The Dialogue on Miracles, Volume 1

Caesarius was a monk at the Cistercian monastery of Heisterbach in Germany, where he served as Master of novices. For their instruction and edification, he composed his lengthy Dialogue on Miracles in twelve sections between 1219 and 1223. The many surviving manuscripts of this and other works by Caesarius attest to his stature in the history of Cistercian letters.

This volume contains sections one through six of Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue on Miracles, the first complete translation into English of an influential representation of exempla literature from the Middle Ages. Caesarius’s stories provide a splendid index to monastic life, religious practices, and daily life in a tumultuous time.

Ronald E. Pepin received his PhD from Fordham University. In addition to The Lives of Monastic Reformers, 1 and 2 (in collaboration with Hugh Feiss and Maureen O'Brien), his published translations include The Vatican Mythographers (Fordham, 2008), Anselm & Becket (PIMS, 2009), and Sextus Amarcius: Satires (DOML: Harvard, 2011).

Hugh Feiss, OSB, is a monk of the Monastery of the Ascension in Jerome, Idaho. He earned MA and MDiv degrees from Mount Angel Seminary, licentiates in theology and philosophy from The Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in theology at Sant’Anselmo. He served as managing editor and contributor for the ten-volume series Victorine Texts in Translation (Brepols). For Cistercian Publications he has translated works of Peter of Celle and Achard of Saint Victor and collaborated on Saint Mary of Egypt: Three Medieval Lives in Verse, and The Lives of Monastic Reformers,1 and 2. He was co-editor and contributor of A Benedictine Reader, 530–1530 (Cistercian Publications, 2019).