The liturgical principles of the Cistercians were grounded, as with all other aspects of the Order, in the strict observance of the Rule of St Benedict. The singing of the psalms was central to Benedictine monasticism, and Benedict devoted several chapters of his Rule to an explanation of how the complete Psalter could be recited each week by dividing its contents between the various services of the day and night office. By the eleventh century, several abbeys under the influence of Cluny had sufficient endowments to enable their monks to pray and chant all day, leading to a perpetual cycle of worship which paid less attention to the spiritual reading and manual labour with which Benedict had balanced the life of prayer. It was in liturgical matters that the early reformers could most easily perceive decadence in the Cluniac congregations: the chief intention of the founders of Cîteaux was not to establish a new religious Order so much as to strip out the many liturgical accretions which had filled the monastic day, and thereby to maintain a more even balance between ora et labora. Their adherence to Benedict’s prescriptions was very literal, and understandably attracted derision from some quarters, notably in Abelard’s letter to Bernard.

When Robert and his twenty-one companions left Molesme in 1098 to establish the New Monastery that would later be named as Cîteaux, we may assume that they took with them the various liturgical books, vestments and vessels that they would require for worship. When Robert was recalled to Molesme the following year, his companions were allowed to retain all of the equipment he had brought with him (his capella), with the exception of a breviary which they were instructed to return to Molesme after making a copy. A psalter written in Arras which Robert had owned in Molesme was among the books kept at Cîteaux, but a note added to it later records that its calendar and litany were unusable for the rite of the New Monastery. There is no way of knowing precisely how services were ordered in the very early years, but it was under Stephen Harding’s abbacy (1108/9–33) that major revisions were made to bring the liturgy in use at Cîteaux under a more systematic and uniform structure, primarily to ensure that the newly established daughter houses followed the same practices as the mother house.

‘Frames are principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters.’

‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text.’

The task of ‘framing the project’ of international human rights law is daunting to say the least. First, there is the sheer enormity and complexity of the international human rights law ‘project’: adequately mapping the subject and its key related issues is impossible in a whole book, let alone a short chapter. Secondly, it is daunting because of the sense of epistemic responsibility involved. Every framing inevitably involves selection – if not pre-selection – through the conscious (and/or unconscious) placing of focus upon features or factors considered to be significant and/or valuable. As Gitlin puts it, framing is a way of choosing, underlining and presenting ‘what exists, what happens and what matters’. In this sense, the founding document (or as Entman might put it, the inaugural ‘communicating text’) of international human rights law (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR) functions as a particularly potent form of framing, for it selects aspects of perceived reality, making them not just salient but symbolically central to the entire philosophical, moral, juridical order designated by the term ‘international human rights law’.

This chapter covers the history of the Cistercian Order from the time of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare up to the present. We begin with a survey of the state of the Order at the beginning of that period.

Cistercians in 1600

It is wise not to give too much credence to generalisations. Cistercian monasteries, although they belong to a centralised Order, are effectively autonomous. Despite protestations of unanimity, there has always been considerable variation among monasteries. Furthermore, monasteries in different regions formed different strategies to respond to different pressures. In the years leading up to 1600 the cohesion and uniformity envisaged by the foundational documents of the Order were no longer possible. There were several hundred Cistercian monasteries of monks and nuns, from Portugal to Scandinavia and from Ireland to Eastern Europe; there were more than 200 abbeys of monks in France alone. The political map of Europe had changed greatly since the twelfth century. With the rise of nation states, and as a result of hostilities and wars, the traditional structures of filiation and visitation were strained, and the practical jurisdiction of the General Chapter was considerably weakened.

In recent years, one of the most intense and interesting debates among mainstream scholars of international law has been whether human rights treaties ‘make a difference’. Oona Hathaway kicked off these controversies with a pathbreaking and subversive article suggesting that indeed they do make a difference – sometimes for the worse. Hathaway did not mean to bring a defeatist realism to scholarship, along the lines of the conservative scholars with whom liberals perpetually struggle. Instead, in documenting how easy it has been for states to gain the expressive benefits of treaty ratification without taking legal obligations to heart, with sometimes negative consequences for rights outcomes, Hathaway hoped to prompt a more sophisticated international regime. For example, she suggested, making ratification tougher or probationary for states would filter out or at least pose barriers to the ‘insincere ratifiers’ and thus make aggregate positive outcomes more likely.

Hathaway’s modest scepticism – though offered for the sake of the progressive realisation of human rights by means of international treaty law – seemed scandalous to some. In any case, now Beth Simmons is regarded as having ‘settled’ the debate about whether human rights law has positive effects. As one reviewer noted of her well-received book, Mobilizing for Human Rights, it ‘has closed the chapter on whether human rights treaties can make a difference.’ More broadly, it has been widely recognised as the most significant work in the field in many years. It is supposed not only to put the concern about insincere ratifiers in its place and thus to clamp down on the potentially creeping worry Hathaway introduced.

The Dictionnaire des auteurs cisterciens published in the 1970s lists some fifteen Cistercian writers active in the formative early twelfth century, a staggering one hundred thirty-eight for the full twelfth century, and another one hundred seventy-nine who lived on into the thirteenth century. Even allowing for some duplication in this count, readers will understand that a short article cannot introduce all of them. Only the best known Cistercian writers, and of them those whose works have been critically edited and/or are available in English, are presented here.

THE ‘FIRST FOUNDERS OF THIS CHURCH’: THE CISTERCIAN AUTHORS OF THE FORMATIVE YEARS

Stephen Harding (third abbot of Cîteaux, 1108/9–33, d. 1134) deserves pride of place in any list of Cistercian writers, even though his literary legacy is slight. It was Stephen who established the constitution, the Carta Caritatis and formed the character of what became the Cistercian Order.

An oblate at Sherborne Abbey in Dorset, the young Anglo-Saxon Harding left cloister and country in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, perhaps prey to ‘worldly nettles’ or perhaps wary of his new overlords. After studying and travelling through Europe, he re-entered monastic life at Molesme, recently founded by the Benedictine Robert and the hermit Alberic. In community discussions of Abbot Robert ’s plans for a another new foundation, as imaginatively depicted by William of Malmesbury, Stephen defended stricter fidelity to the Rule of Benedict as being in accord with reason.

When, in 1983, I ran the first-ever human rights course in my Law School only four brave and idealistic students registered, making me almost abandon the exercise. I told these pioneers that human rights are the conscience of law, practised by a few idealistic lawyers and invoked by dissidents and rebels. How different things look today. If only thirty years ago rights were the repressed conscience of the profession, they have now become its dominant rhetoric. No law student graduates without having taken a specialist course in human rights. Human rights have crept up everywhere in the curriculum. Textbooks on human rights and contract, tort, company, crime, trade, the environment and every other part of the law’s empire appear with an alarming regularity. As friends complain, all law teaching today seems to be about human rights. The dissident pioneers have become the established majority, the repressed idealism dominant consciousness, the protest ruling ideology.

‘Sooner or later, every discussion of law in contemporary society seems to turn to the subject of rights’ opens an influential collection on rights. Liberal jurisprudence has set itself the task to explain and celebrate this amazing turnaround. ‘The discourse of rights is pervasive and popular in politics, law and morality’ a more recent textbook opens boldly. ‘There is scarcely any position, opinion, claim, criticism or aspiration relating to social or political life that is not asserted and affirmed using the term “rights”. . . It is not enough to hold that a proposal will lead to an improvement in wellbeing or a reduction in suffering, unless it can also be presented as a recognition of someone’s rights, preferably their human rights.’ According to Robert Nozick’s ode to extreme liberalism: ‘Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).’

In 1098 a small group of monks left the Burgundian monastery of Molesme to establish a new monastery in the forest of Cîteaux, about 25 km south of the town of Dijon. By the end of the twelfth century this one community had spawned an international monastic Order with over 500 abbeys of men and an indeterminate number of women, spread from Spain to the Baltic, from Scotland to Sicily. Over the course of the century Cistercian monks became powerful figures in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Cistercian writings and spiritual ideas influenced the prevailing religious culture and many Cistercian monasteries became centres for economic and technological change.

Scholars have long debated the character of the new community at Cîteaux and the process by which the Cistercian Order formed. They have argued about Cîteaux’s relationship to older forms of monasticism and to movements of monastic and ecclesiastic reform, about the nature of the documents that claim to describe the foundation of this new Order and about the Order’s ideals and organisational structure. They have questioned the influence of its spiritual leaders, and the extent to which they articulated a unified Cistercian culture. They have asked whether this Order included women’s houses as well as those of men. And they have debated whether the monks’ political activities, economic success and growing status distinctions within their communities illustrate their early ideals or instead demonstrate a quick decline from their initial reform.

The Cistercians created in the course of the twelfth century the first monastic Order in the Western Church. By ‘monastic Order’ I mean an institution with regularised contacts among the monasteries, following common statutes and identifying itself in a separate tradition from other monastic traditions. Since the time of Emperor Louis the Pious (d. 840) virtually all monasteries had followed the Rule of Benedict, but its provisions deal solely with the individual monastery and provide no constitutional structure for regular contacts among monastic houses.

After the foundation of Cluny in 910, however, there did appear groups of monasteries bound to each other by tradition or by singular personalities, but until the Cistercians one can speak only of monastic congregations, not of Orders. If we use the term ordo monasticus, before the twelfth century, it means the entire monastic body pure and simple; those monasteries that had chosen to follow Benedict’s Rule.

The Cistercians changed everything, and so their constitutions and especially the institution of the General Chapter deserve close attention. For the monks who in 1098 left behind Molesme in Burgundy and established what they called the ‘ New Monastery’ (Novum monasterium), which later took the name Cîteaux , there was no intention of starting a new monastic Order. Under Robert, who had been abbot at Molesme, the New Monastery’s monks intended to follow the Rule of St Benedict more faithfully and perfectly. Their departure from Molesme, however, led to a complaint by the monks who stayed behind. They appealed to the pope, an unusual step for any Church institution at the time. He recalled Robert to Molesme. The abbot returned, together with some of the monks who had accompanied him, but a number remained in the new foundation, headed by the former prior, Alberic.

The earliest surviving reaction to the news of Bernard’s death on 20 August 1153 was written by Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford, who had met Bernard in northern France, during 1147 and 1148. He wrote to congratulate a friend, William de Hinet, who had recently joined Bernard’s Order, and possibly even his own monastery, and then to sympathise with him on Bernard’s death and to praise the qualities of the dead man. He began those praises by expressing his inability for the task, using the rhetorical device of praeteritio (literally: a passing over): ‘O who am I that I might worthily commemorate that holy pastor and that most famous and fecund abbey of Clairvaux?’ and then doing just that.

One sentence reflects the impression that Bernard, then in his late forties and already, by that day’s standards, an old man, had made on him. ‘He was a man horrible with filthiness, whose shrivelled flesh stuck everywhere to his bones, whose body never tasted too much wine, nor mouth any delicacies save for spiritual ones.’ Yet although he looked so appalling, he was ‘celebrated for his knowledge. Most well-known for holiness, most holy without deceit, a famous writer, eminent preacher, the mirror of his order, and enlarger of the church.’ That shrunken figure was produced largely by having strained his physical resources by long periods at prayer, often at night. As early as 1119 his physical condition was such that his fellow abbots allowed the bishop William of Champeaux to take him away from the monastery for twelve months to convalesce. Another picture of Bernard at an earlier stage of his life, by Geoffrey of Auxerre, who had first met Bernard in 1140, scarcely hints at how Bernard was ageing, except when he wrote ‘his body was very thin, and he seemed gaunt’.

In the preface we noticed one meaning of compendium, suggestive of a shortening or an abridgement. We start our substantive work here by recalling its Latin configuration, where a compendium was something ‘weighed or kept together. . . a gain or profit through saving’. A compendium of human rights law would be the collected gain, the saved wisdom, the amassed weight of ‘human’, ‘rights’ and ‘law’. Three contested concepts, long histories and complex practices are at stake. Their combination is weighty, profitable, its capital amassed and saved through the ages. Many tomes have been written and will be written about each of the three words. The term ‘human’ directs us away from what is other than humanity, the divine and the animal. Sacred and secular theologies as well as science are involved in defining the ‘human’ and determining its entitlements. The term ‘rights’ refers to ethics, morality and the law, to legal entitlements as well as to moral responsibilities. And the ‘law’ as institution and practice permeates every aspect of life and language. Every form of knowledge is affected by the law; every social relationship involves moral expectations and legal obligations. If the terms ‘human’ and ‘rights’ that precede it are to be taken seriously, every legal norm should aspire to promote the dignity of humanity.

Embracing the human

How does this Companion approach its responsibility to shorten and at the same time to produce ‘gain or profit’ through our saving of knowledge? In so vast a field our chapters must both cover their own ground and stand for something beyond their immediate remit – only in this way can the particular simultaneously evoke the general. Take first this idea of the human. In his ‘anatomy of rights jurisprudence’, Costas Douzinas in Chapter 3 considers the limitations in ‘conceptions of personhood’ that flow out of the work of those philosophers (principally here Alan Gewirth and James Griffin) who seek to impose a rational approach to human rights, above the messiness of history and the contingent meaning of words. Douzinas argues that the ‘“correct interpretation” of the capacity for rational action has been and still is a strategy used to exclude people’.

Preface

The ambition behind this volume is double. It is to offer an up-to-date cross-disciplinary introduction to the Cistercian Order and to reflect the character and interests of current scholarship. The content is structured in three sections. The first treats, in three chapters, the history of the Order from its foundation until today. Then follow two thematic sections, the main focus of which is the medieval period. The first, ‘Structure and materiality’, deals with the Order’s organisation, its material culture and agricultural production, and with the ever-present dynamic between unity and diversity. The second, ‘Religious mentality’, centres on authors and educators and on the ideas, texts, preaching and music which emerged from Cistercian monasteries. The chapters stand as individual essays on different aspects of the Order – and not necessarily in unison. In this sense this volume mirrors the composite nature of the Order, and of the research into it.

Sincere thanks are due to all of the authors for their brave and spirited response to the academic challenge, not to mention the severe word limit, and to Terryl N. Kinder and I. Gorevich as well as Laura Morris and Anna Lowe of Cambridge University Press.

The Cistercian Order has sometimes been unfairly disparaged as hostile to art, or as embracing an aesthetic so profoundly plain that the interiors of their monasteries would have seemed oases of visual repose, free from distracting artistic ornament. The legislation promulgated by many of the earliest generations of Cistercians, and the shells of surviving Cistercian abbeys, might reinforce this impression. Nonetheless, despite legislative prohibitions against colourful, figurative decorations in glass, manuscripts or sculpture which were enacted by the middle of the twelfth century, Cistercian monks lived and worshipped in a visually lush environment. Their churches, typically emptied of original furniture, windows and pavements after the Reformation or the French Revolution, would once have been carpeted with patterned tiles and the windows filled with decorative glass. Their liturgical readings were furnished by colourful illuminated manuscripts, the texts of which were highlighted with giant painted initials, and their charters were guaranteed with delicately wrought figurative seals. Monasteries sometimes received manuscripts enhanced with complex painted figural scenes from wealthy non-Cistercian patrons, or noble postulants to the Order. Furthermore, by two centuries after the Order’s foundation, enthusiasm for strict aesthetic asceticism had waned in many houses, where monks and nuns installed elaborate representational stained-glass panels, embroidered lavish figurative vestments and commissioned luxurious liturgical manuscripts for personal use. Thus while the Cistercians’ artistic legislation may have set the Order apart from the mainstream, by and large the art which characterised it did not.

As with Cistercian architecture, Cistercian art is typified by a certain degree of uniformity engendered by the Order’s well-developed bureaucracy, the lively exchange of monks, manuscripts and correspondence between houses and the artistic legislation intended to delimit some artistic production. Yet from the earliest days of the Order, the pioneer monks of Cîteaux embraced the artistic models provided by their local environment and the aesthetic heritage of the individual monks attracted to its houses from all over Europe. They also, by choice or necessity, bought and were given artworks made by artists who were not Cistercians. Both phenomena led to such artistic diversity that it is difficult to identify a ‘Cistercian’ type or style of art.

What the world has seen since the atrocious terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the counter-terrorism measures states have taken by way of their response, can be characterised as the worst-ever backlash against the promotion and protection of human rights since their post-Second World War emergence in the UN Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948). In this sense, the ‘long decade’ has meant the winding back of the clock by sixty years. As many of the challenges posed by states in relation to the normative code of legally binding human rights relate to what was a major achievement in 1976, namely the entry into force as legally binding international treaties of the twin Covenants, one could equally well say that in legal terms the reversal that began in 2001 was of twenty-five years of human rights protection. But if we focus on practices that have reduced the human person to a mere means, such as in the idea of torturing one individual in the expectation of a benefit to a large group of persons, we can speak instead about turning back the clock by 200 years, to times before the wide approval of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy with its imperative of treating every human being as an end in him- or herself.

When individuals in liberal democratic societies attempt to win greater control over decision-making about their bodies they are engaged in an unequal power struggle with the state. In order to win more freedom they must of necessity go before the law in order to assert these rights or lobby the government for a change in legislation. This active intervention by the individual to win such power has been defined by Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas as biological citizenship. This term describes the phenomenon whereby individuals increasingly define their citizenship in terms of their rights to life, health and cure. This active form of citizenship also has an ethical dimension for Rose. Rose uses the term ethopolitics to define this aspect of biological citizenship. Within this ethopolitical mode individuals ‘use their individual and collective lives, the evidence of their own existence . . . [to] demand civil and human rights . . . They call for recognition, respect, resources . . . control over medical and technical expertise.’ Rose’s notion of ethopolitics allows us to visualise the potential of deliberative participative politics within the context of reproductive rights.