"Led by the example of Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian monks, respected as twelfth-century Europe's holiest and brightest men, embarked on preaching missions against dissidents in southern France from 1145 to 1229." "The white monks turned their attention outside the monastery to a world they viewed as threatened and threatening, a social order in danger of collapse because dissident Christians, particularly the Cathars, were undermining it. Cistercians and other intellectuals resorted to pen, pulpit and popular preaching in the hope of eliminating the danger from their midst. Some Cistercians accepted posts as bishops and papal legates who aided and even directed the Albigensian Crusade and who contributed to establishing procedures of inquisition." "The present book examines this important but little-studied aspect of Cistercian history to probe how and why the Order undertook endeavours that drew the monks outside their monastic vocation. The analysis of texts about the preaching campaigns, and of their contexts, seeks to retrieve the role of preaching and to reconstruct what was preached in the light of its historical and specifically monastic context. Monastic texts and their contexts furnish the keys to understanding how medieval monastic authors perceived heresy, preached, and wrote against it."--BOOK JACKET.