¿Arquitectos o administradores? Sobre el mito de los monjes constructores en el Císter / Architects or supervisors? The myth of the monk as an architect in the Order of the Cistercians

Resumen: El célebre comentario de Orderic Vital sobre cómo los cistercienses construían las abadías con sus propias manos, junto a la existencia de algunas evidencias iconográficas que muestran a eclesiásticos participando enla construcción, ha dado lugar a una leyenda que sigue viva en la actualidad: la creencia que la arquitectura cisterciense fue obra casi exclusiva de los arquitectos y artesanos monásticos. El presente trabajo tiene como objeto dar respuesta a ciertos interrogantes que todavía giran alrededor de este debate historiográfico. Para ello, se propone un análisis de las fuentes primigenias de la Orden, así como de diversos casos-estudio de maestros de obra conversosy laicos documentados en los reinos hispanos.Abstract: The famous comment of Ordericus Vitalis about how the Cistercian monks built monasteries with their own hands, together with some iconographicexamples involving builder monks, have given rise to a legend that is still alive: the conviction that Cistercian architecture was produced almost entirely by monastic architects and craftsmen. The present paper aims to answer to some questions of this discussion. For that purpose, the primary sources or the Order and different case studies of lay builders and conversi in the Hispanic kingdoms has been analyzed.

The Icelandic saga of Edward the Confessor: its version of the Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium

The fourteenth-century compiler of the saga of Edward the Confessor, Saga Játvarðar konungs hins helga, supplemented his material on the king with history, anecdote and legend on various topics. His final chapter contains an account of the Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium after the Norman Conquest. No historian doubts that this event took place. There is fairly full documentation from Byzantium itself and the accounts of the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic and the hagiographer Goscelin are not unknown. But in general the medieval chroniclers in England make no reference to it and the scholars who have worked on Játvarðar saga, perhaps insufficiently aware of supporting Byzantine evidence, have tended to dismiss the account as a fabrication. Gudbrand Vigfusson calls it ‘an extraordinary story’. Professor Jón Helgason writes, with a characteristic touch of fine disdain, that ‘the saga concludes with the episode of Earl Sigurðr of Gloucester, who after the Conquest left England, together with other English malcontents, and with the Greek emperor's consent settled in a country six days' journey north-east of Constantinople. Here they gave the towns such English names as London and York. The source of this far-fetched story is unknown.’ H. L. Rogers says no more than ‘evidently a similar tradition was known to the Anglo-Norman Ordericus Vitalis’.