Research

Constance Berman developed an interest in medieval history at Carleton College in Minnesota and did her graduate work at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she was admitted into the research seminar of the late David J. Herlihy. Her first book, Medieval Agriculture (1986) grew out of a doctoral dissertation based on archival materials from southern France. Berman demonstrated in it that the contributions to medieval economic growth of the Cistercians (a monastic reform group of the twelfth century) were not as pioneers on new, undeveloped lands, but as managerial specialists, entrepreneurs who reorganized the landscape and systems of cultivation by the creation of vast granges and the use of lay-brothers and lay-sisters who joined monks and nuns to produce their own food. Her findings have changed what historians expect to find in investigating Cistercian economies in medieval Europe.

A second project on Cistercian nuns came upon widespread denials that women were part of that Order, but abundant archival evidence that they were, and that by the end of the thirteenth century Cistercian nuns may have constituted a majority. Explaining this and other discrepancies between traditional assumptions and the archival evidence about early Cistercian history led to The Cistercian Evolution (2000), which incorporated women into the Order’s history. Its more important contribution has been to challenge traditional dates for the Order’s new administrative structure and those of its early narrative and constitutional texts. In doing so, the scope of the book extends far beyond the history of southern France alone, and its impact far beyond the history of the Cistercians, because so many other twelfth-century institutions have been dated on the basis of what were assumed to be secure dates for Cistercian documents. Berman’s findings are based on long study of minute details of published texts and microfilms, but also upon her codicological evaluation of surviving manuscripts in situ, something which had not been systematically undertaken earlier. She concludes that the Cistercian creation of a new institution in the twelfth century, the religious Order as an umbrella group having oversight over many individual monastic communities, came considerably later than once thought, that the expansion of the Cistercian order was not by colonization from Burgundy, but by incorporation, and that Cistercian authors writing in the second part of the twelfth century not only left out any discussion of Cistercian nuns, but assumed that institutions created after the 1140s had been in place for much longer than was once thought. This second challenge to the traditional historiography of the Order by Berman has ruffled considerably more feathers than the first. Integral to understanding the debate is an exchange on H-net France with Bruce Venarde, and Berman’s “A Response to McGuire and Waddell,” Cîteaux 53 (2002, appeared fall 2003): 333-37.

Berman’s larger study of communities of Cistercian women and their relationships to powerful female patrons has resulted already in a number of publications, including a volume of translated documents for teaching, Women and Monasticism in Medieval Europe (2002), and "Abbeys for Cistercian Nuns in the Ecclesiastical Province of Sens," Revue Mabillon 73 (1997): 83-113; "Cistercian Women and Tithes," Cîteaux 49 (1998): 95-128; "Were There Twelfth-Century Cistercian Nuns?"Church History 68 (1999): 824-64; and "The Labors of Hercules, the Cartulary, Church and Abbey for Nuns of La Cour-Notre-Dame-de-Michery," The Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 33-70, to which a response was published by A. E. Lester and W. C. Jordan in The Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001): 43-54. Berman has now nearly completed The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys for Women and their Property. There she argues in response to Lester and Jordan in her introduction that the la Cour-Notre Dame debate shows how our assumptions have been biased by a misogynous agenda about monastic women that derives from the middle ages. She is showing in this book that the long-denied expansion of Cistercian abbeys for women in places like northern France reflects a particular gathering together of circumstances allowing powerful female patrons and enthusiastic female monastic recruits to make active choices for the life of Cistercian nuns and to found communities that were not poor, not marginal, and not powerless.

Berman’s concern to bring new interpretations of the history of the medieval Church into the classroom has led to her newest book-length publication, an anthology of articles by fifteen trend-setting authors, Medieval Religion: New Approaches (2005), to which she adds extensive introductory remarks on institutions and theory, women and gender, the history of art and illustration, and medieval Christian reaction to Jews and Islam, including Crusades. Berman has also published many articles, dictionary entries and over 75 book reviews.

The recipient of many grants and awards, in 2003-04 Berman held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. She is currently holds a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow for working on After the Millennium: Women’s Work and Economic Development in Medieval Europe, 1050-1250 AD, for which she received initial support from a University of Iowa May Brodbeck Fellowship in the Humanities in 2000.