How are we to comprehend the Cistercian Order? How do we examine and represent a phenomenon which has existed for over 900 years and spread across the world, which has built monumental architecture and produced a wide array of texts, tilled land and cultivated minds, seen schisms and sought concord? How do we grasp the basic tenor, the fluctuations, the varied responses to widely different conditions within one overall scholarly framework?

An influential trend in Cistercian scholarship has viewed the history of the White Monks as a tug-of-war between ‘ideals’ and ‘reality’. The assumption is that the Order was founded on a set of ideals, crystallised in twelfth-century legislation and foundation narratives: lofty aspirations – whether for isolation from the world and its ways, for repudiation of tithes, ownership of serfs and other allegedly corrupting practices or for harmony and uniformity within the Order and its communities. The reality is, then, all those factors which cause appropriation, modulation and abolition of these ideals, synchronically as well as diachronically: local conditions, extramural powers, pragmatism or the impact of individual figures. Louis Lekai, seminally, set the dichotomy as a motto for his momentous The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (1977) and, in a definitive article, employed the collision between ideals and reality as a key to the dating of the Cistercian decline: the Order’s fourteenth-century fall from its initial ideals, pushed by the overpowering force of reality. Seen in this light, ideals become synonymous with ‘true Cistercianness’ in the shape of unanimity, strictness and absence of ambiguity, whereas reality stands for distortion, deviation and equivocation.