Fixing the Liturgy: Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite, 1256-1516

A new history of the medieval Dominican liturgy, from the perspective of women's communities

In Fixing the Liturgy, Claire Taylor Jones opens a window into the daily practice of medieval liturgy, uncovering the astounding breadth of knowledge, the deep expertise, and the critical thinking required just to coordinate each day's worship. Focusing on the Dominican order, Jones shows how changes in medieval piety and ritual legislation disrupted the fine-tuned system that Dominicans instituted in the thirteenth century. World-historical events, including the Great Western Schism and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, had an impact on the practice of liturgy even in individual communities. Through a set of never-before-studied records from Dominican convents, Jones shows how women's communities reacted and adapted to historical change and how their surviving sources inform our understanding of the friars' lives, as well. Tracing the narrative up to the eve of the Protestant Reformation, this study culminates in a multi-media reconstruction of the sounds, sights, and smells of worship in the rightfully famous southern German convent of St. Katherine in Nuremberg.

Fixing the Liturgy makes this late medieval world accessible through clear introductions to medieval liturgy and to the Dominican order's governance. Jones illustrates how Dominican friars and sisters reconciled their order's rules with their own concrete circumstances and with the changing world around them. On the way, a new history of the medieval Dominican liturgy unfolds, told from the perspective of women's communities.

Author: Claire Taylor Jones
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 07/02/2024
Pages: 456
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.50d
ISBN: 9781512825688

About the Author
Claire Taylor Jones is William Payden Associate Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame and author of Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.