Constance Berman presents an indispensable new collection of the most influential and revisionist work to be done on religion in the middle ages in the last couple of decades. Bringing together an authoritative list of scholars from around the world, the book provides a valuable service to students of religious history in providing a compilation of the most important new work. Medieval Religion: New Approaches is essential reading for all those who study the middle ages, church history or religion.

Constance Berman presents an indispensable new collection of the most influential and revisionist work to be done on religion in the middle ages in the last couple of decades. Bringing together an authoritative list of scholars from around the world, the book provides a valuable service to students of religious history in providing a compilation of the most important new work. " Medieval Religion" is essential reading for all those who study the middle ages, church history or religion.

The Cistercian Evolution The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe Constance Hoffman Berman "An extremely important book, one that will redefine the ways we conceive of medieval religiosity and politics."--"Virginia Quarterly Review" "A significant contribution to the study of the history of monasticism in the twelfth century."--"EHR" "Stimulating, controversial, and compelling, Constance Berman's major revisions of early Cistercian history, "The Cistercian Evolution," should be read by historians of monasticism and will greatly interest scholars in the institutional and religious history of the twelfth century as well as those who study the experience of women in that period."--"The Medieval Review" "An important and provocative book: important because it challenges scholars to rethink a central medieval theme, the creation and expansion of the Cistercian order in twelfth-century Europe; provocative because it brazenly upends received narratives, two generations of accumulated monastic scholarship."--"Speculum" "This important work builds on and continues Berman's solid, indeed splendid, scholarship on the institutional history of the Cistercians in southern France. She explores and rejects much traditional thinking in fields as diverse as the supposed uniformity of Cistercian architecture and the propagation of the order through colonization or 'apostolic foundation, ' pointing out that much Cistercian expansion was by incorporation of existing communities."--"Church History" " Berman's] book changes our understanding of the early Cistercians. It will shape our research for some time to come. Berman's questioning of Cistercian documents, her new picture of Cistercian growth, her warnings about reading thirteenth-century administrative structures and ideas back on to the twelfth, and especially, her insistence that we consider houses of both men and women, make this book an important contribution to the history of religious institutions in the central Middle Ages."--"The Catholic Historical Review" For centuries the growth of the Cistercian order has been presented as a spontaneous spirituality that swept western Europe through the power of the first house at Citeaux. Berman suggests instead that the creation of the religious order was a collaborative activity, less driven by centralized institutions; its formation was intended to solve practical problems about monastic administration. With the publication of "The Cistercian Evolution," for the first time the mechanisms are revealed by which the monks of Citeaux reshaped fact to build and administer one of the most powerful and influential religious orders of the Middle Ages. Constance Hoffman Berman is Professor of History at the University of Iowa and the 1999 May Brodbeck Fellow in the Humanities. The Middle Ages Series 2000 408 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-2102-2 Paper $26.50s 17.50 World Rights History, Religion Short copy: Reveals the true story behind the growth of the Cistercian order.

Modern studies of the religious reform movement of the central Middle Ages have often relied on contemporary accounts penned by Cistercian monks, who routinely exaggerated the importance of their own institutions while paying scant attention to the remarkable expansion of abbeys of Cistercian women. Yet by the end of the thirteenth century, Constance Hoffman Berman contends, there were more houses of Cistercian nuns across Europe than of monks. In The White Nuns, she charts the stages in the nuns' gradual acceptance by the abbots of the Cistercian Order's General Chapter and describes the expansion of the nuns' communities and their adaptation to a variety of economic circumstances in France and throughout Europe. While some sought contemplative lives of prayer, the ambition of many of these religious women was to serve the poor, the sick, and the elderly. Focusing in particular on Cistercian nuns' abbeys founded between 1190 and 1250 in the northern French archdiocese of Sens, Berman reveals the frequency with which communities of Cistercian nuns were founded by rich and powerful women, including Queen Blanche of Castile, heiresses Countess Matilda of Courtenay and Countess Isabelle of Chartres, and esteemed ladies such as Agnes of Cressonessart. She shows how these founders and early patrons assisted early abbesses, nuns, and lay sisters by using written documents to secure rights and create endowments, and it is on the records of their considerable economic achievements that she centers her analysis. The White Nuns considers Cistercian women and the women who were their patrons in a clear-eyed reading of narrative texts in their contexts. It challenges conventional scholarship that accepts the words of medieval monastic writers as literal truth, as if they were written without rhetorical skill, bias, or self-interest. In its identification of long-accepted misogynies, its search for their origins, and its struggle to reject such misreadings, The White Nuns provides a robust model for historians writing against received traditions.