At the end of the twelfth century, the Cistercian monk Engelhard of Langheim wrote a collection of miracles and moral stories, intended both for monks and for nuns. In this book, Martha G. Newman analyzes these stories for the first time. They exist only in manuscript form in Poland, Germany, and France and have never before been properly analyzed. Newman uses them to discuss gender in medieval spirituality and the tensions between priests and monks in defining religiosity. The Cistercians have mostly been studied in their early heartlands of France and England, but here Newman's focus is east of the Rhine. She discusses the writings of a man whose religious and philosophical ideas were very much part of the twelfth-century milieu of his youth, even though he lived in a time of rapid change, when universities were on the rise and the friars were just about to outcompete the white monks for attention.
Engelhard's stories, Newman argues, were not tales of marvelous, heroic, and saintly people but rather of rather ordinary people whose experiences could serve as exempla for both the laity and those in the church. Even if what we see and what we believe do not always match, he suggested, with particular reference to the bread of the Eucharist, everyday objects could convey a transcendent meaning. Further, he assumed that Cistercian monks and nuns alike could learn from his accounts; he sent his collection to the nunnery of Wechterswinkel, which had not yet been formally made part of the Cistercian order but already followed its customs. Newman sees Engelhard as resisting the clericalization of religion, believing that monks and nuns and the laity also had a claim to understanding spiritual issues.
Newman's first book, The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098–1180 (Stanford University Press, 1996), established her as one of the few American scholars to follow the lead of Dom Jean Leclercq in studying twelfth-century Cistercians principally through their spirituality rather than focusing on Cistercian foundations, regulations, architecture, and interactions with the secular world (as done by many, including me). But here she attempts to add a social history dimension to her analysis, while retaining the emphasis on medieval people's efforts to find religious meaning. Her discussion of the audience, or anticipated audience, for these stories gives what she terms a “sociological” dimension (17).
The first half of the book provides the context for the stories, in particular what is known of Engelhard's life and the intellectual and religious climate of his time and details about the nunnery of Wechterswinkel. Here, too, is a broader discussion of twelfth-century exempla as a genre. In the second half of the book, Newman analyzes Engelhard's work in some depth, starting with his discussion of eucharistic visions and especially emphasizing his assumption that prosaic events could convey spiritual meaning. He intended his audience, she argues, to draw conclusions from his stories that the characters in the story would have missed. A theme throughout the book is that Engelhard drew little distinction between how men and women could comprehend and respond to religious issues.
Newman writes clearly and well, and the scholarly context in which she places her work is evident in an extensive and up-to-date bibliography. Yet, one wishes throughout for more of Engelhard. The general religious climate of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century is familiar ground to medievalists, but his stories are not. The most interesting part of the book is found in chapters 5 and 6, where brief versions of them appear to support Newman's analysis of Engelhard's thought.
In one story, a Cistercian monk who comes back to the monastery after a day spent toiling in the fields has a vision of the Virgin smelling with real pleasure the contents of a vase, which she tells the monk held the sweat of monastic labor, clearly sweet to her. The story is enlivened by the monk's initial shock at seeing a woman in the cloister, where a woman did not belong, before she identified herself. In another story, a girl soon to be married has a vision of a church full of other girls, where a bejeweled woman invites her to join them. This woman was of course the Virgin, and the girl tells her mother to give her new bridal cloak to the church and conveniently and happily dies. Such stories underline the special connection the Cistercians established with the Virgin, their patron saint, and also suggest Engelhard's openness to active women both within the church more broadly and within the Cistercian order specifically. In other stories, he even has the Virgin take on the role of abbot to a male congregation, a gender-bending he found unproblematic. One cannot help but wish Newman could have given more space to such accounts and less to comparisons with the much more broadly discussed writings of Bernard of Clairvaux or Caesarius of Heisterbach.
Engelhard's stories deserve to be much better known. The too-short summaries scattered throughout the book whet the reader's appetite for more. Newman gives a discussion of the manuscripts where they are found, including their provenance and contents, in this volume's appendix. One hopes she is considering editing Engelhard's collection; an edition with translation would make an excellent teaching text as well as provide new material for historians of medieval religious thought.
