The Cistercian Reform and the Art of the Book in Twelfth-Century France

• Published in: Medium Aevum Vol. 88; no. 2; pp. 396 - 397
• Main Author: HAMBURGER, JEFFREY F.
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature 01.01.2019; Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature
• Subjects: 12th century; Allegory; Bible; Harding, Stephen; Imagery; Learning; Literary devices; Medieval period; Metaphor; Monasteries; Monks; REVIEWS; France
• ISSN: 0025-8385; 2398-1423

Taking as her point of departure not only Jean Lerclercq's classic study, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, from which she derives her emphasis on monastic reading as a metaphorical process of mastication, but also Brian Stock's and Barbara Rosenwein's concepts of textual and emotional communities, Reilly situates the imagery in Cîteaux's majestic copies of patristic works by Gregory and Jerome as well as the Bible of Stephen Harding in the context of the words, if not the music, of the liturgical chant that would have resounded in the same spaces in which lessons from these manuscripts were read. [...]to Conrad Rudolph's extended but more narrowly focused readings of the imagery in Cîteaux Moralia in Lob, with which Reilly often quibbles but hardly disagrees, Reilly ranges more widely, less in pursuit of specific interpretations, although many are offered, than in search of the strategies deployed in order to produce them. Michael Camille's analyses of monastic imagery may often have veered too far in the opposite direction, stressing the bodily and sexual at the expense of all else, but it is nonetheless surprising and perhaps indicative that not a single one of Camille's many studies of relevant material is cited in the otherwise extensive bibliography.