The Dialogue on Miracles

Reviews / Votes

"Written in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum is a major work of the Middle Ages. A treasure trove of Cistercian exemplary stories, the Dialogue offers many avenues to deepen our understanding of medieval life, both inside and outside of the cloister. Ronald Pepin deserves all our gratefulness for taking upon himself the daunting task to translate this long work: his lively and accurate new rendition finally makes the Dialogue available to a larger public. General readers, students and scholars alike will also greatly benefit from Hugh Feiss' highly readable and stimulating introduction. Together with Victoria Smirnova's recent volume on Medieval Exempla in Transition, this volume brings new and well-deserved attention to a master storyteller, Caesarius, and to the central role of narratives in the Medieval world."
Stefano Mula, Middlebury College "At times, the working of the medieval mind seems very foreign and strange. Yet the very strangeness of these stories have illuminated my faith. As a working priest, I have found these sermon stories from Heisterbach slipping into my everyday conversations with parishioners. We talk about some illustration or notion found in the Dialogue on Miracles, and then fall into a contemplative silence for a moment, full of wonder and delight."
The Rev. Karl Stevens, Rector, St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Columbus, Ohio "This volume will be a good source of spiritual reading and insight into medieval (and especially Cistercian) spirituality and practice."
The Downside Review "The mysterious presence and activity of grace, of transcendent compassion bestowed and received even without conscious awareness, not only in explicitly spiritual contexts but in the midst of the ordinary tasks of daily life, along with comparable lessons found in many other of these exemplary tales, still has power to edify and to instruct, to stimulate and to inspire, power that has now become more readily and more widely accessible through this sprightly new translation."
Catholic Books Review "Students, teachers and scholars will the two volumes a reliable English version of the Dialogus, preceded by a learned introduction and directions for further research. Ron Pepin's highly readable and accurate translation of Caesarius' Dialogus will no doubt remain for a long time the standard English reference for this famous and yet often overlooked medieval text."
American Benedictine Review