Incarceration and Liberation: Prisons in the Cistercian Monastery

"Incarceration and Liberation: Prisons in the Cistercian Monastery." This article explores the means by which Cistercians from the thirteenth century were able to use and justify imprisonment in their monastic houses. It traces the invention of the monastic prison from the advent of cenobitic monasticism and explores the discursive construction of captivity as a fundamental element of western monastic life. The author particularly looks at the tension between spiritual understandings of freedom in confinement, and the reality of actual incarceration in a monastic setting. The article positions a history of monastic prisons within specific cultural contexts; in this way, it departs from a traditional reading of imprisonment as part of legal and political history. In tracing the meanings given to imprisonment by Cistercians, the author contends that medieval understandings and uses of imprisonment were closely linked to understandings of space and that the specific historical and ecclesiastical contexts of the early thirteenth century were pivotal to Cistercian justifications of incarceration.