caa a22 4500 388090871 CHVBK 20180307125250.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199912 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/3170206 doi S0009640700085711 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/3170206 Berman Constance H. Constance H. Berman is professor of history at the University of Iowa and University of Iowa May Brodbeck fellow in the Humanities for 1999. Were There Twelfth-Century Cistercian Nuns? [Elektronische Daten] [Constance H. Berman] It has been a truism in the history of medieval religious orders that the Cistercians only admitted women late in the twelfth century and then under considerable outside pressure. This view has posited a twelfth-century "Golden Age” when it had been possible for the abbots of the order of Cîteaux to avoid contact with women totally. Only later did the floodgates burst open and a great wave of women wishing to be Cistercians flood over abbots powerless to resist it. This paper reassesses narrative accounts, juridical arguments, and charter evidence to show that such assertions of the absence of any twelfthcentury Cistercian nuns are incorrect. They are based on mistaken notions of how the early Cistercian Order developed, as well as on a biased reading of the evidence, including a double standard for proof of Cistercian status—made much higher for women's houses than for men's. If approached in a gender-neutral way, the evidence shows that abbeys of Cistercian women appeared as early as those for the order's men. Evidence from which it has been argued that nuns were only imitating the Cistercian Order's practices in the twelfth century in fact contains exactly the same language that when used to describe men's houses is deemed to show them to be Cistercian. Formal criteria for incorporation of women's houses in the thirteenth century are irrelevant to a twelfth-century situation in which only gradually did most communities of monks or nuns eventually identified as Cistercian come to be part of the newly developing religious order. Copyright © American Society of Church History 1999 Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture Cambridge University Press 68/4(1999-12), 824-864 0009-6407 68:4<824 1999 68 CHH https://doi.org/10.2307/3170206 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/3170206 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Berman Constance H. Constance H. Berman is professor of history at the University of Iowa and University of Iowa May Brodbeck fellow in the Humanities for 1999 NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture Cambridge University Press 68/4(1999-12), 824-864 0009-6407 68:4<824 1999 68 CHH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge