Ebook: The Art of Cistercian Persuasion in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Caesarius of Heisterbach's "Dialogue on Miracles" and Its Reception

The essays in this volume derive from a 2013 conference on Cistercian persuasion held at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, which sought to reflect on Cistercian exempla from the perspective of late twentieth-century studies in rhetoric and argumentation, utterance and logic, theories of communication, literary theory, and cognitive psychology. The resulting publication is a thorough and interdisciplinary volume that is primarily interested in the ways that Cistercian modes of storytelling served to stir emotions and to induce behavior and belief. The majority of the essays explore, in particular, methods of 'faire croire', the social act of believing or convincing someone to believe. Together, they cast light on Cistercian tools of persuasion, putting forth a collective argument for the Cistercians as progenitors of a unique brand of persuasion through their perfection of the narrative form of the exemplum.

At the center of the volume’s investigations, as the subtitle indicates, is Caesarius of Heisterbach and the particularities of his rhetorical efficacy. Although Caesarius is one of the most well-known Cistercian authors, little is understood about his life or his major work, 'The Dialogue on Miracles', as a whole. One aim of this volume is thus to outline an approach to rhetoric in the 'Dialogue', its manuscript tradition, and the reasons for its immense success. The contributors demonstrate that Caesarius’s cultivation of a 'narrativity of the self', the clarity of his message, and the visual and verbal representations he included in his exempla collection served to convey an image of authority that promoted certain Christian beliefs and behaviors from the twelfth to eighteenth centuries across three continents.