Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany by Claire Taylor Jones (review)

The religious orders of women in Germany associated with the mendicant friars are at times portrayed as experiencing rapid decline and decadence during the late Middle Ages, beginning soon after their foundation in the early thirteenth century and well before being swept away, mostly in the aftermath of the Reformation. Yet, this view has been increasingly discredited by recent scholarship that has highlighted the aspirations and vitality of the movements of reform of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially as manifested by the Observant branches of these orders. Claire Taylor Jones, who displays close acquaintance with this scholarship, focuses on some of the monasteries of the cloistered, women's branch of the Dominican order that fell within the orbit of the Observant movement active in the friars' Province of Teutonia, primarily St. Katherine in Nuremberg, at first an Augustinian foundation but soon associated with the Dominicans and integrated into the Observance in 1428. On the basis of a meticulous investigation of the suviving evidence of these monasteries' rich library resources, Jones argues for a close connection between the friars' governance and spiritual direction and the sisters' devotional and liturgical practices. The sisters responded to the friars' proposal of the ideals of the Dominican order, especially obedience, by appropriating a didactic approach that stressed a high level of Latin literacy as a prerequisite for the solemn recitation of the Divine Office as a vehicle for genuine piety and even the attainment of ecstatic prayer.

The book comprises six chapters, each of which reiterates its principal argument while presenting the various sources employed in a flexible chronological order. It opens with an examination of the discrepancies in liturgical practice between the sisters' and the friars' branches at the order's beginnings and concludes with the legislation (1259) of master general Humbert of Romans that sought to introduce uniformity. The second chapter evaluates the impact on the sisters of the linkage of the spiritual and the liturgical life proposed in the works of the Dominican preachers and mystics Heinrich Seuse (c. 1300–1361) and JohannesTauler (1295–1366). The third considers the "sistersbooks"—collections of biographies compiled for the edification of future generations of sisters—that reveal a persistent tension between formal liturgical practice and affective, mystical manifestations of piety, factors ultimately reconciled by the Observance's emphasis on obedience. The fourth chapter turns to the legislative material (Acts of general and provincial chapters, visitation charges) implementing the spread of the Observance among both the friars and the sisters and shows the centrality accorded to the liturgy in the dynamics of reform by both branches. The fifth chapter focuses on some works of the Dominican reformer Johannes Nider (1380–1438)—his German translation of the Conferences of John Cassian and his reworking of these as a cycle of sermons, The Twenty—Four Golden Harps—and concludes that while Nider held that visual piety sufficed for the devotion of lay women, the recitation of the Divine Office was indispensable to the spirituality of cloistered nuns. The final chapter considers two works of another Observant Dominican, Johannes Meyer (1423–1485), intended expressly for Dominican religious women: the Book of Duties and the Book of the Reformation. For Meyer the most important aspect of religious life is community, and it finds its foremost expression in liturgical functions that, at the same time, both separate and unite a religious house and civic society. Jones offers us a work of serious scholarship that merits close reading. Yet the book might have benefited from a more defined conclusion, bringing the narrative neatly to the eve of the Reformation—perhaps a discussion of the section on liturgy (Chapter I) in the Constitutiones monialium O.P. first edited by master general Vincenzo Bandello and promulgated at the general chapter of Milan in 1505.