Since much of Bernard's activities and corpus reflect Cistercian charisma, it is important to understand what distinguished Cistercians in the late Middle Ages and why this may have been attractive to Dante. The 12th century has often been considered the century of the Cistercians. Part of the reason was due to a reformist impulse within the monastic community of the Church for greater simplicity in religious life and a greater emphasis on inner contrition and virtue. Martha G. Newman argues that in the early 9th century the 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 corps. .” 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. Because many of the new monks had lived in the world and previously 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 For new adult monks who had withdrawn from the world, the process of purification from sins was emphasized. As an example of this emphasis, Bernard preached the sermon On Conversion to an audience of Parisian scholars and students who constituted the type of candidate the Cistercians hoped to recruit. Bernard's sermon is full of verbal imagery that at first glance might seem explicit and dismissive of the body. He speaks of the “attractions of pleasure” in the sinner's memory which are like “a sewer [in which] every abomination and impurity flows.” Bern...... middle of paper...... St. Thierry describes the many attempts to install Bernard in ecclesiastical office, particularly in Milan and Reims where the clergy and people chose him as a candidate for archbishop. Bernard, however, did not seek progress for himself, but only to meet the needs of the church. Bernard did not hesitate to help the Church "whenever the needs of Obedience or Charity become urgent". For Bernard, the government of the Church was not separate from personal sanctity. Jean Leclercq states that Bernard wrote very often on topics having to do with “the mysteries of salvation, the way one should behave, act and govern in harmony with Christian principles”. De Consideratione is Bernard's work in which all the themes cited by Leclercq come together. De Consideratione is considered Bernard's treatise on the government of the Church.