Janet Burton and Julie Kerr have together presented a lively account of the Cistercians that includes occasional mention of Cistercian nuns as well as monks. Carefully drawn from the latest scholarship, the contents of this volume are nearly always unexceptionable. I find in it a wealth of information that will be useful to people at many stages of understanding of the early Cistercians. They discuss how often Cistercian abbeys were founded versus affiliated, how Cistercians created granges and introduced lay brothers, and provide a good sense of why the Cistercians were so successful. In so doing, they combat earlier tendencies to see Cistercians as pioneers rather than managers of land, and Cistercian sites as isolated deserts. Thus Kerr sensibly suggests: “the Cistercians were contemplatives rather than solitaries and their sites were more secluded than remote. Accordingly, the monks were sheltered but not cut off from the world and most houses were relatively near to transport links and communications routes” (57). They agree with such assessments as mine in Medieval Agriculture, the Southern-French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians (Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1986) that the advantages that the Cistercians had over their secular counterparts, as in tithe exemption or advantages of scale, or continuity beyond a single lifetime, explain their success.

In the first two chapters Burton provides her own assessment of the complex debate about the earliest Cistercians and their early accounts. Burton summarizes the issues under debate and then suggests that a more productive way to approach the questions at issue is to turn to the observations of Benedictine historians who mention the Cistercians in passing, but who may be assumed to be less-biased witnesses than those usually invoked (15). She notes that the Cistercian re-emphasis on a return to the manual labor associated with original Rule of Saint Benedict is well attested in William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum (circa 1125) and Orderic Vitalis (writing circa 1135). William also provides evidence that as early as 1124 Stephen Harding, the early abbot of Cîteaux who ruled until 1133, had begun to think about the larger picture. She thus relies on more than only the Exordia accounts in arguing that it was Stephen Harding who began to shape the expansion of the community of Cîteaux. Similarly, she discusses the importance to the whole enterprise of Robert of Molesme for whom: “Cîteaux marked not a beginning but an ending: it was to be the last of Robert's many experiments in making monastic foundations” (17).

Burton also takes up the question of Cistercian nuns, noting that in the 1120s Stephen Harding as abbot of Cîteaux joined with its earlier founders to establish the first house of Cistercian nuns at le Tart. Similarly, Molesme's foundation at Jully had begun even earlier, circa 1113, as a community of religious women where so many of Bernard of Clairvaux's female relatives could follow some of the same religious under Bernard's authority until the nuns were attached to Molesme in the 1140s.

Burton's account sidesteps the issues about dating of documents that are so tied to the new volume of twelfth century Cistercian documents edited and translated by Chrysogonus Waddell (Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Citeaux [Nuits-Saint-Georges: Abbaye de Cîteaux, 1999). While often deferring to Waddell's self-assurance that he knows more about the manuscripts than the rest of us, Burton is not entirely uncritical of that edition. In her discussion of the events of 1152, long thought to have spelled a diminution of Cistercian expansion, Burton references Robert of Torigny, another Benedictine historian, in concluding “there seems to be little doubt that in 1152 a bold—though as it turned out ineffective—decision was made to halt further dispersal” (44). She objects that Waddell has dismissed this dating as “a retrospective commentary, and [for which] the earliest manuscript in which it survives dates to around 1180,” suggesting Waddell's selective reading of the evidence.

Burton provides additional evidence from the British sources that new meanings for the term ordo were emerging in the 1140s. Such a developing meaning of the Cistercian order as an institution rather than a way of life, is found, she suggests, in Bernard of Clairvaux's letter of 1143 to Fountains, deputizing a visitor in his place, seeing it as “bearing the hallmarks of a system of some maturity” (34). She provides evidence that Savigniacs were beginning to be instructed in Cistercian ways by shortly after Aelred's election as abbot of Rievaulx in 1147 (40–41). On the other hand her argument that Bernard's Apologia of 1125 provides a new way of using the word ordo suffers from our lack of knowledge about the actual date of any part of that work in the form that we have it; its text was most likely updated and polished over Bernard's entire lifetime and the part cited could come from the 1140s like the other evidence that she cites.

It is probably a misreading of the secondary source on the Order's administration, that we read the statement by Kerr: “individual Cistercian houses were joined together in familial bonds and arranged in a hierarchy” (82). This is only partially correct, for a foremost principle of the Cistercian Charter of Charity (whatever its date) is that Cistercian abbeys and their abbots were to treat one another equally, unlike in the monarchical hierarchy of Cluny. Despite calling Cîteaux “the mother of us all,” there is no single abbot ruling the Order, but a collective head, the General Chapter of all abbots.

The chapter on Cistercian spirituality, given the limited space, provides interesting evidence from saints' lives about (often female) mystics who may have had ties to Cistercians. Similarly the chapter on relationships to the world discusses the Cistercians and the Crusades particularly that against the Albigensians and mentioning the reliance of Louis IX on the prayers of Cistercian nuns for the success of his Crusades. On the other hand, the canonization records for Louis IX cannot show that he helped build Royaumont abbey with his own hands in December 1244; Louis IX founded Royaumont for the soul of his father in 1228 and it was completed by 1134; by December 1244, he had fallen ill, taken a Crusader vow, and was aiding his mother in the construction of the second of her two abbeys of Cistercian nuns, at le Lys. Given the vast amounts of material incorporated, a few such glitches, or even minor misreadings of earlier work are easily forgiven in a book that covers such an enormous range. It is a solid companion that will provide a basis for many new studies while also adding some nuance to debates about early Cistercians. The authors are to be congratulated.