The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys for Women in Medieval France brings together two important strands in Constance Hoffman Berman's scholarship: the economic contributions of Cistercian communities and arguments for the existence of Cistercian nuns. In The White Nuns, Berman argues for the rapid expansion of the numbers of Cistercian nuns in the thirteenth century but also for the economic and administrative achievements of Cistercian women in the archdiocese of Sens and of the women who supported them. Her book suggests that the picture of poor and mismanaged communities of Cistercian nuns is a fiction, articulated to justify the late medieval suppression of women's abbeys and monastic confiscations of the nuns’ property.

The White Nuns is divided into three parts. Part one reprises Berman's arguments for the existence of Cistercian nuns. Her discussion of the scholarship only hints at the important conclusions of her article, “Were there Cistercian Nuns?”(Church History 68 [1999]: 824–864), where she suggests that we consider women who followed “the institutes of the Cistercian brothers” as Cistercians, even if their communities were not officially recognized by the chapter general. In The White Nuns, Berman instead focuses on the chapter general and visitations by Cistercian abbots who attempted to bring Cistercian women under their control. In considering what was distinctive about the Cistercians, Berman argues that abbeys of Cistercian women, like those of Cistercian men, were “opposed to the old ways of a monumental Benedictine lifestyle,” but that they “welcomed and embraced” a diversity of economic practices and resources (46).

Part 2 explores the economic practices of Cistercian nuns in the province of Sens. Berman examines documents from “over twenty”(49) abbeys of white nuns. There is no appendix or chart listing these communities, their founders, their significant patrons, and the dates of their foundation or adoption of Cistercian customs. Three chapters cluster the women's abbeys according to the status of their patrons: regents, heiresses, and one queen (Blanche of Castile). A fourth chapter focuses on the abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs and its relations with Parisian burghers. A fifth explores nuns’ participation in viticulture in western Champagne. Berman shows that Cistercian nuns consolidated their landholdings and that they received revenues from mills, viticulture, urban rents, and the accumulation of tithes. Furthermore, she shows that powerful aristocratic women supported communities of Cistercian nuns as did bourgeois families from Paris and from towns in Champagne. She argues that these patrons had confidence in the value of the women's prayers, and that Cistercian abbesses had the managerial skills and literacy to create successful economic organizations, many of which survived until the French Revolution.

Part three is a single chapter that compares the economic practices of thirteenth-century Cistercian nuns to women at the Paraclete and Fontevraud and to twelfth-century Cistercian monks. Berman suggests that Cistercian nuns held properties and managed their estates in ways that differed little from other monasteries. She concludes that accounts of Cistercian nuns that emphasize their poverty, the burden of the cura monialium, and organizational failure stem from the inability of modern scholars to read against the misogyny of their sources.

The questions raised by The White Nuns will influence future research on Cistercian nuns. Can Berman's conclusions about Cistercian women in the province of Sens be extended to Cistercians elsewhere in Europe? Appendix 5, for instance, shows nearly twice as many Cistercian women in Germany as in France. Furthermore, Berman's conclusions should be brought into conversation with those of Anne Lester, whose Creating Cistercian Nuns (Cornell University Press, 2011) examines a geographical region (Champagne) that overlaps with the province of Sens. Alongside the prominent female abbeys founded by aristocratic women, Lester locates many small communities who were inspired to live in imitation of Christ by caring for lepers and the sick, and she argues that the process of incorporating women into the Cistercian order was often a local process. Further studies of Cistercian women, especially those that use administrative and diplomatic documents, will help us understand the diverse motivations for the foundation of female Cistercian abbeys, their economic circumstances, and their relations with their patrons. They can increase our knowledge of female literacy and the nuns’ relations with the priests and lay brothers who were associated with their communities. Berman's work also suggests the importance of continuing to explore the relation between female patronage and women's religious communities to further understand both female administrative agency and forms of female religiosity.

Most importantly, Berman's book asks us to consider the extent to which we should read Cistercian documents with a hermeneutic of suspicion. Such reading has been central to much of Berman's scholarship on the Cistercian order. In The White Nuns, she assumes that ingrained misogynies in the sources “poison our understanding of all nuns” (233). She demonstrates that some Cistercian nuns resisted the regulatory efforts of Cistercian abbots (21), that some Cistercian monks “reformed” late medieval communities of women out of existence (207, 209–215), and that modern scholars have assumed the monks’ narrative of female mismanagement to be true. At the same time, recent scholarship has complicated such pictures of antagonism and pervasive misogyny by suggesting the possibility of cooperative and symbiotic relations between religious men and women, something that even The White Nuns at times demonstrates (see, for instance, the Cistercian abbot of Fontenay who encouraged the foundation of Notre-Dame-de-Prés, 198). Berman's pioneering work set the initial parameters for studies of Cistercian women; our job now is to continue to read both with and against our sources to further uncover the lives, ideas, and practices of religious women and the complicated and various relations between religious men and women in medieval Europe.