In her previous monograph, The art of reform in eleventh-century Flanders: Gerard of Cambrai, Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Saint-Vaast Bible (London 2006), Dianne Reilly analysed that eponymous manuscript and the political and theological messages of its programme of miniatures. In this book, Reilly similarly examines the contexts within which manuscripts were produced, but shifts her focus south from a long-established Benedictine abbey in Flanders to the monastery of Cîteaux in the first years of its existence. The rich cache of illustrated manuscripts to survive from Cîteaux during those early decades – before its scriptorium shifted from figural to aniconic decoration by the mid-twelfth century – allows Reilly to explore what she terms the monastery's ‘shared repertoire of text-based experiences’. For the monks of Cîteaux, Reilly argues, Scripture was to be spoken, heard, tasted and ingested in powerfully sensory and often communal ways, ways which run counter to the traditional characterisation of early Cistercian spirituality as highly ascetic. The monks’ continual verbal and aural interaction with sacred texts shaped the production of manuscripts at Cîteaux.

The book is divided into four chapters, which alternate between an examination of liturgical practices at the monastery and a close reading of associated manuscripts. In the first chapter Reilly outlines the liturgy which was in use at Cîteaux during the season of Advent. She argues that while the monastery broadly followed the Night Office which had been in use in Benedictine monasteries for centuries, there were distinct emphases at Cîteaux on spoken and sung eloquence as a key element in the successful transmission of God's Word. Here, Reilly particularly engages with the work of Margot Fassler on the liturgy of Chartres Cathedral to provide a comparative element. In the second chapter, Reilly focuses on the strong attachment of the monks of Cîteaux to St Jerome. Jerome was depicted more frequently than any other patristic author in the manuscripts produced at the Cîteaux scriptorium during its figural period, while his Vulgate, biblical commentaries and descriptions of his own editorial principles feature in a disproportionate number of surviving texts from the monastery. Unusually, selections from Jerome's prologues to the books of the Bible were included in Cîteaux's lectionary. This attests to Jerome's standing in the community, which was tied to and perhaps emerged from the monks’ awareness that the texts which they heard on a daily basis were themselves the products of an enormous editorial and translation project. The first two chapters of the book therefore form a loose pair in which Reilly seeks to show a common preoccupation at Cîteaux with the appropriate visualisation and vocalisation of sacred texts.

In the third chapter Reilly returns to a consideration of Advent, looking at the influence of the Matins Offices celebrated during Advent, Christmas and the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, on depictions of the Virgin Mary in manuscripts produced at Cîteaux. The motif of Jesse's rod or tree, and the budding of a saviour from it, was a frequent one in the iconography of early Cîteaux manuscripts, while liturgical chants composed at the monastery tended to emphasise Mary's role as intercessor. None of this of course is unique to Cîteaux, but Reilly is concerned less with establishing novelty than she is with how Marian devotion at the monastery demonstrated consistent elements across sermons, liturgies and artworks. The final main chapter explores how the images in manuscripts produced at Cîteaux also suggest a contemporary preoccupation with biting, chewing and swallowing: a rumination on the Scriptures in both senses of the word. Here Reilly looks particularly at the famous Stephen Harding Bible (c. 1110), seeing in the shifts in artistic style of its decorated initials a desire to experiment with new ways of visually expressing the value of the spoken word. The scribes of Cîteaux deployed a repertoire of hungry animals – such as the lion, symbol of Mark the Evangelist, eating a volume of Scripture – and foliate initials which sprouted biting human or animal heads. Historiated initials contrasted the Annunciations to Zachariah and Mary with the suicide of Herod: the appropriate reception of the Word juxtaposed with a figure who, in medieval apocrypha, was particularly associated with the sin of gluttony. Reilly does see innovation in the decorative scheme of the Harding Bible, identifying distinct connections between, for instance, the biting creatures and the text adjacent to them, unlike with manuscripts produced in other contemporary scriptoria.

The Cistercian reform is generously illustrated throughout. However, presumably to reduce costs, the plates were produced on standard, rather than glossy photo paper. Any attempt on the part of publishers to reduce the eye-watering costs of academic monographs must be applauded. Yet this printing method meant that a number of the plates were too dark and muddy for me to be able easily to see the details to which Reilly was referring. I had to resort to the online digitised collection of the Bibliothèque muncipale de Dijon on more than one occasion.

That communal singing and reading of Scripture formed much of the round of a medieval monk's day is an obvious point to make, as too is the fact that monks were often individually occupied with memorising and copying such texts. Yet this worldview is one which can be difficult to grasp for modern readers whose contexts tend to be largely secular. The Cistercian reform is therefore a useful reminder that what Reilly terms ‘symbolic synaesthesia’ was deeply embedded in the lives of the inhabitants of twelfth-century Cîteaux.