Contrasted as they may have been in life (and appetites), Bernard of Clairvaux and Winston Spencer Churchill share this much in common, that both towered over their particular centuries, and both inspired official biographies so vast in scale that entire editorial teams, rather than a single author, were required to complete the task. The ‘Vita prima’ of St Bernard (d. 1153), first commissioned by Pope Eugenius iii c. 1145, initially entrusted to Bernard’s secretaries, was then carried forwards by William de Saint-Thierry (book i, to 1148), passing after William’s death to the black monk Arnold of Bonneval (a close associate of Bernard’s former friend, bishop Geoffrey of Chartres, responsible for book ii). It was then returned (probably c. 1153) for completion (c. 1156, books iii–v) by Geoffrey of Auxerre, Bernard’s last secretary and the man who in 1145 had been canvassed as first potential biographer. This protracted process occurred against the backdrop both of Bernard’s preaching of the disastrous Second Crusade and the years of massive Cistercian expansion (vol. ii. 306-7, approaching 700 monks at Clairvaux by the time of his death). Not only this, but from as early as the 1640s, albeit boosted by discoveries first announced by Adrian Bredero in 1960, it has long been acknowledged that the Latin text of the ‘Vita prima’ generally available is in fact that of a second ‘B’ recension, prepared by Geoffrey of Auxerre, elected abbot of Clairvaux in 1162 but himself thereafter embroiled in controversy as a result of his equivocal support for Thomas Becket at Pontigny. As a result, not only did the ‘A’ version of the Vita, available after 1156 (sixty manuscripts, only a minority of specifically Cistercian provenance), fall into obscurity, but its successor, the ‘B’ version (sixty-four manuscripts, for the most part disseminated from Clairvaux), remained uncompleted until Geoffrey’s return to papal favour, early in the 1170s. This left Pons de Polignac, the then abbot of Clairvaux, to commission a new life, the ‘Vita secunda’, insipid but significant in the process that culminated in Bernard’s canonisation, on 18 January 1174. As for modern editorial work, and despite Bredero’s prolonged occupation of the field, it was not until 2011 that the ‘A’ text of the ‘Vita prima’ was first published by the Jesuit Paul Verdeyen, as volume 89B in the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio series: 233 pages of Latin text, 215 euros, at roughly a euro per page. The present translation into French, by Raffaele Fassetta, a member of the Cistercian community at Tamié, prepared for publication by Laurence Mellerin, not only offers minor but useful corrections to the Verdeyen edition, but at roughly a tenth of the cost of the CCCM text, page for page, deserves to become the standard scholarly reference, not least for noting variations between the two versions ‘A’ and ‘B’. To those for whom the Latin remains impenetrable, it also offers a complete and generally reliable French translation, entirely superseding that by François Guizot (future French prime-minister), published in 1825. In English, to date, students have access to only two brief selections: of twenty or so pages excerpted by Pauline Matarasso (for the 1993 Penguin Classics collection The Cistercian world), from the Migne reprint of the ‘B’ recension, and, at slightly greater length, by Geoffrey Webb and Adrian Walker, as part of a devotional series published by Mowbrays in 1960, again from Migne’s ‘B’ text. Although presented as complete (and apparently assumed to be such by both Verdeyen and Fassetta), Webb and Walker’s is in fact a mere scissors and paste selection of just over a tenth of the original 200 or so chapters, misleadingly interspersed with excerpts, only vaguely signposted, from other sources, including what is in effect merely an English précis of the opening chapter of Odo of Deuil’s chronicle of the Second Crusade.

Fassetta’s introduction clearly and coherently expounds the history of the text, and the contrasts to be drawn between its authors’ various concerns or approaches. He rightly criticises Bredero, both for dismissing Arnold of Bonneval’s claims to have enjoyed close relations with the saint, and for his wider assertion that the ‘Vita’ has no historical significance save as a particular (and often frustratingly vague) instance of twelfth-century hagiographical manipulation. On the contrary, and for all its lack of dates or narrative coherence – many dozens of lifetime miracles, but hardly a word of the fate of the crusade, let alone of the internal squabbling over the future of the Cistercian ‘order’ – there is much here for both the social and the political historian. We read, for example, of the crowds of beggars accustomed to gather in the vicinity of prisons (i. 206–7), with such poverty viewed on occasion as that of a mere swarm of ‘stinging wasps’ (i. 518–19, ‘vespae pungentes’). Crowds, indeed, remained in constant attendance on Bernard, whenever he ventured from the cloister (i.e. ii. 230–1, 248–9, 266-7, including the kissing of his footprints). We are told of the manufacture of semi-permanent relics from bread blessed by Bernard, in imitation of the process by which ship’s biscuit was made (ii.170–1, 176–7, ‘bis coctum’). From the ‘A’ recension, here for the first time properly translated, we are introduced to King Stephen’s son, given the birth name ‘Bernard’ (perhaps otherwise William of Warenne) in commemoration of his mother, Queen Matilda, and her breathless dash to meet the saint on his arrival outside Boulogne (ii. 124–5, a detail suppressed in ‘B’). We learn too of the great jewel-encrusted golden vessels gifted by Henry i of England to Stephen’s brother, Theobald of Champagne, that the king had been accustomed to display at table on the occasion of his crown-wearings (i. 528–9).

Just as the ‘B’ version suppresses details preserved in ‘A’, so, by its very nature, translation involves rejecting all but one amongst a series of imperfect alternatives. This is apparent even in Fassetta’s account of Henry i’s golden vessels, where ‘couronnement’ is chosen to denote a ‘solemnitas corone’ perhaps best defined as rather less than a coronation. On occasion, Fassetta fills out what in the Latin is left unstated, for instance defining Gaudry de Touillon (i.199) as Bernard’s ‘maternal uncle’ (where ‘avunculus’ is not so specific). Nor should a ‘chartulam’ (i. 434–5) be equated with a ‘petit papier’ (in this instance worn as an amulet, commanding the Devil to depart). Occasionally, more precision might have been achieved (i.e. i. 264–5, where a gathering by ‘pauculis abbatibus’ has become merely an assembly of ‘quelques abbés’). Even so, for those able to navigate both left and right facing-page text and translation, the appropriate response is awe and gratitude, that so much here is so sensitively revoiced.

It is good that Fassetta identifies so many of the scriptural and other textual allusions sometimes overlooked in CCCM (i.e. from Horace [ii. 62], or Vergil [ii. 132, 284], sadly omitted from an index of citations, here restricted to Scripture), even if it is not always helpful to find each and every scriptural echo italicised, including such banalities as ‘dies Dominica’ or ‘vir Dei’ (for example, i. 468, 474, 476, 516). Less justifiable is Fassetta’s reluctance to cite secondary authorities beyond those in French, or occasionally Italian. There is thus nothing here of Martha Newman on Cistercian ‘Reform’. Nothing of Constance Bermann on the ‘invention’ of the Cistercian order, nor of Christopher Holdsworth on Bernard’s miracles (an important article in the Festschrift for Frank Barlow, noting not merely the defensive stand taken in the face of what was elsewhere criticised as Bernard’s vainglorious boasting of his ‘visions’, but the role played by Elijah, as well as Christ, as model for Bernard the miracle-worker). As Holdsworth has also pointed out, readers might note the ‘Vita’s willingness to portray a saint who himself changed and to some extent softened over time, yet its relative dearth of stories in which Bernard, as interlocutor, pays even the remotest heed to anything that his monks themselves might have had to say’. This in stark contrast, for example, to Eadmer’s record of the dialogue between Anselm and his monks. Readers may also note Bernard’s almost Manichean distinction between flesh and spirit. Blind to natural beauty (ii. 32–3, where for an entire day he traversed Lake Geneva entirely oblivious to its splendours), he rejected his own noble sister as the devil’s net, cast to ensnare souls, or worse still as merely a ‘well-dressed turd’ (i. 258–9, words attributed to their own brother, Andrew). Only partially set against this, we read of his curing of diseased livestock (ii. 182–3, for its usefulness to humanity) or his rescue of leverets and fledglings from the jaws (or talons) of their human pursuers (ii. 100–1). There is also the Vita’s remarkable lack of concern for any institutional development, from the rejection of the black monk traditionalism of Stephen Harding, via the general chapter (here recorded in 1147 [ii. 216–17], having ‘just growed’), to the almost total absence of any reference of Clairvaux’s relation to Cîteaux and its abbots. Indeed, as is so often the case with hagiography, it is from listening for the dogs that do not bark in this particular night that the keenest insights may be obtained. The crusade, we are told, although it failed to achieve its expected outcome, at least ‘brought a great number of western souls to heaven’ (ii. 48-9): a claim that in sheer brass neck tops those made for many a latter-day military disaster. Unlike Rossini’s Wagner, this is a text whose less than thrilling half hours are easily outweighed by its many good moments. Fassetta and his publishers are to be congratulated for, at last, popularising one of the towering achievements of twelfth-century biography.