The Art of Cistercian Persuasion in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Caesarius of Heisterbach?s Dialogue on Miracles and its Reception

by Brill

Overview

Focusing on the theory and practice of Cistercian persuasion, the articles gathered in this volume offer historical, literary critical and anthropological perspectives on Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum (thirteenth century), the context of its production and other texts directly or indirectly inspired by it. The exempla inserted by Caesarius into a didactic dialogue between a monk and a novice survived for many centuries and travelled across the seas thanks to rewritings and translations into vernacular languages. An accomplished example of the art of persuasion —medieval and early modern— the Dialogus Miraculorum establishes a link not only between the monasteries, the mendicant circles and other religious congregations but also between the Middle Ages and Modernity, the Old and the New World.

Contributors are: Jacques Berlioz, Elisa Brilli, Danièle Dehouve, Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Marie Formarier, Jasmin Margarete Hlatky, Elena Koroleva, Nathalie Luca, Brian Patrick McGuire, Stefano Mula, Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Victoria Smirnova, and Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789004304826
Publisher:	Brill Academic Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/15/2015
Series:	Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions , #196
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Victoria Smirnova (Ph.D. 2006), is Senior Lecturer, Russian State University for the Humanities. She specializes in medieval sermons and exempla with particular emphasis on Caesarius of Heisterbach. Her Publications include L'Œuvre littéraire du Moyen Âge aux yeux de l'historien et du philologue (2014).

Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Ph.D. 1984, Habilitation 2001) is Director of Research at the Paris Centre for Historical Research. She published on medieval exempla, preaching and liturgy. Her publications include the edition of Collectio exemplorum cisterciensis (2012) and Predication and Performance (2013).

Jacques Berlioz (Ph.D. 1985) is Director of Research at the Paris Centre for Historical Research and former Director of École nationale des chartes (2006-2011). He published on Bernard of Clairvaux and exempla and he is Editor of the Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus of Stephen of Bourbon (2002, 2006).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Manuscripts Cited
Abbreviations
List of Contributors

Introduction
Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Victoria Smirnova and Jacques Berlioz

PART 1
The Cistercian Art of ‘Making Believe’ (Faire Croire)
1 The Monk Who Loved to Listen: Trying to Understand Caesarius
Brian Patrick McGuire

PART 2
In Search of a Cistercian Rhetoric
2 To What Extent Were the Twelfth-Century Cistercians Interested in Rhetorical Treatises?
Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk
3 Caesarius of Heisterbach Following the Rules of Rhetoric (Or Not?)
Victoria Smirnova
4 Visual Imagination in Religious Persuasion: Mental Imagery in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum (VIII, 31)
Marie Formarier

PART 3
Elaboration and Dissemination of a Narrative Theology
5 Narrative Theology in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum
Victoria Smirnova
6 Exempla and Historiography. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines’s Reading of Caesarius’s Dialogus miraculorum
Stefano Mula

PART 4
The Use of the Cistercian Heritage in Dominican Preaching
7 The Making of a New Auctoritas: The Dialogus miraculorum Read and Rewritten by the Dominican Arnold of Liège
Elisa Brili
8 Dialogus miraculorum: The Initial Source of Inspiration for Johannes Gobi the Younger’s Scala coeli?
Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu

PART 5
The Dialogus miraculorum in Translation
9 On a Former Mayor of Deventer: Derick van den Wiel, the Devotiomoderna and the Middle Dutch Translation of the Dialogus miraculorum
Jasmin Margarete Hlatky
10 The Dialogus miraculorum in the Light of Its Fifteenth-century German Translation by Johannes Hartlieb
Elena Koroleva
11 Caesarius of Heisterbach in the New Spain (1570–1770)
Danièle Dehouve

PART 6
Roundtable: “Making Believe. Stories and Persuasion:Continuity, Reconfiguration and Disruption, Thirteenth–Twenty-first Centuries”
12 From Caesarius to Jông Myông-Sôk: A South Korean Exemplum of a Messiah
Nathalie Luca
13 Readings/Lessons of the Exemplum
Pierre-Antoine Fabre

General Index