The article explores how the passion for storytelling, obvious in Cistercian exempla collections, corresponded with the efforts of white monks to rigorously observe the silence, as prescribed by the Rule of St Benedict. Keeping in mind the necessity to maintain a critical distance to the exempla, we can ask how the circulation of stories was managed and controlled by a community that wanted to be silent and austere to the point of discouraging conversions. The article confronts therefore narrative texts and legislative texts, to find out whether the passion for storytelling was explicitly controlled or left to the discretion of each community and therefore existed in some kind of a grey legislative zone