Book Review: Bernard of Clairvaux

 

Bernard of Clairvaux

An Inner Life

by Brian Patrick McGuire

 Cornell University Press 

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  History 

Pub Date 15 Oct 2020 

I am reviewing a copy of Bernard of Clairvaux through Cornell University Press and Netgalley:

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was a man of many talents.  He was a monk abbot, adviser of kings and popes, author of some of the finest latin prose to emerge from the Middle Ages.

The world Bernard of Clairvaux was born into was one of hope and promise.  From the ninth to the eleventh centuries, Western Europe had been the object of Viking plundering. Today, some Danish archaeologists claim that the Vikings were more traders than pirates, but monks along the coasts and rivers of Europe knew better.  

Travel that had once been dangerous had become possible and even attractive.  

Brian Patrick McGuire delves into the life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.  He offers a refreshing interpretation that finds within this grand historical figure a deeply spiritual human being who longed for the reflective quietude of the monastery even as he helped shape the destiny of a church and a continent.  It was heresey, crusades, politics and papacies as well as theology and disputation shaped this astonishing man's life.  McGuire presents Bernard of Clairvaux’s life in an all informed and clear-eyed biography.

Bernard of Clairvaux reveals a life full of momentous events and spiritual contemplation, from Bernard's central roles in the first great medieval reformation of the Church and the Second Crusade, which he came to regret, to the crafting of his books, sermons, and letters. We learn what brought brought Bernard to monastic life and how he founded Clairvaux Abbey, established a network of Cistercian monasteries across Europe, and helped his brethren monks and abbots in heresy trials,.

I found Bernard of Clairvaux to be both well written and well researched, allowing us to get a better glimpse of this early Medieval Monks life and works, and therefore find it worthy of five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!