Another Witness to the Cistercian Statutes of 1257
December 2, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition
Part-Leaf from a Dismembered Witness
to the 1257 Codification of the Statutes
for the Cistercian Order
A Part-Leaf, now on its own, carries parts of the Chapter De Conversis (“On the Lay Brothers”)
from Distinctio (“Section”) XIV (out of XV in total)
in the Codification of 1257 of Statutes for the Cistercian Order
This installment of our blog on Manuscript Studies identifies a fragmentary 13th-century leaf on vellum with monastic rules in Latin. Now reduced to a single column of its original double columns of text, the fragment carries parts of the Statutes of the Cistercian Order, in a mid-–13th-century version — or, rather, extension — of those Statutes. That extended version appears in full in a few other extant manuscripts. Mildred Budny describes the fragment and its testimony.