Lay awake last night listening to the sound of a farmer working into the small hours in an effort to get the harvest in. Spent the time thinking about all sorts of irrelevant things (although the thought of the farmer's weariness was perhaps not irrelevant). I hadn't expected the post on St Bernard to spark so much interest, although I am very gruntled to find it so. St Bernard is one of my heroes and largely responsible for the fact that I am a nun. As a Ph.D student, I had to read his collected works as "background" (four hefty volumes in Migne) and was entranced by his use of language: Bernard's Latin is extraordinarily supple and dynamic, although my old Latin teacher would NOT have approved. It "sowed the seed", so to say. As to the Ribalta, some may remember that it was included in an exhibition of Spanish painting of the Golden Age held in London in the 1970s, where it was hung very effectively and had a huge imapact. When I lived in Madrid I used to go and look at it most Sunday mornings in the Prado. Those shadowy figures, the angel and the young man in the foreground, are deeply mysterious, half-revealing, half-concealing a very private experience. The iconography of St Bernard is a fascinating subject in itself. For a definitive study of every known medieval image, I cannot recommend too highly James France's learned and immensely readable Medieval Images of St Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies 210 (Kalamazoo, 2007) which is accompanied by a disk of the images referred to in his book. (The fact that our copy is inscribed by James with engaging humility as "from a fellow-devotee of St Bernard" has nothing whatsoever to do with my opinion, which is utterly objective and disinterested. Ed.)