Like many new religious groups of the central Middle Ages the Cistercians had origins in the late eleventh-century eremitical reformers who questioned the comfortable lives of those earlier monastic communities that had held lordship over villages, rights to tithes, churches and other revenues. Instead, these Cistercian reformers embraced a reputation for foundations ‘far from cities, castles and human habitation’. Taking literally such self-descriptions by the Order’s monks, earlier economic historians saw them as twelfth-century ‘pioneers’ whose clearing and draining of new lands led to an enormous acquisition of wealth derived from ‘bumper crops’ on ‘never-before cultivated lands’. More recent studies have shown that although many Cistercian abbeys became wealthy, they were not the pioneers once imagined. Cistercian wealth derived from providing meat, cheese and other animal products along with the usual agricultural products to neighbouring towns where they were sold free of tithes, tolls and market dues. Their pastoralism became famous especially in Britain, where they produced wool for export. Their attempts to revive the early simplicity of the Rule of Benedict included a reduced liturgical practice that allowed time for manual labour in the production of their own food and the gradual introduction of lay brothers and lay sisters as labourers.

While the earliest Cistercian communities may have lived on the produce of their little gardens, Cistercian grange agriculture would be based on large, compacted granges or farms created by reconstituting fragmented holdings of previously cultivated lands into large compact ones. Although Cistercian abbeys and granges might be sited on recently cleared lands (assarts or, in southern France, artigues), such land coming into Cistercian hands was almost entirely already settled and cultivated. It was extremely rare for Cistercian abbeys to clear and drain land. Although abbey and grange sites might give the appearance of recent wilderness, such land had features of earlier development such as roads, pathways, mills, farm buildings and established place-names. Acquisitions often had as their core the land given them by early donors and patrons, but large sums were needed to consolidate land rights into granges, using hundreds of contracts.

Cistercian sermons enjoyed a golden age as the Order expanded and flourished in the twelfth century. The sermon was the preferred literary genre for influential Cistercian commentary on the Song of Songs as well as other works of exegesis. Extant sermons are found as complete and polished literary works, reports, parables and sententiae – short summaries or outlines containing the major points of the sermon. These texts provide a guide to monastic spirituality and theology. Preaching, whether formal sermons or informal chapter talks, was centred in the liturgy of the community as described in the Rule of Benedict. Everyday preaching offers a glimpse of life within the monastery. Rarely did the preacher direct comments to life in the outside world. However, Cistercian preachers occasionally addressed audiences beyond the monastery, and even preached on crusade missions. The numerous editions of Cistercian sermons give testimony to the richness of medieval Cistercian preaching. Unfortunately, little evidence remains to elucidate the preaching done by medieval abbesses, with the exception of Innocent III’s letter concerning abbesses preaching in northern Spain in the late twelfth century.

Cistercian preaching and the liturgy

Preaching was central to the community liturgy, as Chrysogonus Waddell emphasises: the sermon preached in chapter ‘was itself a liturgical act, with the preacher breaking the bread received from Christ, ever present and acting through his word’. The Cistercian usages describe how the Rule of Benedict was to be read in chapter, which usually took place after Prime and was followed by a commentary by the abbot or another monk appointed by the abbot. A parallel chapter was held for the lay brothers each week; the abbot or a designated monk spoke there. Cistercians delivered formal sermons to the community on the major liturgical feasts of the First Sunday of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Easter, Pentecost, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul and the Dedication as well as the Marian feasts of Purification, Annunciation, Nativity and Assumption. Most extant sermons by major Cistercian writers correspond to those feasts.

Some fifty years after Robert of Molesme and his twenty-one companions had founded the New Monastery in 1098 – the Novum Monasterium which would become the abbey of Cîteaux – the Order enacted legislation which specified the minimum number and nature of the books which each abbey was required to possess. The list appears in the Institutes of the General Chapter (Instituta Generalis Capituli), dating from about 1147, and the list is brief: apart from the Rule of St Benedict (the fundamental guide to Cistercian life), it includes only liturgical volumes necessary for the daily worship of God, the opus Dei: Missal, Epistolary (Epistle Book), Evangeliary (Gospel Book), Collectary (which contained the collects and other formulae for the celebration of the Divine Office), Gradual (containing the mass chants), Antiphonary (containing the Office chants), Hymnal, Psalter, Night-Office Lectionary and Martyrology. A little later, as part of the process of updating, the Book of Usages (Liber usuum) was added to the list.

This is not to say, however, that these were the only books required in any Cistercian monastery. Chapter 48 of the Rule of St Benedict stipulates that every religious – monk or nun – should be given a book from the common collection at the start of Lent and read it through from beginning to end, and it follows from this that any monastery must have had in its collection at least as many books as there were religious. From the foundation of the Order until about the end of the twelfth century, a library of sixty to eighty books would not have been uncommon.

For many, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War marked the triumph of human rights (discourse) and the inauguration of a new era which, in allusion to a term coined by American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, could be described as the ‘rights’ empire’. This ‘empire’ denoted, of course, not a reality in which all human beings did, in fact, enjoy the state of being represented by human rights, such as a life in dignity, civil and political liberties, the rule of law and democracy, and a (certain) degree of social welfare. Rather, it signified a discursive hegemony that turned human rights discourse into the common currency of a globalising world. In fact, the impressive expansion of the international human rights regime, and the proliferation of new constitutions with ample bills of rights in Central and Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have turned ‘rights-talk’ into the predominant instrument for defining and defending personal and collective identities. This does not, of course, allude to the reality behind rights-talk, which remains at best ambivalent, but to the fact that human rights has come to enjoy a near monopoly on emancipatory and utopian discourse in a post-communist and post-industrialist era.

Who owns human rights (discourse)?

Whoever seeks liberation from any type of real or perceived oppression couches his or her claims in the language of human rights. Whoever aspires to live out his or her particular identity also expresses this desire in human rights terms. Individuals and groups across the globe use human rights to articulate their claim for better lives. As such, they have at once become one of the defining discourses of globalised (post)modernity and an expression of its hubris. In their dominant interpretation they represent the ongoing process of emancipation and differentiation by individuals from social norms and governmental power that has become the hallmark of liberal democracy and market-based capitalism. Yet, they have also been at the heart of critiques of a ‘Western’ modernity that is seen to over-emphasise liberty over responsibility, individuals over nations, markets and competition over community and solidarity.

With the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, a continuing process of human rights standard-setting was set in motion, which has produced a remarkable breadth of human rights norms, standards and principles. Their importance, the changes they have introduced in the relationship between governments and individuals and the impact they exercise on the development of international law are beyond doubt, despite critical comments on the very process of creating these standards and on the future of human rights standard-setting. Enforcing these norms is, however, a different story. Decades of attempts to reduce human suffering through the creation of human rights supervisory and enforcement mechanisms have dishearteningly few results to show. Despite an elaborate institutional framework for protecting these rights, gross human rights violations continue to occur and all too often seem to make a mockery of the proliferation of procedures, committees and commissions on human rights.

As a consequence, human rights activists together with supportive political leadership and scholarly voices keep on calling for the strengthening of human rights enforcement. They are motivated by the realisation that there is little value in abstract rules which do not lead to visible change and that allowing states to consistently ignore human rights obligations derides and damages these very standards, discourages co-operative states and alienates civil society. Enforcing human rights is seen as important beyond the immediate effects on victims of human rights violations as it touches upon the legitimacy of the rules and the stability of the human rights system. The move from standard-setting to enforcement (or from rhetoric to action) is usually perceived as decisive for the success of human rights.

In his Exordium Magnum, composed between 1206 and 1221, Conrad of Eberbach saw in the wonderful history of the Cistercian Order an example of the providence of God. During the thirteenth century the Order was greatly admired. The Frankish lords of the new Latin Empire of Constantinople were generous benefactors, though the hope of successful proselytism among the Orthodox proved illusory. Ruling houses often chose Cistercian abbeys as burial places for their dynasties. In 1228 King Louis IX of France founded the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont near one of his castles, for members of the royal family other than the kings themselves. The remains of Pribislav, the first Christian ruler of Pomerania, were translated to the abbey of Doberan by his son Borwin around 1219. Mariensee/Chorin was founded in 1258 as a burial place for the younger line of the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg. In 1291 King Wenceslas II of Bohemia founded the Cistercian abbey of Zbraslav (Aula Regia) as the necropolis of his dynasty.

Most spectacular was the increase in houses for Cistercian women. ‘The religious movement of women of the Cistercian Order’, wrote Jacques de Vitry, a contemporary, ‘increased to infinity like the stars of heaven.’ Local studies confirm Jacques’s enthusiasm. In 1234, for instance, the archbishop of Cologne approved the foundation of a house of Cistercian nuns at Duissern near Duisburg. It was to be for thirteen nuns, a number which was not to be exceeded. Already in 1237 the archbishop agreed to twenty-five. In 1240, six years after its foundation, there were enough sisters in Duissern for the foundation of a daughter house.

Torture constitutes one of the most serious human rights violations and a direct attack on the core of the dignity and integrity of human beings. As a consequence, the prohibition of torture has been recognised as one of the very few absolute and non-derogable rights in a variety of global and regional human rights treaties. It also has been accepted as a rule of ius cogens under international law, in times of both peace and armed conflict. Nevertheless, after having carried out the mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture for six years and having conducted fact-finding missions to eighteen countries in all world regions as well as three joint studies with other special procedures, I have come to the conclusion that torture is practised in more than 90 per cent of all countries and constitutes a widespread practice in more than 50 per cent of all countries. In addition, I have found highly deplorable conditions of detention in most countries that often amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. I was so alarmed by these findings that I have spoken of a global prison crisis and have called for a UN Convention on the Rights of Detainees.

In reaction to the systematic practice of torture in Latin American military dictatorships the UN in 1984 adopted the special Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) aimed at strengthening the prohibition of torture and ill treatment through a number of positive obligations to prevent torture, to criminalise torture and bring the perpetrators of torture to justice, and to provide torture survivors with an effective remedy and reparation for the harm suffered.

To combine in the same mindscape the separate ideas of human rights protection and of devolution prompts a number of thoughts. Some may be at quite a high level of generality; some much more specific to the arrangements of a particular state. At the most general level one might first have in mind the contribution that the study of devolution might make to an understanding of those processes whereby rights, first formulated and proclaimed at an international level, may ‘cascade’ down to the level of the nation state and then to regions within that state and perhaps beyond. This might be seen as a process in which there is an increasing degree of specificity of the rights to be applied – perhaps involving an idea of an initial rights baseline which may be enhanced to a higher degree of rights protection (however such a notion is to be understood) or customised to take account of the conditions – political, social or legal – particular first to the state and then to the regions of a state. If such a cascading vision is to be adopted, it has presumably to be routinely assumed that this process is one that will not be wholly unproblematic. Some of the conditions, specific to a state or region, may, at least at first, conflict, either in their substance or their procedures, with the cascaded rights. Rights deriving from prior national or regional (e.g. Europe-level) rights may not chime precisely with existing ‘rights’ at the devolved level. Judicial procedures for the enforcement of rights (including, for instance, those rules which determine who may seek the enforcement of rights, on what time scale and in the expectation of what remedies) may also adjust only with some difficulty to the enforcement of the newer generation of rights. Rules and procedures may well be necessary for the resolution of uncertainties of hierarchy to decide which rights rules should prevail. Institutions (presumably mainly courts but not exclusively so) need to be empowered to apply these rules of conflict resolution, an issue which may be of particular concern where there is some expectation of a degree of uniformity in the application of rights and yet also a sensitivity to local conditions.