Victoria SMIRNOVA, Medieval Exempla in Transition: Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum and Its Readers. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023. xxix + 352 pages, pbk, $34.95. ISBN 978-0-87907-130-1. Reviewed by Thomas SIMMONS, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069.

Caesarius of Heisterbach was a thirteenth century prior of a Cistercian monastery – Heisterbach Abbey – near Oberdollendorf, Germany. He left behind the Dialogus miraculorum, a hagiography of some eight hundred miracle stories. Each is narrated in the form of a dialogue between a monk and novice.

The dialogues of Dialogus miraculorum concern aspects of monastic life and elements of church doctrine. They are divided into twelve parts (distinctiones) which follow the progression of monastic life beginning with conversio and ending with de praemio mortuorum. Most of Caesarius’ stories were taken from the oral tradition. Some are original. The intent of their author was to provide efficacious tools for religious formation, but the stories also became a source of reading pleasure.

Dialogus miraculorum is an important example of Cistercian exemplary literature. The stories reveal medieval monastic mentalities. Their numerous translations and adaptations over the centuries reveal much more. “Over a number of centuries, different communities with different identities and contexts found it worth reading and copying” (xix). Although originally designed primarily for Caesarius’ own monastic community, the acquisition of a wider readership demonstrates the pull of the miracle stories he put down in print. Only a gifted medieval storyteller could still boast readers living in modern times – in Germany, especially.

Dr. Victoria Smirnova is a research fellow in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. This is her first authored book. In it, she undertakes twin ambitious aims: “not only to answer the question of the identity of Caesarius’s readers and the way the Dialogus was transmitted through different media, but to understand how different communities exemplified Caesarius’s stories” (xxvi). In both goals, she succeeds.

Smirnova shows how these miracle stories allow the reader to grasp the ways in which oral stories circulating around a monastic community could shape the Order’s collective milieu and identity. The stories familiarized monks with rules and expectations. They set forth, for example, how to make a good confession or how to act when a brother dies. Socialization, we can discern, is shaped by storytelling; by providing patterns of conduct mapped by the lives of characters worthy of emulating. Storytelling, indeed, is important. Stories instruct, model, and edify. They connect us with communities in ways that other text or instruction cannot. Perhaps that is one reason why Christ told so many parables.

An appendix contains summaries of nine sample exempla. They read in some ways like Irish folk tales. They are odd; strange; foreign. They were written in a vastly different time and place. Besides the stories, however, is the story of those stories.

The more “fascinating story that the Dialogus could tell is arguably that of its own journey through the ages” (273). One point on the timeline will serve to illustrate the influence of Caesarius on moderns: Herman Hesse.
Hesse, the German-Swiss novelist-poet, undertook to translate hand-picked stories from the Dialogus beginning in about 1900. Perceiving the monk-novice dialogue framing as superfluous, he omitted it, attempting to “mute” the didactic. Hesse continued the project into 1921 and anthologized the stories. Hesse saw Caesarius as “a hidden treasure of the old German literature” (258). But this warm image was “conveyed to the readers primarily by the dialogic frame of the Dialogus, which, ironically, Hesse’s translations omit” (ibid).

The other translations and adaptations of Dialogus are numerous. Smirnova’s survey is erudite as well as illuminating. This work is recommended for medievalists as well as anyone concerned with storytelling.