This large and handsomely printed book is the third that Waddell has produced since 1999. His edition of early Cistercian narrative and legislative texts appeared in that year, followed in 2000 by materials about lay brothers. Together these books represent one of the most significant contributions made to modern scholarship on his own order. One can marvel at how much he has done, and feel much gratitude for his labours. Now he argues with clarity, resulting from long familiarity with the texts and subsequent scholarship, and minute and painstaking labour with the manuscript sources. Here, unlike in the earlier books, he does not translate the texts but has furnished them with extensive notes in English, and a fine series of indices which enable one to search out materials on many issues.

A fifty-page general introduction precedes part i, the statutes dated c.1136 to 1201. Part ii presents three ‘systematic collections’: the Capitula (usually found as the last part of the compilation beginning with Exordium Cistercii, followed by a short form of the Charter of Love (Summa Cartae Caritatis); Instituta Generalis Capituli; and a series of statutes which he dates to 1157–79, the only section of this part not edited in 1999. Lastly, part iii presents seven local collections of statutes, most of which have not previously been edited.

It is disappointing that Waddell does not show systematically which statutes were in Canivez's 1933 volume, and whether their datings coincide. My general impression is that Waddell certainly uses more manuscripts, and annotates them much more helpfully than his predecessor did. I observe too that Waddell often depends upon post-medieval manuscripts, produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that, as in his earlier books, he can rarely draw on manuscripts originating in eastern Europe, Scandinavia or the British Isles. Was this a result of the Reformation? The introduction (pp. 28–9) contains an explanation of how the sources are indicated in the edition which raises an important issue. Waddell provides an example, without any page reference, and from his words one might expect that the statute would appear either under 1189, given in two manuscripts, or, just possibly under 1191, given in one. But the statute is under neither, but rather 1192 (no. 14, p. 241). There one discovers that Waddell has preferred a version of the statute and the date given it in five post-medieval manuscripts, and one eighteenth-century edition, to a twelfth-century manuscript. At that point I expected that he would have explained his choice, but he did not do so. It is also disturbing to find four variants in two places (pp. 569, 715, no. 42) quoting a statute in San Isidro, ms 1. This leaves me rather uneasy.

Taken as a whole the book reveals how, until the 1180s, no substantial continuous series of annual statutes survived, but after that date numbers of statutes grew steadily. Whereas in the 1180s fourteen statutes on average survive per year, by the 1190s the average was nearly seventy. Alongside this growth in business, procedures were recorded for providing the abbot of Cîteaux with helpers in the tricky task of formulating statutes during Chapter sessions. Similarly the Chapter developed more efficient ways of ensuring that absent abbots knew when decisions had been made involving them, which by 1190 included naming in Chapter abbots who would convey such information. Statutes show too the enormous pressure on Cîteaux's resources from the two or three hundred abbots attending Chapter, each accompanied by a servant. The need for trout to feed the visitors was so great that the Chapter took steps in 1199 to try to stop other abbeys buying fish in Lake Geneva, scarcely next door to Dijon, in the period leading up to the Chapter. Another statute, possibly from somewhat earlier, forbade abbots staying in Dijon on their way to or from Chapter from attempting to buy fish there, or even to eat fish given to them, unless they were going to eat it with a bishop.

Statutes for 1180–1201 show the concern of Chapter for houses in England and Wales. Thirty-six houses, around half of those then extant, occur. Waddell does not always seem to have used the volumes listed in his select bibliography in compiling his notes. For example, he has confused Stanlaw, Stanley and Stoneleigh, whereas Knowles and Hadcock's invaluable Medieval religious houses would have sorted them out. He also wrongly states that a statute for 1196 shows that the abbot of Garendon had been murdered by his lay brothers, whereas Knowles's Monastic order, and later Heads of religious houses, shows that he was alive in 1202/3. Similarly, when commenting upon the Chapter's decision in 1201 to write to the cardinal legate and to John de Courcy about difficulties being experienced by Irish Cistercians, he notes that the cardinal had been abbot of Cîteaux, but does not tells us that de Courcy had founded Inch, probably around 1187, with monks from Furness, while his wife, six years later, had brought monks from Holm Cultram to establish Grey: again Stalley's book is in the bibliography.

One must, however, be grateful for the huge and well-presented labours reflected here. They will surely provide, as Waddell himself hopes, the basis for much further work. Here too is much evidence that will throw light upon the stages by which the Cistercian ‘order’ emerged, a matter upon which Waddell has clashed scholarly swords with Constance Berman. My own hunch is that these statutes themselves will not settle the matter, but together with Waddell's other two books, as well as other sources about the Chapter, a new consensus will emerge. Perhaps we may even rediscover that already under Stephen Harding a new kind of monastic family was indeed coming into existence.