Creating Cistercian Nuns

In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century.

Anne E. Lester is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder.

With Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne Lester has made a vital contribution to our understanding of the deeply nuanced relationship between the thirteenth-century women's religious movement in Champagne and the apparatus of the Cistercian order. It fills several important lacunae and reconfigures the historiography. This is a book that will be read for some time to come.

Mary Forman:

The book will be a welcome addition to the academic study of monastic and church history and gender studies.

Lester examines the transition and transformation of informal communities of religious women living the apostolic life—characterized by charity, penitential piety, and poverty—into organized communities of Cistercian nuns after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).... The author concentrates on Champagne, where some twenty Cistercian convents were established in the 13th century, and her impressive analysis of unpublished archival sources offers new perspectives on the dynamics of religious reform and the monastic life after 1215.

John Van Engen:

Anne Lester's Creating Cistercian Nuns is a wonderful achievement. This book reconstructs ground-up a whole new socioreligious landscape in and around the country of Champagne while also contributing broadly to a new and evolving narrative of women's religious life in the thirteenth century. Lester's craft in this first monograph is remarkably mature, an ability to construct landscape and narrative out of the raw stuff of documentary records and to do so in pleasing prose.

Martha G. Newman, University of Texas at Austin:

Anne E. Lester illuminates the lived world of thirteenth-century Cistercian nuns by portraying the establishment of women's houses in Champagne as the institutionalization of a local movement of female piety. By exploring the vexed problem of Cistercian women, Creating Cistercian Nuns enhances our understanding of the Cistercian order, the social history of Champagne, and movements of religious women.

Sharon Farmer, UC Santa Barbara, author of Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris:

In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester makes a number of important and compelling arguments that will change our views of the relationship between the Cistercian order and women in the thirteenth century, the institutional shape and function of Cistercian nunneries, and the range of institutional responses to the urge to live the apostolic life in thirteenth-century France.