8vo. [6], 477pp, [1]. With a woodcut frontispiece. Title in red and black. Contemporary blind-ruled calf, metal clasps. Extremities worn and marked, very small worm-holes to joints. Marbled pastedowns, ink-stamp to FFEP of the Franciscan monastery at Crawley, Sussex, slight marginal loss to frontispiece, paper repair to lower corner of leaf X1, leaves toned, occasional spotting.

An early eighteenth-century Bavarian printing of the devotional writings of French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), whose role in the reformation of Benedictine monasticism led to the formation of the Cistercian order. Bernard was canonised in 1174, the first Cistercian to be placed on the calendar of saints.