This weighty (quite literally) and richly illustrated volume is the result of an international conference held at Chaumont in 2017. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines (history, archaeology, art history, archives), this gathering sought to generate new insights with regards to the history of the Cistercian abbey of Morimond (Haute-Marne), the fourth of the four great daughter abbeys of Cîteaux, which was then celebrating its 900th anniversary (Morimond's foundation has long been dated to 1115, but a reassessment of the sources by the late Michel Parisse means the date of 1117/1118 is today generally seen as reflecting historical reality). The resulting proceedings are therefore to be situated alongside similar volumes published in France in the wake of scholarly meetings held to celebrate other Cistercian foundation anniversaries (for example, Savigny in 2012, Clairvaux in 2015), as well as within a tradition of recent conferences held in relation to Morimond itself, specifically those organised in 1992 (‘Morimond et son Empire’) and 2003 (‘L'Abbaye Cistercienne de Morimond: Histoire et Rayonnement’). However, unlike some of these earlier gatherings (both those held in relation to Morimond and those for Cistercian houses elsewhere), which focused either exclusively (or very nearly) on the medieval period, the 2017 meeting brought together scholars from across both a wide range of disciplines and time periods. The result, therefore, is a set of proceedings covering not just the entire monastic history of Morimond, but also the period after, when the site, which was largely razed to the ground in the early nineteenth century, began to attract its first visitors (specifically artists). Finally, given the extent to which Morimond established daughter houses throughout Europe, many of them successful in their own right, the proceedings of the 2017 conference also contain papers focusing on Morimond's impact not just in France, but also Italy, Spain and Central Europe (unlike some of its contemporaries, which established daughters throughout the British Isles, the abbey had only one house in England, namely that of Dore in Herefordshire).
The volume itself contains twenty-four articles divided across four parts. The first focuses on the archaeology and fabric of the monastic site, with articles dedicated to Morimond's hydraulics (Erwan Madigand and Benoît Rouzeau), its general construction (Cédric Moulis and Benoît Rouzeau), its guest house (Benoît Rouzeau) and its burials (Hubert Flammarion), among other things. Of these, the study by Hubert Flammarion of the ‘Nécropole de Morimond’ (pp. 89–129) brings together a wide range of source material to study a subject about which, in Morimond's case, almost nothing had been previously known. As Flammarion himself notes (pp. 95, 99), burial within a Cistercian house was ostensibly bound by strict regulations, which stipulated not only who could be buried in the abbey, but where and in what manner, with these regulations changing subtly over the centuries. Cistercian burial practices are therefore an extremely useful lens through which to examine the ways in which Cistercian ideals came up against Cistercian (and other) realities. As the case of Morimond itself makes clear, however, any analysis of this particular topic often requires the painstaking reassembly of evidence across a range of written source types (charters, antiquarian works, inscriptions, visitor accounts etc.), given the near total destruction of many Cistercian sites. This Flammarion achieves with success, tracing in forensic detail the development of burial practices at Morimond with regard both to the monks themselves (in particular the abbots) and to lay benefactors. The chapter concludes with an extremely useful listing of all those individuals known to have been interred at Morimond, which researchers working on the same topic at other Cistercian houses will find enormously helpful for comparative purposes. Also of interest in this first section of the book is the article by Samuel Mourin (pp. 131–49), who examines nineteenth-century artistic interpretations of the Morimond site. Drawings by artists such as François-Alexandre Pernot (1793–1865) have long been used by architectural historians to study parts of the abbey's fabric that have since fallen to ruin, but Mourin looks first and foremost to situate their work at Morimond within wider artistic movements such as Romanticism, the picturesque and literary illustrations. The result is an article at once illuminating and wide-ranging, something that is very often promised by conference proceedings of this sort but not always delivered.
The book's second and third sections deal, respectively, with the abbey's interactions with its estates and possessions in France, and its wider filiation throughout Europe. There is, of course, not room here to comment in detail on all the articles contained therein. Their range, however, is impressive, with the second section containing articles stretching across nearly all Morimond's monastic history, from the little-studied career of Henry de Carinthie, former monk and then bishop of Troyes (1146–69), whose achievements are examined by Patrick Corbet (pp. 153–75), to the reconstruction of the abbey's network of granges in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, which is analysed by Sylvain Skora for the period up to 1715 (pp. 255–68). The third section is equally wide-ranging (this time, geographically, as noted above), with the whole being prefaced by a very useful article by Alexis Grélois (pp. 325–36) exploring the general mechanics by which Cistercian filiations came into existence and their impact upon the general harmony of the order.
By comparison, the book's fourth part, comprised of a single article by Jean-Francois Leroux-Dhuys (pp. 409–25), which examines Cistercian responses to the end of their religious life following the French Revolution, feels somewhat tacked on as an afterthought. (Indeed, it is unclear why Samuel Mourin's article was not included in this section, thereby at least giving the whole more substance.) This fourth section is followed by a useful bibliography and index (divided into both people and places), as well as by abstracts in French, German and English, the last of which could have benefitted from being proof-read by a native speaker. This, and the point about the brevity of the fourth section, are but minor quibbles, however (as is the initial observation that the book, printed on thick, glossy paper, is extremely heavy – nearly 2kg in weight – and thus somewhat uncomfortable to handle). These points aside, the editors have produced a valuable and engaging book that largely achieves what it aims to do, such that those with an interest in the history of Morimond, or of the Cistercian Order more generally, will find much here to sink their teeth into.
