The long twelfth century was one of those periods when fundamental changes occurred at a high speed. Robert of Molesme and his followers’ founding of the Novum Monasterium in 1098 is often considered the expression of a general tendency toward renewal. Spiritual asceticism is most commonly thought to be the driving force behind the foundation as this seems to have stimulated many initiatives that were taken around 1100.

There is little doubt that Robert’s project must be positioned within the overall spiritual climate around 1100. But this does not explain the huge success of the new foundation some decades later. Nor does it offer any explanation for the crisis and the serious regression towards the end of the century, when Cîteaux handed over the torch to new currents of spiritual poverty such as those of the Franciscans and the Dominicans.

The early history of Cîteaux demands a more profound understanding of the backgrounds against which the Order developed. Its success during the greater part of the twelfth century can only be due to the fact that the Cistercians offered an answer to certain urgent demands in the surrounding world. Likewise, regression and failure at the end of the century seem to point toward a disruption of this dialogue. During the first century of its existence, important shifts took place within Cîteaux that had a lasting influence on its dialogue with the world. In order to shed light upon these inner changes, we will first have to identify the Order’s interlocutors and the social developments which incited a demand for new solutions.

According to tradition the New Monastery, later known as Cîteaux, was founded on 21 March 1098. The choice of day was no coincidence as on that day the feast of St Benedict was celebrated. It was also apt, for on moving from Molesme the twenty-one monks under their abbot Robert had left behind the ‘old’ ways of traditional monachism with its emphasis on the elaborate and time-consuming celebration of the Divine Office in order to embrace a ‘new’ interpretation of the Rule, one in which the balance between the three constituent parts of the monastic horarium – prayer, study and work – had been restored. The Rule and its revised implementation were basic to the Cistercian reform and were commented upon both in all early Cistercian texts as well as by a number of contemporary outside observers. The Premonstratensian abbot Philip of Harvengt claimed that with the foundation of Cîteaux the ‘monastic Order, formerly dead, was revived … and the Rule of St Benedict recovered in our times the truth of the letter’. Even some of the Cistercians’ severest critics acknowledged their achievement. The chronicler William of Malmesbury refers to their distress that they were not able to follow ‘the purity of the Rule’ to which he states that they attached great importance by saying, ‘So intent are they on their Rule, that they think not a jot or tittle of it should be disregarded.’ The Norman Benedictine Orderic Vitalis described them as endeavouring ‘to carry out a literal observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict’.

Although the Cistercians did away with many of the accretions to the liturgy that had been introduced over the centuries, the opus Dei – the Work of God – still remained their primary and distinctive occupation, constituting the very raison d’être of monasticism. St Benedict devoted twelve chapters in the Rule to its composition and the manner of celebrating the seven daytime canonical Hours of Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, plus the Night Office. The primacy of the Office was endorsed by Bernard of Clairvaux in these words: ‘By our Rule we must put nothing before the Work of God.’

What do we mean when we refer to a medieval Cistercian nun? How many houses of Cistercian nuns were there in the Middle Ages? The answers to these questions are not clear-cut. Ever since the nineteenth century, when Leopold Janauschek produced his influential listing of Cistercian abbeys, the study of medieval Cistercian nuns has been a study of inconsistencies, confusions and omissions. Janauschek intended to produce a survey of Cistercian women’s houses but, in fact, never published this work. His influential Originum Cisterciensium therefore includes male abbeys only, and thereby paved the way for a modern scholarly tradition which tended to treat medieval Cistercian nuns as peripheral players in the wider Cistercian story. One of the great editorial projects of twentieth-century Cistercian scholarship, Canivez’s publication of the General Chapter’s statutes, had the unintended consequence of confusing the study of Cistercian nuns even further. Many Cistercian nunneries are absent from the statutes, despite having existed for centuries. With modern scholars paying such close attention to the statutes, and with the statutes referring rarely or never to a certain female house, for many years it was easy to believe that the Cistercian Order’s approach to the religious lives of women was one of neglect (at best) or suspicion and rejection (at worst). The first statute reference to nuns being ‘incorporated’ (formally accepted into the Order) was in 1213. Despite the fact that the 1213 statute refers to nuns ‘already’ incorporated, the inference has often been drawn that the Order refused to admit women as members until the early thirteenth century. Likewise, the statutes for 1228 state that no monasteries of nuns were to be built in the name or under the jurisdiction of the Order, nor were female houses to be united to the Order. The same statute mentions that nuns were free to emulate Cistercian customs, but that the General Chapter would take no responsibility for their spiritual care or visitation. For many scholars, this statute seemed to sum up perfectly an Order which, in its foundational medieval period, was reluctant to include nuns within its fold.

The subject of this chapter is the interdisciplinarity of the study of human rights, and not of the rights themselves, like freedom of expression or right to health care, in the abstract. A study like this can apply to such matters as the subjective meaning of the right as experienced by the people who claim it and the context in which it is exercised. In my view, however, the study of all aspects of human rights should be for the purpose of informing and facilitating the practical implementation of these rights, rather than as a purely academic exercise. It would therefore follow that the interdisciplinarity of the study of human rights should be directed at guiding policies and struggles for the protection of human rights. As an approach to the study of human rights, reference to interdisciplinarity addresses such questions as what it is, what does it do, and what does it add to disciplinarity and multi-disciplinarity? In other words, the title of this chapter raises questions about the relationship among disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity, that is, how are these concepts related yet different, and what each of them means for the study of human rights in ways that are conducive to effective and sustainable implementation of these norms around the world.

A primary concern with any discourse of human rights is to what extent is it, or can it be, as globally inclusive as possible because that is the nature of the subject. As I will explain later, human rights must be by definition universal, if they are to be at all, because they are supposed to be the entitlements of all human beings, equally and without distinction. In other words, the human rights project may be doomed to failure for whatever reason, but if it is to succeed at all, it must be about the universal rights of all human beings. This project has been resisted for a variety of reasons when it was first proposed in the aftermath of the Second World War, and continues to attract strong scepticism. For those like myself who do believe in the necessity and possibility of the universality of human rights, the inquiry would be about what does this belief mean and require, whether in theoretical or conceptual terms, or as a matter of political, legal and cultural practice.

Architecture is, without a doubt, the most tangible witness to the medieval Cistercian legacy. Not only standing churches and cloisters, but abbey ruins and rural granges also attract several million visitors yearly; special routes and networks of Cistercian abbeys may be found across Europe, and no less than five abbeys have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Cistercian architecture is a popular subject – attractive to tourists, fascinating to scholars and a niche for publishers. This chapter contains four complementary approaches to the subject. After sketching the main historiographical steps of past and present research, I shall examine the central issue of the architectural specificity or identity of medieval Cistercian abbeys, then consider the abbey buildings as a material source for monastic life and finally define major research perspectives.

Historiography

In his famous Dictionnaire (1854) Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, as one of the first scholars, stressed the specificity of Cistercian architecture by analysing the plans of Clairvaux and Cîteaux, the churches of Fontenay and Pontigny, the cloisters of Thoronet and Fontfroide and the infirmary of Ourscamp. This was the source for a long line of scholars who were to consider Cistercian architecture in the first instance as a product of the Romanesque period, originating in Burgundy, intimately related to Bernard of Clairvaux, spreading internationally through the network of the Order and controlled by its General Chapter. Edmund Sharpe, author of the first book dedicated entirely to Cistercian architecture (1874), focused on the buildings of the White Monks in an international and comparative perspective. Contemporaneous authors considered it as part of a national style. In the increasingly nationalistic climate preceding the First World War, authors such as Camille Enlart depicted the medieval Cistercians as ‘missionaries’ of an early Gothic canon to Italy, Scandinavia, Poland and other countries. Inversely, British and German scholars, refusing the theory of a pure French export, tried to prove how Cistercian architecture was indigenous to their respective countries.

Too much has been said about human rights; my apologies for adding more verbiage! In at least a partial defence, I must say that the engaging recent talk and action about ‘reinventing’ human rights may not be entirely diversionary. New human rights frameworks, instruments, norms and standards are constantly invented. Some old human rights frameworks are also being ‘dis-invented’ in the contemporary conjuncture of neoliberalism and wars of and on terror and in our era of hyperglobalisation. Even as the ascendant forms of primitive accumulation of global capital discredit the hard-won insistence on decency and dignity at workplaces, deny minimum wages and repress associational rights of workers, movements of resistance and counter-power reinvent global solidarity rights. The trinity of invention, disinvention and reinvention calls for some labours of understanding; here, all I aspire towards is an elementary grasp of these three notions.

I think that it is high time that we begin to acknowledge that human rights constitute acts of ethical as well as juridico-political manufacture. The idea of human rights is a remarkable recent ethical invention. It is ethical because human rights enunciate the values of human dignity and freedom; it is juridico-political as a socio-technical invention. Human rights are moral (the responsibility that each human owes to the other) and juridical (the responsibility that political authority owes to citizens as well as all subjects within its jurisdiction). Human rights constitute an invention because they generate new signifying systems of values, principles, institutions, movements, practices and languages.

François de Menthon, one of the French Prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945, was assigned the task of defining humanity. The context was a trial in which a more or less new legal category – crimes against humanity – had to be created to encompass the system of abuse and murder instituted by the Nazis in the mid 1930s. This development had a spatial imperative (Nazi crimes committed against Germans in Germany fell outside the category of ‘war crimes’, a category encompassing only acts committed against foreign soldiers or civilians), a temporal imperative (war crimes applied only to acts committed during war and excluded peace-time offences) and a moral imperative (it was believed that an unprecedented level of baseness had been reached and that the response to it required a new language and new law).

In its delineation of crimes against humanity, de Menthon’s opening address to the International Military Tribunal invoked three distinguishable concepts. The first was the idea that certain acts were crimes against human beings regardless of the race, religion, national affiliation or ethnicity of the victims. This was international criminal law in its universalising mode, and it was an inspiration for two 1948 landmarks: The Genocide Convention (in the field of criminal law) and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (in the field of human rights law).

Life and work

There is no doubt that Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) is the most famous Cistercian, so much so that he is often mistakenly considered to be the Order’s founder. It is Bernard who expanded the modest beginnings of the Order under Robert of Molesme (1098) into universal fame. After a brief spell in the monastery of Cîteaux, Bernard moved to Clairvaux in Champagne, whence he organised and supervised, in the shape of an amalgam of intra- and extramural activities, both his own life and the life of the Cistercian Order. In themselves those activities amount to an ecclesiastic-political career that, in theory, does not betray any need of monastic underpinnings. Thus Bernard’s (in)famous interventions in the world of (Church) politics such as his manoeuvrings on behalf of Innocent II during the papal schism of 1130, his meddling in the theological controversy surrounding Abelard at the Council of Sens in 1140 and his preaching of the Second Crusade in 1147 could all have been the work of any politically minded cleric whosoever. His activist behaviour certainly does not seem to owe anything to a particular brand of Cistercian spirituality. At the same time, ever since founding Clairvaux Bernard held but one position: the abbacy of his monastery. Whether attending to his duties as an abbot inside that monastery or hitting the road on Church business, he acted on the assumption that his authority did not exceed the limits of his profession, even though, unsurprisingly, his opponents took a different view on this claim. As such there was nothing abnormal about an abbot reaching out beyond the walls of his monastery in matters political and ecclesiastical. In the case of the freshly established Cistercian Order, however, with its ambition of return to the letter of the Benedictine Rule – that is, to poverty, withdrawal and stabilitas loci – things looked different. In fact, no one was more vociferous than Bernard in denouncing monastic exhibitionism both intra- and extramurally.

The two big ethical ideas to emerge victorious from the short twentieth century were human rights and democracy. Initially an old trope revived to rally elite morale during the Second World War, the first of these (human rights) was useful to the designers of the second, the controlled democracies that were then being constructed in the loser-states of Germany, Italy and Japan. After this brief moment centre-stage, however, both rather lost their universalist lustre, with human rights being sidetracked off into an international arena of pious declarations and unenforceable agreements while a respect for state sovereignty that was indifferent to domestic political arrangements fast became the norm at the UN. Their time came again in the 1970s with both being dusted down for use once more, this time in the late Cold War as a convenient stick with which the West felt able to beat its communist rivals. Just as in 1945, the success that flowed from the breakthroughs of 1989 produced democratic/human rights nation-building on a grand scale. Almost to an (ex)-comrade, the post-Soviet and post-Soviet-bloc states chose forms of government that declared themselves to be democratic while at the same time ostensibly respectful of the human rights of all those within their borders. Federal arrangements were carefully designed, bicameral legislatures lovingly re-created from training sessions on Capitol Hill, presidents constituted to embody their states while being simultaneously dependant on the will of their people. And in very many of these schemes, overseeing this tumultuous worker-bee activities in these new hives of democratic freedom were the various Constitutional Courts, given over-riding responsibility for the protection of human rights.

‘What is needed nowadays is that as against an abstract and unreal theory of State omnipotence on the one hand, and an atomistic and artificial view of individual independence on the other, the facts of the world with its innumerable bonds of association and the naturalness of social authority should be generally recognized, and become the basis of our laws, as it is of our life.’

Recovering the human

‘Human rights’ – here are two words expressing two different normative domains. Most simply assume that the two are mutually reinforcing, mutually implicated by each other, coterminous and coeval. Everywhere in the world, first-year law students are routinely told that we enjoy human rights simply because we are human. The question of whether there are any essential criteria of being human or of ‘personhood’ and, if so, what they are, is left dangling as if solved by the conjuncture of ‘human’ with ‘rights’. That is, rights-talk tends to cloud our view of what it means to be human. And rights tend to impute a certain view of humanity – one that is not necessarily tied to observable reality. Another result is the absence of any clear toeholds in the slippery debate about whether there are any non-human ‘persons’ (e.g. animals or even the earth) and, if so, whether they are the proper subject of rights.

This chapter discusses the reconstitution of the universality of human rights as a regional idea that as a result becomes visible through the lens of regional treaty-based systems of human rights. There are four such initiatives: the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950 (European Convention), the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man 1948 (American Declaration) read together with the American Convention on Human Rights 1969 (ACHR, American Convention), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights 1981 (African Charter). Although these regimes form the pinnacle of regional human rights law, they have crystallised into regional systems in which a corpus of specific human rights regimes have sprouted in relation to, for example, the prevention of torture, the protection of minorities, women, children, and economic, social and cultural rights, etc. Such treaty regimes are not the focus of this chapter although they should be acknowledged as belonging to respective regional systems of human rights.

We start our discussion of reconstituting the universal by examining the essential characteristics of universality, the reasons for reconstituting the universal and the place of universality as the flying buttress of regionalism. This discussion is then followed by an examination of human rights protection as a regional idea. Here we consider the reasons behind the establishment of regional regimes of human rights, the essence of regional human rights obligations in the context of universality, and the relative differences between regional human rights regimes. The chapter then examines regional human rights protection mechanisms, and the dynamics that lie behind the development of human rights law by the cross-fertilisation of human rights ideas across regional bodies of human rights. This development is seen as a reinforcement of universality. (The issue of relativism is not directly discussed as it falls outside the compass of the chapter albeit, as is to be expected, it emerges frequently as a point of importance when working through the content of the regional rights’ instruments that we will be discussing.)

In his Sermo de diversis 121 Bernard of Clairvaux told his monks: ‘We are in the school of Christ (In schola Christi sumus), and there we learn two teachings: the one that the one true Master teaches us himself, that is, love; and the other through his ministers, that is, fear.’ The appeal to being in the ‘school of Christ’ was a mark of the self-identity of the Cistercian Order. Manifested in the abbot of Clairvaux, and also illustrated by three other major early Cistercian theologians influenced by him (William of Saint Thierry, Aelred of Rievaulx and Isaac of Stella), the ‘great miracle’, as Bernard put it, of the success of the Cistercians made a lasting impact on the medieval world. The institutional, political and cultural roles of the Cistercians are presented in other essays in this volume; here I will concentrate on their spiritual theology during the fifty years between c. 1120 and 1170. However much scholars continue to study the Cistercian Order, if the early Cistercians still reach a wide audience, it is fair to say it is largely because of their spiritual teaching, what they learned ‘in the school of Christ’.

The goal of learning in Christ’s school was not restricted to monastics. Bernard and his confreres believed that all the baptised are called to deeper knowledge and more intimate contact with God, even to the embrace of the Divine Word. In SC 83.1 Bernard says that all Christians are called to marriage with the Word, though monastics have a privileged highway to the goal. Although the White Monks were the virtuosi of the religious life, they felt an obligation to speak, both to other monks and (as history has shown) to non-monastics.