The volume under review here is the fruitful product of a joint celebration in 2022 of two anniversaries, 80 years of the collection Sources chrétiennes and 70 years of the Institut monastique of the Faculté de Théologie of the Athénée Pontifical Saint-Anselme. The celebration took the form of a multilingual conference focusing on the Vita prima of Bernard of Clairvaux and its compilers, all of whom knew the saint to a greater or lesser degree, Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Arnaud de Bonneval and Geoffroy d'Auxerre. The questions that motivated the contributors were various. The organizers wanted to know what characterized expectations about a holy man in the mid-twelfth century. How did those who desired such a man's canonization put together a persuasive dossier? What is the historical value of a twelfth-century hagiographical text, like the Vita prima? And so on. The plan was (and is) for this conference and the collected essays, twenty-two in total, to be the first in a series of collaborations between Sources chrétiennes and the Institut monastique.

The authorship of the Vita prima, the nature of the text, and the biographical details that scholars have been able to glean on the authors are at the heart of the contributions offered by Rafaele Fassetta, Patrick Demouy, and Alexis Grélois. The literary qualities of the Vita prima, including its tropes and its authors' use of biblical quotations, are at the center of Carmen Cvetković's essay and Laurence Mellerin's contribution. They are nice companion pieces to Marie-Céline Isaïa's study of the Vita prima in the long sweep of hagiographical writing since Late Antiquity. The resonances of the life and thought of Saint Benedict and Saint Augustine in Bernard's world view and practices occupy Paolo Maria Gionta and Antonio Montanari, respectively, while Guy Lobrichon lays out the changing notions of holiness in Bernard's own time.

Many of the essays are devoted to aspects of Bernard's career as described or alluded to in the Vita prima. Here one finds an evaluation of the saint as an ethicist (Laure Solignac), as a contemplative (Christian Trottmann), and as a person who struggles with the conflict of reason and the will (Philippe Nouzille). These three essays are all excellent, but they are more traditional, I would say, than those by Marielle Lamy and Maria Manuela Brito Martins. The first discusses Bernard's 'sweetness' as represented in the Vita prima. Lamy acknowledges that most people do not think of Bernard, when they think of him at all, as sweet. Modern teachers, when they lecture to their students, certainly concentrate on the saint's toughness in his troubles with his rivals. But the two characteristics are not mutually exclusive. The second of the essays mentioned (Brito Martins') argues about the important role ruminatio (chewing the cud), metaphorically speaking, must have played in Bernard's writing and thus offers a parallel to Dom Jean Leclercq's famous discussion of ruminatio in monastic reading in The Love of Learning and the Desire for God.

Leclercq's work runs like a thread through many of the essays in the volume, but not always uncritically. Fernando Rivas, for example, deconstructs an article of Leclercq's which, arguing from modern notions of sacramental theology, denied Bernard a formative role in medieval developments. Rivas believes that this argument has prevented other modern commentators from reading the sources in the proper way, which in his view, would accord a much more significant role to Bernard and to his impact on contemporary thought and spirituality. This concern for the twelfth-century saint's relevance for the present day is also characteristic of Bernard Łukasz Sawicki's article which, to a certain degree, treats the Vita prima's representation of Bernard's piety as a kind of blueprint for proper modern spirituality. To this degree, it could replicate a pattern of imitation or, rather, of the reception of Bernard's views in the Middle Ages, as the essays of Lorenzo Braca on Joachim of Fiore, of Marie-Pascal Halary on vernacular translations of the Vita prima, and of Rob Faesen specifically on the reception of the text in Middle Dutch devotional circles.

Bernard's toughness, alluded to above, is discussed in several essays. Pierfrancesco De Feo's essay is a probing piece which evokes the somewhat bruising intellectual culture of the saint's time. Jérôme Rival and Pascaline Turpin further develop this insight by concentrating on the saint's ongoing struggles with Abelard (Rival) and his attitude toward dialectic, which was perhaps more nuanced than traditional interpreters have noticed (Turpin).

Readers will relish this collection, like gourmets who delight in a great feast. One can only hope that subsequent volumes allow the banquet to continue.

William Chester Jordan