Notes

1. Rule of St Benedict, chapter 36: ‘Of the sick brethren’.
2. Les Ecclesiastica Officia Cisterciens du xii siecle, ed. D. Choisselet and P. Vernet (Reinigue, 1989). 92: 20-22 (pp. 264).
3. See, for example, the satirical verse, ‘De Visitatione Abbatis’, which describes how the abbot conducting visitation indulges in meat and other delicacies from the infirmary, ‘De Visitatione Abbatis’ in The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Map, coll. and ed T. Wright (Camden OS 16, 1841) pp. 184-7 at p. 185 (lines 10-20). Also note Gerald of Wales’ account of a diocesan clerk who visited a Cistercian house near the Welsh border; the clerk was initially received in the common hall until the community realised that he was the chief official of the diocese, whereupon he was escorted to the inner houses and infirmary and served an abundance of sumptuous and well-crafted foods, including meat, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera: Speculum Ecclesiae, vol IV, ed. J. S. Brewer (London, 1873), pp. 211-2.
4. Ecclesiastica Officia: 91 (p. 262).
5. Ecclesiastica Officia 92: 18-19 (p. 264).
6. T. Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation (Kalamazoo, 2002), p. 364.
7. This is now in Jesus College, Cambridge; see M. Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces and their Meanings: thirteenth-century English monasteries (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 157-8.
8. The ‘Bursar’s Book’ has been edited and printed by the Surtees Society, Memorials of the Abbey of St Mary of Fountains III, cont. and ed. J. T. Fowler, Surtees Society CXXX (1919), pp. 1-91.
9. Memorials of Fountains III, p. 50. For the description of the pulvis vitalisand pulvis pestilenciae, see Memorials of Fountains III, p. 265.
10. Walter Daniel, Vita Aelredi, The Life of Aelred of Rievaulx, ed. and trans. F. Powicke (Oxford, 1978), p. 49. Aelred, however, insisted on watering his wine although the physicians recommended that it should be drunk pure.
11. A Biographical Register of the Medical Practitioners in England, ed. C. Talbot and E. A. Hammond (London, 1965), pp. 85-6.
12. Walter Daniel, Life of Aelred, p. 39.
13. Walter Daniel, Life of Aelred, p. 34.
14. Walter Daniel, Life of Aelred, p. 49.
15. Life of Aelred, p. 54.
16. Life of Aelred, p. 55.
17. Life of Aelred, p. 79.
18. ‘Letter to Maurice’, in Walter Daniel, Life of Aelred, pp. 65-81, at p. 80.
19. Walter Daniel, Life of Aelred, pp. 42-43.
20. Walter Daniel, Life of Aelred, pp. 43-44.
21. See Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces, p. 162.
22. See J. Castora, ‘The Cistercian Order as portrayed in the Speculum Ecclesiae of Gerald of Wales’, Analecta Cisterciansia 53 (1997), pp. 73-97, at pp. 92-4.
23. Speculum Ecclesiae pp. 173-4. H. Owen, Gerald the Welshman (1904), p. 184.
24. Speculum Ecclesiae pp. 174-5.