Given that much of Bernard's activities and corpus reflect Cistercian charisma, it is important to understand what was distinctive about the Cistercians at the end of the Middle Ages and why it may have been attractive. to Dante. The 12th century has often been considered the century of the Cistercians. This can be explained in part by a reforming impulse within the monastic community of the Church, in favor of greater simplicity in religious life and a greater emphasis on inner contrition and virtue. Martha G. Newman argues that in the early 9th century, Benedictine rule, which was the dominant monastic rule in Western Europe, often ignored the "implications for inner [spiritual] education and focused instead on appropriate behavior and ritual actions of a military body. .” In contrast, the Cistercians emphasized spiritual contemplation in the context of a community. One of the differences between the Cistercians and other monastic orders is that they only accepted adults as novices. As many of the new monks had lived in the world and once belonged to the upper classes, the training of adult novitiates was less about basic education and more about spiritual reform. For new adult monks who had withdrawn from the world, the emphasis was on the process of sinful purgation. As an example of this emphasis, Bernard preached the sermon On Conversion to an audience of Parisian scholars and students who were the type of candidates the Cistercians hoped to recruit. Bernard's sermon is full of verbal imagery that may at first glance seem graphic and dismissive of the body. He speaks of the "inducements to pleasure" in the sinner's memory which are like "a cesspit [into which] all abomination and all impurity flow." Bern...... middle of paper ...... Saint-Thierry describes the numerous attempts to establish Bernard in an ecclesiastical office, notably in Milan and Reims where the clergy and people chose him as candidate for archbishop . However, Bernard did not seek advancement for himself, but only to advance the needs of the Church. Bernard did not hesitate to help the Church “whenever the demands of obedience or charity became urgent.” For Bernard, church governance was not distinct from personal holiness. Jean Leclercq specifies that Bernard most often wrote on subjects which concerned “the mysteries of salvation, the way in which one must behave, act [and] govern according to Christian principles”. De Consideration is Bernard's work where all the subjects mentioned by Leclercq come together. De Consideratione is considered Bernard's treatise on Church governance.