Great Beginning of Citeaux

In the closing decades of the twelfth century, the Cistercian Order had become an important ecclesiastical and economic power in Europe. Yet it had lost its influential spokesman, Bernard of Clairvaux, and as the century drew to a close, religious sensibilities were changing. The new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and the impulses they embodied were to shift the center of gravity in Christian religious life for centuries to come. It was in this transitional period that Conrad of Eberbach graduallybetween the 1180s and 1215compiled theExordium magnum cisterciense: The Great Beginning of Cteaux. It is a book of history and lore, often with miraculous stories, meant to continue a great spiritual tradition, and it is also a book meant to justify and repair the Order. TheExordium magnumwas in part an effort to provide a historical and formative context for those who were to be Cistercians in the thirteenth century. Conrads combination of a historical sensibility and the edifying exempla makes theExordium magnuma remarkably innovative book. Its unique combination of genresnarratio and exemplais conceivable only within the intellectual world of the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, before exempla collections came to be complied solely for edification or use in sermons.The Great Beginning of Cteauxis a revealing book and an excellent place to begin more detailed study of the Cistercian Order between 1174 and the middle of the thirteenth century.