Synopses & Reviews
When in 1191 John of Ford became abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Ford in southwest England, he was already a man of experience in the Order--having attended General Chapters and been abbot of Bindon--and he was renowned for his considerable literary accomplishment. His Life of the neighboring recluse Wulfric of Haselbury enjoyed a long popularity in the Late Middle Ages. As abbot, John had to deal with the Interdict imposed against King John and the crippling taxation he levied on the Cistercian houses to support his campaign in Ireland. Turning adversity into opportunity, John prayed, May a new day dawn upon us, a day of your holy poverty and your holy love.
Review
[John] emerges as a lively and original commentator, writing sensitively from a deep experience of the spiritual and monastic life. Carrying on where his great predecessors, including Saint Bernard, left off, John knows grace and its counterpart, humility, are central to all christian spirituality; he also has an exceptionally keen awareness of the church as a body whose members share in each other's treasures and rejoice in each other's blessings.Simon Tugwell OP, Cistercian Studies Quarterly
Synopsis
John completed the sermon-meditations on the Song of Songs which had been begun by Bernard of Clairvaux and continued by Gilbert of Hoyland. In one-hundred twenty sermons, he brings the task to its conclusion, in the process demonstrating the persistence of the patristic-monastic exegetical tradition and the influence of the early thirteenth-century intellectual tradition.