Brian Patrick McGuire tells about his life-long immersion in Cistercian Studies and the Cistercian Studies Conference in Kalamazoo
The city of Kalamazoo in Western Michigan is best known for the Glenn Miller song “I’ve got a girl in Kalamazoo” but for the past fifty years it has been home every May to an international conference of medieval studies which now brings 3000 scholars from all over the globe to Western Michigan University for four intense days of seminars, lectures and events focusing on life and learning in medieval Europe.
One segment of the Medieval Congress is made up of the Cistercian Studies Conference. Here monks, nuns and lay scholars delve into the long history of the Cistercian Order, founded in Burgundy in the 12th century and still alive today in more than a hundred houses for men and for women all over the globe. The idea of the Conference is to make it possible to living Cistercians to talk about their heritage with lay persons. Some of these are Roman Catholics, but there are just as many Protestants and those with no religious faith but with a fascination for the group of contemplative monks that changed the geography of medieval Europe with their 700 foundations. Each of us is encouraged to give a 20 minute paper, followed by 10 minutes of discussion, and with three papers in a session, and three sessions in a day, plus an evening session, it is an intense and exhausting experience!
I first came to the Cistercian Conference in 1989 and was amazed to discover the openness of the monks and nuns to critical studies of their traditions and past. I was told that I was a “Cistercian scholar” and was welcome to visit Cistercian monasteries in the United States and lecture on the topics that I presented at Kalamazoo. So I am one of a privileged group of lay scholars who first visit the United States by spending a week in a monastery and live the daily life of monks or nuns and then come to Kalamazoo. I have just come from the Abbey of New Melleray in Iowa, founded by Irish monks in 1849 and now home to about 30 monks who listened to three days of my presentations on the history of private prayer and the life and writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, the best-known Cistercian of the twelfth century.
This year’s Cistercian Studies Conference will be especially memorable, for the key figure in Cistercian studies, Professor Rozanne Elder, who has been based at Western Michigan University since the 1970s, is retiring from her professorship. A successor has been chosen, but the future of the Cistercian Conference is in question, with a university that like other American institutions of higher learning is trying to cut back on expenses. It remains to be seen if Western Michigan will continue to house what Rozanne Elder helped create, the Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies, or if it will have to move elsewhere. If so, the Cistercian Conference would not be allowed to continue offering twelve sessions over three days with scholars from North America, Europe and Asia. There will no longer be a Cistercian Conference separate from the Medieval Congress and a wonderful meeting place of kindred spirits will be lost.
The modern Cistercians used to be called Trappists, from the branch of the movement that was reformed in the 17th century, but most Cistercians today prefer their medieval name and not the name derived from the strict abbey of “La Trappe”. Thus the initials of these Cistercians remains OCSO, meaning the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. The Trappists were famous for never speaking, and there are still monks and nuns alive today who can remember the old regime when they only spoke to each other on special occasions. Today the Cistercians are much better known for loving to talk, and at Kalamazoo the talk will spread out of the lecture hall to the coffee room and the pathways of the university, bursting with spring flowers and a sense of renewal.
Brian Patrick McGuire – Professor Emeritus, Roskilde University
FEATURED PHOTO:
Abbey of New Melleray in Iowa. Notice the austere architecture, true to the aesthetic designs of Bernard of Clairvaux
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Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies
Selected Works of Brian Patrick McGuire:
Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350-1250
by Brian Patrick McGuire
Cornell University Press (1988) 2010
ISBN-10: 0801476720
ISBN-13: 978-0801476723’
ABSTRACT:
Human beings have always formed personal friendships. Some cultures have left behind the evidence of philosophical discussion; some have provided only private or semipublic letters. By comparing these, one discerns the effect exercised by the society in which the writers lived, its opportunities, and its restrictions. The cloistered monks of medieval Europe, who have bequeathed a rich literary legacy on the subject, have always had to take into account the overwhelming fact of community. Brian Patrick McGuire finds that in seeking friends and friendship, medieval men and women sought self-knowledge, the enjoyment of life, the commitment of community, and the experience of God.
First published in 1988, Friendship and Community has been widely debated, inspiring the current interest among medievalists in the subject of friendship. It has also informed other fields within medieval history, including monasticism, spirituality, psychology, and the relationship between self and community. In a new introduction to the Cornell edition, McGuire surveys the critical reaction to the original edition and subsequent research on the subject of medieval friendship.
The Difficult Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux and His Tradition by Brian Patrick McGuire
Cistercian Publications Inc. 1989
ISBN-10: 0879076267
ISBN-13: 978-0879076269
ABSTRACT:
Controversial in his own day, Bernard still today excites both admiration and dislike. McGuire looks at various facets of Bernard’s personality, and at the enduring legacy that has followed him for over eight centuries.
Conflict and Continuity at Om Abbey A Cistercian Experience in Medieval Denmark
by McGuire, Brian Patrick
Museum Tusculanum Press 1976
ISBN 978-87-7289-226-9
A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux
Ed. by Brian Patrick McGuire
Series: Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition
Brill 2011
ISBN-10: 9004201394
ISBN-13: 978-9004201392
ABSTRACT:
Bernard of Clairvaux emerges from these studies as a vibrant, challenging and illuminating representative of the monastic culture of the twelfth century. In taking on Peter Abelard and the new scholasticism he helped define the very world he opposed and thus contributed to the renaissance of the twelfth century.
CONTRIBUTORS
Christopher Holdsworth, Michael Casey, James France, Diane Reilly, John Sommerfeldt, Mette B. Bruun, Burcht Pranger, Chrysogonus Waddell, E. Rozanne Elder, and Brian Patrick McGuire.
Friendship and Faith: Cistercian Men, Women, and Their Stories, 1100-1250
Brian Patrick McGuire
Series: Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS742
Ashgate Variorum 2002
ISBN: 978-0-86078-892-8
ISBN: 9780860788928
In these articles Professor McGuire explores the riches of the Cistercian exemplum tradition. These texts are made up of brief stories, often with a miraculous content, which provided moral support for novices and monks in Cistercian abbeys all over Europe in the High Middle Ages. The Cistercians have been seen mainly in terms of their great writers like Bernard of Clairvaux and the impressive buildings they left behind. But Cistercian literature also provides us with more humble insights from daily life, shedding light on questions of sexuality, anger, depression, and bonds of friendship, also between monks and nuns. They bring a freshness of insight and immediate experience, and their seeming naivety lets us be aware of monks’ commitment to each other in individual and community bonds. In Cistercian storytelling, the Gospel’s message meets an historical context and bears witness to a transformation of Christian life and idealism, while at the same time allowing us precious insights into how ordinary men and women, not just monks and nuns, lived and thought.