Teaching by example: Cistercian exempla collections before Caesarius, 1178–1220

In the period between c. 1170 and c. 1230, Cistercian monks in France and Germany wrote a number of exempla collections. These were widely copied and disseminated throughout the houses of the Order, and several survive in multiple manuscript witnesses, testifying to their significance; as this thesis argues, they were perhaps the paramount Cistercian literary production of this period. The most famous of these is Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum, but his was not the first, and an entire earlier corpus of exempla collections exists that has gone largely unexplored. This thesis studies Herbert of Clairvaux’s Liber miraculorum, Conrad of Eberbach’s Exordium magnum, and Engelhard of Langheim’s collection for the nuns of Wechterswinkel, the three most widely read and copied of the earlier collections, to explore the development of this textual tradition before Caesarius. These exempla collections have been seen by historians as attempts to create a uniform Cistercian identity, especially as the Order expanded and moved away from its French heartlands and founding generation. This thesis, studying the collections in an interdisciplinary manner, reveals the unique character of each collection and the specific agenda of its author, conditioned by the context in which he was writing, the audience for whom he created his collection, and his network of relationships and influences. It argues that teaching by example, via exempla collections, was a key way in which Cistercian life was constructed, contested and propagated, and that there existed multiple conceptions of Cistercian spirituality in these decades. It also demonstrates that Cistercian exempla constitute their own species of exempla, and shows how they were compiled, written, and arranged in the collections to construct and propagate these different models of ‘Cistercianness’ through the formation of members of the Order.