Constance Brittain Bouchard's Books

Sword, Miter, and Cloister

Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980-1198

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Sword, Miter, and Cloister

Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980-1198

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

Bouchard provides a fresh perspective on social and ecclesiastical life in the High Middle Ages, drawing on a vast range of primary sources to reveal the surprisingly close relationship between monasteries and the nobility.

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470

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801475260

ISBN 13

9780801475269

Strong of Body, Brave and Noble

Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Strong of Body, Brave and Noble

Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

Medieval society was dominated by its knights and nobles. The literature created in medieval Europe was primarily a literature of knightly deeds, and the modern imagination has also been captured by these leaders and warriors. This book explores the nature of the nobility, focusing on France in the High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). Constance Brittain Bouchard examines their families; their relationships with peasants, townspeople, and clerics; and the images of them fashioned in medieval literary texts. She incorporates throughout a consideration of noble women and the nobility's attitude toward women. Research in the last two generations has modified and expanded modern understanding of who knights and nobles were; how they used authority, war, and law; and what position they held within the broader society. Even the concepts of feudalism, courtly love, and chivalry, once thought to be self-evident aspects of medieval society, have been seriously questioned. Bouchard presents bold new interpretations of medieval literature as both reflecting and criticizing the role of the nobility and their behavior. She offers the first synthesis of this scholarship in accessible form, inviting general readers as well as students and professional scholars to a new understanding of aristocratic role and function.

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Page Count

220

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801485487

ISBN 13

9780801485480

Those of My Blood

Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Those of My Blood

Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

For those who ruled medieval society, the family was the crucial social unit, made up of those from whom property and authority were inherited and those to whom it passed. One's kin could be one's closest political and military allies or one's fiercest enemies. While the general term used to describe family members was consanguinei mei, "those of my blood," not all of those relations-parents, siblings, children, distant cousins, maternal relatives, paternal ancestors, and so on-counted as true family in any given time, place, or circumstance. In the early and high Middle Ages, the "family" was a very different group than it is in modern society, and the ways in which medieval men and women conceptualized and structured the family unit changed markedly over time. Focusing on the Frankish realm between the eighth and twelfth centuries, Constance Brittain Bouchard outlines the operative definitions of "family" in this period when there existed various and flexible ways by which individuals were or were not incorporated into the family group. Even in medieval patriarchal society, women of the aristocracy, who were considered outsiders by their husbands and their husbands' siblings and elders, were never completely marginalized and paradoxically represented the very essence of "family" to their male children. Bouchard also engages in the ongoing scholarly debate about the nobility around the year 1000, arguing that there was no clear point of transition from amorphous family units to agnatically structured kindred. Instead, she points out that great noble families always privileged the male line of descent, even if most did not establish father-son inheritance until the eleventh or twelfth century. Those of My Blood clarifies the complex meanings of medieval family structure and family consciousness and shows the many ways in which negotiations of power within the noble family can help explain early medieval politics.

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262

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081220140X

ISBN 13

9780812201406

Rewriting Saints and Ancestors

Memory and Forgetting in France, 5-12

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Rewriting Saints and Ancestors

Memory and Forgetting in France, 5-12

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

Thinkers in medieval France constantly reconceptualized what had come before, interpreting past events to give validity to the present and help control the future. The long-dead saints who presided over churches and the ancestors of established dynasties were an especially crucial part of creative memory, Constance Brittain Bouchard contends. In Rewriting Saints and Ancestors she examines how such ex post facto accounts are less an impediment to the writing of accurate history than a crucial tool for understanding the Middle Ages. Working backward through time, Bouchard discusses twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies or reworked into narratives of disaster and triumph, ninth-century churchmen deliberately forging supposedly late antique documents as weapons against both kings and other churchmen, and sixth- and seventh-century Gallic writers coming to terms with an early Christianity that had neither the saints nor the monasteries that would become fundamental to religious practice. As they met with political change and social upheaval, each generation decided which events of the past were worth remembering and which were to be reinterpreted or quietly forgotten. By considering memory as an analytic tool, Bouchard not only reveals the ways early medieval writers constructed a useful past but also provides new insights into the nature of record keeping, the changing ways dynasties were conceptualized, the relationships of the Merovingian and Carolingian kings to the church, and the discovery (or invention) of Gaul's earliest martyrs.

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Page Count

379

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812290089

ISBN 13

9780812290080

Holy Entrepreneurs

Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Holy Entrepreneurs

Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

The twelfth century was characterized by intense spirituality as well as rapid economic development. Drawing on unprecedented research, Constance Brittain Bouchard demonstrates that the Cistercian monks of Burgundy were exemplary in both spheres. Bouchard explores the web of economic ties that linked the Cistercian monasteries with their secular neighbors, especially the knights, and reaches some surprising conclusions about Cistercian attitudes.

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Page Count

260

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501721038

ISBN 13

9781501721038

Three Cartularies from Thirteenth Century Auxerre

By: Constance Bouchard

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Three Cartularies from Thirteenth Century Auxerre

By: Constance Bouchard

This edition presents the recently rediscovered episcopal cartulary of Auxerre, composed in the 1280s but assumed lost since the French Revolution. Along with confirmations by popes, quarrel settlements with counts, and agreements with the bishop’s tenants, the cartulary contains documents that were previously unknown, notably several papal decisions. Auxerre was unusually well documented for the period 800–1200, but little information on the bishopric’s history after 1200 has been available until now. The text contains a wealth of information about relationships between church leaders and other churches, between churches and secular leaders, and details on peasant rights and obligations. This edition also includes the short thirteenth-century cartularies of the nuns of St.-Julien and of the cathedral chapter, the latter existing only in fragmentary form. With full annotation of people and places and English-language summaries, these cartularies make a valuable contribution to our understanding of this significant episcopal centre’s history.

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Page Count

273

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442664010

ISBN 13

9781442664012

Negotiation and Resistance

Peasant Agency in High Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Negotiation and Resistance

Peasant Agency in High Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

In Negotiation and Resistance, Constance Brittain Bouchard challenges familiar depictions of the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of impoverished and powerless workers. Peasants in eleventh- and twelfth-century France had far more scope for action, self-determination, and resistance to oppressive treatment—that is, for agency—than they are usually credited with having. Through innovative readings of documents collected in medieval cartularies, Bouchard finds that while peasants lived hard, impoverished lives, they were able to negotiate, individually or collectively, to better their position, present cases in court, and make their own decisions about such fundamental issues as inheritance or choice of marriage partner. Negotiation and Resistance upends the received view of this period in French history as one in which lords dealt harshly and without opposition toward subservient peasants, offering numerous examples of peasants standing up for themselves.

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Page Count

245

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501766600

ISBN 13

9781501766602

"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted"

The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted"

The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

In high medieval France, men and women saw the world around them as the product of tensions between opposites. Imbued with a Christian culture in which a penniless preacher was also the King of Kings and the last were expected to be first, twelfth-century thinkers brought order to their lives through the creation of opposing categories. In a highly original work, Constance Brittain Bouchard examines this poorly understood component of twelfth-century thought, one responsible, in her view, for the fundamental strangeness of that culture to modern thinking.Scholars have long recognized that dialectical reasoning was the basic approach to philosophical, legal, and theological matters in the high Middle Ages. Bouchard argues that this way of thinking and categorizing—which she terms a "discourse of opposites"—permeated all aspects of medieval thought. She rejects suggestions that it was the result of imprecision, and provides evidence that people of that era sought not to reconcile opposing categories but rather to maintain them. Bouchard scrutinizes the medieval use of opposites in five broad areas: scholasticism, romance, legal disputes, conversion, and the construction of gender. Drawing on research in a series of previously unedited charters and the earliest glossa manuscripts, she demonstrates that this method of constructing reality was a constitutive element of the thought of the period.

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Page Count

234

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501716646

ISBN 13

9781501716645

Those of My Blood

Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Those of My Blood

Creating Noble Families in Medieval Francia

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Page Count

262

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081220140X

ISBN 13

9780812201406

"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble"

Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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"Strong of Body, Brave and Noble"

Chivalry and Society in Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

Medieval society was dominated by its knights and nobles. The literature created in medieval Europe was primarily a literature of knightly deeds, and the modern imagination has also been captured by these leaders and warriors. This book explores the nature of the nobility, focusing on France in the High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). Constance Brittain Bouchard examines their families; their relationships with peasants, townspeople, and clerics; and the images of them fashioned in medieval literary texts. She incorporates throughout a consideration of noble women and the nobility's attitude toward women.Research in the last two generations has modified and expanded modern understanding of who knights and nobles were; how they used authority, war, and law; and what position they held within the broader society. Even the concepts of feudalism, courtly love, and chivalry, once thought to be self-evident aspects of medieval society, have been seriously questioned. Bouchard presents bold new interpretations of medieval literature as both reflecting and criticizing the role of the nobility and their behavior. She offers the first synthesis of this scholarship in accessible form, inviting general readers as well as students and professional scholars to a new understanding of aristocratic role and function.

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Page Count

215

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501713299

ISBN 13

9781501713293

Negotiation and Resistance

Peasant Agency in High Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Negotiation and Resistance

Peasant Agency in High Medieval France

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Page Count

184

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501767259

ISBN 13

9781501767258

Three Cartularies from Thirteenth Century Auxerre

By: Constance Bouchard

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Three Cartularies from Thirteenth Century Auxerre

By: Constance Bouchard

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Page Count

273

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442664010

ISBN 13

9781442664012

Sword, Miter, and Cloister

Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980-1198

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Sword, Miter, and Cloister

Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980-1198

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Page Count

470

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801475260

ISBN 13

9780801475269

Holy Entrepreneurs

Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Holy Entrepreneurs

Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Page Count

260

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501721038

ISBN 13

9781501721038

"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted"

The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted"

The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Page Count

234

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501716646

ISBN 13

9781501716645

Rewriting Saints and Ancestors

Memory and Forgetting in France, 500-1200

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Rewriting Saints and Ancestors

Memory and Forgetting in France, 500-1200

By: Constance Brittain Bouchard

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Page Count

384

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812246365

ISBN 13

9780812246360

The Cistercian Evolution

The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe

By: Constance Hoffman Berman

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The Cistercian Evolution

The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe

By: Constance Hoffman Berman

According to the received history, the Cistercian order was founded in Cîteaux, France, in 1098 by a group of Benedictine monks who wished for a stricter community. They sought a monastic life that called for extreme asceticism, rejection of feudal revenues, and manual labor for monks. Their third leader, Stephen Harding, issued a constitution, the Carta Caritatis, that called for the uniformity of custom in all Cistercian monasteries and the establishment of an annual general chapter meeting at Cîteaux. The Cistercian order grew phenomenally in the mid-twelfth century, reaching beyond France to Portugal in the west, Sweden in the north, and the eastern Mediterranean, ostensibly through a process of apostolic gestation, whereby members of a motherhouse would go forth to establish a new house. The abbey at Clairvaux, founded by Bernard in 1115, was alone responsible for founding 68 of the 338 Cistercian abbeys in existence by 1153. But this well-established view of a centrally organized order whose founders envisioned the shape and form of a religious order at its prime is not borne out in the historical record. Through an investigation of early Cistercian documents, Constance Hoffman Berman proves that no reliable reference to Stephen's Carta Caritatis appears before the mid-twelfth century, and that the document is more likely to date from 1165 than from 1119. The implications of this fact are profound. Instead of being a charter by which more than 300 Cistercian houses were set up by a central authority, the document becomes a means of bringing under centralized administrative control a large number of loosely affiliated and already existing monastic houses of monks as well as nuns who shared Cistercian customs. The likely reason for this administrative structuring was to check the influence of the overdominant house of Clairvaux, which threatened the authority of Cîteaux through Bernard's highly successful creation of new monastic communities. For centuries the growth of the Cistercian order has been presented as a spontaneous spirituality that swept western Europe through the power of the first house at Cîteaux. Berman suggests instead that the creation of the religious order was a collaborative activity, less driven by centralized institutions; its formation was intended to solve practical problems about monastic administration. With the publication of The Cistercian Evolution, for the first time the mechanisms are revealed by which the monks of Cîteaux reshaped fact to build and administer one of the most powerful and influential religious orders of the Middle Ages.

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Page Count

407

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812200799

ISBN 13

9780812200799

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