sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 9

Victoria Smirnova: Medieval Exempla in Transition

Victoria Smirnova's book is firmly anchored in the French school of studying Medieval exempla, in fact, she has collaborated with several leading scholars on the field, for example Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu. However, she is also follower of the traditional German school of Medieval studies where strong emphasis is placed on the meticulous and pedantic study of the original sources. Moreover, working as a project researcher at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Victoria Smirnova has been particularly well-positioned for a demanding research project such as the book currently reviewed definitely was.

Caesarius of Heisterbach (Caesarius von Heisterbach, Caesarius Heisterbachiensis) was a Cistercian Monk and an important writer of praedicabilia. In addition to the massive exemplum collections Dialogus miraculorum and the unfinished Libri VIII miraculorum, Caesarius also wrote a collection of Sunday sermons. His sermon collection, however, was not nearly as popular as the Dialogus miraculorum.

The Dialogus miraculorum contains around eight hundred exempla presented within dialogues between a master and a novice. It enjoyed reasonable popularity and manuscript tradition and was also printed several times in the late fifteenth century and during the early modern period. In reality, it was much more popular than the number of manuscripts leads to believe because Caesarius's exempla circulated also in numerous other exemplum collections such as Arnold of Liège's Alphabetum narrationum and Jean Gobi's Scala coeli. Therefore, one can safely claim that Caesarius's work played a significant role in the thirteenth-century preaching revival. It was also used within monasteries (Cistercian and other), either collectively in the chapter house or by the individual monks, for the moral edification.

Victoria Smirnova's book is a comprehensive study on the diffusion and use of the Dialogus miraculorum within and beyond the Cistercian order. Interestingly, she does not limit herself to the medieval tradition of Dialogus but studies also its printing and use during the early modern period, the beginning of the academic study of Caesarius's magnum opus in the nineteenth century, and even allusions to it in modern literature and popular culture.

Her book is, to my knowledge, the only study that analyses the copying tradition of Dialogus miraculorum. She identifies five major branches of copying tradition and proposes plausible hypotheses to where, when, and why each of them has diverted from the earlier tradition (not all of them were diverted from the "main tradition" named A by the author). For example, Victoria Smirnova shows that the E version derives from the B version. The mutual relationship between different versions would have been easier to comprehend if the author had included a stemma to help visualize it. Nevertheless, figuring out the existence and mutual relationships of different branches of the copying tradition is a Herculean undertaking. More so, if one considers the fact thar there is some contamination between different versions when older manuscripts from a different version have been used to correct the text - not an unlikely occurrence between different Cistercian monasteries.

There are plenty of interesting nuggets of information and methodological solutions in this book. Not all of them can be brought to spotlight in one short review - few examples will have to do here. For example, the chapter 7 Cistercian Readers Interacting with the Dialogus miraculorum tries to find out why Dialogus was such an important work within the Cistercian order. To do so Victoria Smirnova has chosen to identify those manuscripts that are of known Cistercian provenance and to analyse marginal notes, additional rubrics, and nota bene signs in the manuscripts. While this approach is not absolute novelty, it has, nevertheless, been used much less than one would expect. Especially philologically oriented scholars have often chosen to concentrate on the actual text itself and often ignored the comments on the margin unless they are corrections to the text. Such marginalia, however, often reveal very interesting information on the use and users of the manuscript. In this case, it allows Victoria Smirnova to analyse what kind of exempla stories within the Dialogus were deemed to be particularly interesting by its Cistercian readers, namely stories concerning the everyday monastic life and its challenges as well as material interesting from the pastoral point of view.

Chapter 9 concentrates on the Canons Regular as the owners and readers of the Dialogus. Here Victoria Smirnova proposes that the increasing readership of Dialogus by the Canons Regular went hand in hand with them adopting different fifteenth-century reform movements such as the Devotio moderna. Chapter 10 analyses the diffusion and use of Dialogus within Benedictine, Carthusian, and Mendicant orders. Here the most interesting finding is that the Dialogus which has for a long time been considered as a preaching aid sui generis, was not particularly popular within the most active preaching orders, namely the Dominicans and the Franciscans. Victoria Smirnova explains that the hugely popular thirteenth-century Dominican collection Alphabetum narrationum mined those exempla out from Dialogus that were most useful for popular preachers and, consequently, made it unnecessary for the Mendicant convents to own a copy of the Dialogus.

Another interesting chapter, no. 11, analyses the incunabula editions of the Dialogus, both originating from Cologne. Consequently, they were mostly diffused within German speaking Europe - after the Reformation only in Catholic regions. The first early modern edition, Jacob Fischer's edition from 1571, brought about heated discussions on the credibility of the miracles. This debate followed - unsurprisingly - mostly the demarcation lines between the Catholics and the Protestants. However, even the Protestants authors quoted Caesarius whenever his stories included useful information for them. For example, late sixteenth-century Protestant writers Andreas Hondorff and Wolfgang Büttner quoted Caesarius concerning a story of a young man in Paris punished for not respecting his parents (212).

All in all, Victoria Smirnova's book is a prime example of a study where no stone has been unturned and enormous amounts of work have been invested to study numerous manuscripts and early printed versions of an important medieval text. In addition to this, she has an impressive command of other sources concerning the Cistercian order and the history of its individual abbeys. This has been needed to set the information mined from original sources in its context, and indeed, it has been done exceptionally well. When one adds the fact that results are interesting and impressive, one cannot but conclude that Victoria Smirnova's book is a highly recommended reading for all the scholars working in the fields of medieval sermon studies, medieval monasticism, or book history.