This article describes the role played by the topos of manual labour in the Cistercian reform at La Trappe in the 1660s. According to the reformer Armand-Jean de Rancé, manual labour serves partly as a link from the reform to the Rule of Benedict's prescriptions about opus manuum, partly as an epitome of the biblical definition of the post-lapsarian condition as a matter of eating bread by the sweat of one's face and finally as a device for the cultivation of monastic humility and penitence.