Any attentive reader of Medieval Exempla in Transition will be impressed and delighted by its comprehensive treatment of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s early-thirteenth-centuryDialogus miraculorum (c. 1230). Smirnova ambitiously traces the historical (including religious, paleographical, and literary) fortunes of this powerful exponent of early-Cistercian storytelling, and does so with astute readings of Caesarius’s tales and comparisons of the Dialogus with other Cistercian exempla collections, notably Herbert of Clairvaux’s Liber visionum et miraculorum (c. 1190) and the Exordium magnum of Conrad of Eberbach (c. 1210). This study reminds us that, in its medieval formulation, exemplarity and its efficacy are not merely textual but also communal and potentially transhistorical processes that entail understanding, accepting, internalizing, and finally performing--while also avoiding the ever-present danger of misreading--the instructions contained within the narrative (xxiii-xxiv). Smirnova’s is a careful analysis of how, “transmitted through different media,” Caesarius’s great work realized its function for a wider (and not merely local and monastic) community to become “compelling and efficacious” across a long historical arc from the thirteenth century to the present (xxvi).
Early chapters locate the Dialogus within a rich tradition of Cistercian compilations of miracle tales that extended from the twelfth into the thirteenth centuries and which relied heavily on oral accounts shared among monastic houses. Yet that tradition also had its competitors. Chapter 2 treats the ascendency, emergent decades prior to the fourteenth century and influential for centuries thereafter, of mendicant exempla which tended to privilege moral instruction over the spiritual edification provided by monastic accounts of visions and miracles. As Chapters 4-6 demonstrate in impressive detail, while theDialogus was in circulation it was both expanded and abridged by any number of copyists seeking to accommodate the work to the needs of their own communities. Some of these modifications made sense within in view of the strongly Marian cast of Cistercian devotion (79-80), yet others owe to what were obviously more idiosyncratic needs of specific readers. Notations in extant manuscripts provide one means of tracing such patterns. For example, medieval manuscripts generally are replete with marginal notes and maniculae that show how readers responded to and interacted with portions of specific texts. Chapter 7 shows that the Dialogus was no exception.
This sympathetic and devotional engagement with the Dialogus by its earliest and mostly monastic readers, however, is only part of the story. By the end of the middle ages, some began to turn their backs on Caesarius, especially early modern humanists. Such a response to the Dialogus contrasted markedly with the widespread early interest in exempla collections on the part of Cistercians, and it was a harbinger of developments to come. Thus, while generations of monks likely heard the book read in the refectory (127), for example, by this later period such practices and the tales within the collection itself were being dismissed as silly and borne of the wrong sort of devotion (i.e., excessive and naïve).
Nonetheless, as Smirnova’s discussion illustrates repeatedly, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century detractors of the style and content of the Dialogus demonstrated despite themselves a central feature of the work’s history and success--namely that it migrated well beyond the bounds of its initial Cistercian readership. Its popularity among mendicants, Carthusians, Benedictines, and Regular Canons (Chapters 9-10) was considerable and to judge from the evidence of ownership by Augustinian and Premonstratensian Canons, for example, the work vastly outpaced in its popularity Herbert of Clairvaux’s Liber visionum (133-39). The contrast is only slightly less arresting with respect to the Benedictine (160-62) and Carthusian (172-73) libraries, while mendicant ownership of the Liber or Exordium is nowhere attested (178-79). Unsurprisingly, an intense interest in the Dialogus is witnessed among fourteenth- and fifteenth-century reformist communities (esp. 146-58). For these, its demands for spiritual purity held an extraordinarily strong appeal.
In its formal presentation, Smirnova’s book is highly balanced, virtually free of errors and has been excellently copyedited. To be sure, this reader found himself somewhat puzzled by the following sentence: “[Caesarius’s] abbot told him about the appearance of the Virgin Mary, Saint Anne, and Mary Magdalene to the harvesting monks in Clairvaux and her comforting them” (xxiii). Which of the three saints here listed does the pronoun “her” refer to? Meanwhile, some readers might also quibble over the book’s emphasis on the whole: a substantial portion (esp. Chapters 3-7) will be of far greater interest to scholars working on monastic or even more narrowly Cistercian narratology than, for example, to religious historians or those with a broader interest in literary studies. Its highly detailed and codicological discussions of the modifications (both abridgements and additions [Chapter 4]) that later Cistercians made to Caesarius’s work, for example, are more useful to specialists in the area of late-medieval monastic manuscripts and textual culture than to a wider body of medievalists.
Yet while this study’s likely readership is a coterie of specialists among specialists, its historical scope shows the true extent of Smirnova’s learning and vision. In some ways this book reads as a case study of the well-known shifts that the “medieval” as image--derided, appropriated, glorified--has undergone in the hands of western intellectual elites even to the present day. That the Dialogus was widely read by early modern audiences is apparent from its popularity among early modern printers, as well as from its place in the politics of reformation and counter-reformation as, by turns, it became reviled by its Protestant and defended by its Catholic readers (Chapter 12). After suffering a decline during the eighteenth century, during which the work did not enjoy a single new edition (239), the emergence of western romanticism brought with it a flourishing interest in Heisterbach and, by extension, Caesarius’s masterpiece. Smirnova discusses how, closer to our historical moment, it has continued to fascinate readers as it came to the attention (257-69) of the German novelist Hermann Hesse--whose Narziß und Goldmund (1930), for example, was almost certainly influenced by the Dialogus--and several of his twentieth-century counterparts.
Smirnova’s interests are not theoretically oriented but are instead rooted firmly in textual history, the transmission of manuscript and print books, as well as the immensely rich and complicated question of a text’s readership across centuries. Thus, this book is also helpfully supplied with three appendices, two of which detail extant manuscripts. We might wonder about the deeper, theoretical challenges that attend exemplarity, in particular the fact that both exempla and miracles must in some sense and in similar ways be “efficacious” (an important concept in this study especially). Yet the two clearly cannot be conflated: miracles are not strictly speaking narratives, despite their narrative elements, and exempla cannot be treated as miraculous, even if their effects might in certain circumstances be so understood. In this extraordinarily precise, and detail-oriented, examination of the Dialogus less attention is given to such theoretical questions than to its extraordinarily rich and varied history. Yet this is not a shortcoming by any means. Smirnova is clearly (and justly) fascinated by the Dialogus, and rather than defend Caesarius against eighteenth-century criticisms of this recounter of miracles as gullible and his narratives as fables (240), Medieval Exempla in Transition tells a story of its own: a story about western culture’s deep interest in medieval narrative. That interest may at times be reluctant and marked by grim repudiation of early Protestant communities, but at other times (as presently) it has been delightfully enthusiastic.