuns that some Cistercian monks held at the time, “Engelhard addressed women as peers, and he assumed they shared with monks a common religious culture and a common desire for spiritual progress” (35). His stories exhibit a remarkable resistance to the clericalizing trends in monastic communities in the twelfth century; instead, they promote “a nonsacerdotal religiosity that could be shared by monks and nuns who wished to find sacramental possibilities in their religious lives” (47). This is especially evident in Engelhard’s depictions of the Eucharist; the sacramentality of prayer, manual labor, and other everyday activities; and penance, which Newman discusses in depth in chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Cistercian Stories, respectively.
In her analyses of Engelhard’s stories, Newman remains committed to reading his exempla closely, identifying their liturgical and biblical references and resonances, examining his play with gender (including his own), and comparing his stories with those found in other Cistercian story collections (4). Throughout her study, Newman richly contextualizes Engelhard’s project, situating it within the broader changes in education, sacramental theology, visual theory, legal culture, liturgy, monastic identity and practice, and the relationship between orality and textuality that were taking place both in and outside of the Cistercian order. As a scholar of medieval religious women, I appreciated Newman’s efforts to highlight the intellectual and spiritual interests, literacies, and labors of Cistercian nuns and other women connected to Engelhard. Her findings further the research of Alison Beach, Constance Berman, Fiona Griffiths, Julie Hotchin, Erin Jordan, Anne Lester, and many others, who have transformed our understanding of the lives of medieval religious women associated with the Cistercian order and the Hirsau reforms during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Like these scholars, Newman shows the need to recover these women’s histories primarily on the basis of the documents of practice they used. Though nothing can be known now about how or even whether the nuns of Wechterswinkel read the story collection Engelhard dedicated to them--neither the origins nor the provenances of the five extant manuscripts containing his collection can be located at this community--it is still important to establish, as Newman does, that there were nuns in the late twelfth century capable of reading, hearing, and comprehending such stories in Latin, and that Engelhard expected his audience to possess similar literacies.
Beyond engaging past historical accounts of the stated purposes behind and reader receptions of Cistercian story collections, Newman has a vested interest in demonstrating how the study of these collections and the monastic religio that informed them “complicates” genealogies of the concept of religion traced by historians and scholars in religious studies, which often begin at the sixteenth century and exclude faith or conflate it with religion (12). As a scholar who finds herself betwixt and between the disciplines of history and religious studies both departmentally and intellectually, Newman recognizes that medieval religio has a “specialized character” that must be defined narrowly according to its medieval uses (198). For Newman, “Engelhard’s stories show how the practices of monastic religio formed faith, but they also demonstrate that these techniques of spiritual formation move outside the confines of a male monastic community to instruct women and nonpriestly men so that they too could follow religio” (198).
In her introduction and conclusion, Newman claims that Engelhard’s stories shared “important characteristics with vernacular theologies,” because “he wrote stories rather than treatises, emphasized the sacrality of everyday practices, and sought to preserve a monastic religiosity based on liturgical prayer and contemplation rather than priestly consecration” (5-6). Newman borrows the term from Bernard McGinn to explain why texts like Engelhard’s should be considered works of theology. Rightly both scholars are concerned that “theology” is still viewed by many “as the exclusive preserve of those trained in Christian doctrine and logical argumentation” (195). They urge us to consider instead that a variety of medieval genres and practices can and should be read as theologies depending on their subject matter and aim. I fully support such efforts to expand our conception of what counts as “theology,” but I also think that it is necessary to expand our conception of what counts as “vernacular.” Alastair Minnis has suggested that we reconsider Latin as “the great medieval European vernacular,” and Ian Johnson has advised that we view the relationship between Latin and other vernaculars as interdependent and often collaborative, instead of as agonistic and hierarchical. Such reconceptions of “vernacular” would have helped Newman to frame Engelhard’s latinity.
By the end of Newman’s Cistercian Stories, I was left wondering whether there are more Engelhards with story collections, saints’ lives, miracula, and related textsawaiting discovery. Surely he was not unique in his attempts in the late twelfth century to perpetuate a monastic religioin which monks, nuns, lay brothers, and others were invited to engage in the same process of spiritual formation. We just need to redouble our efforts to find such exemplary writers. Fortunately, we now have Newman’s study in hand to guide our work.