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

In Ruling the Spirit, Claire Taylor Jones highlights the formative nature of liturgical piety for German Dominican nuns from the origins of the Order to the later Middle Ages. Along the way, she challenges popular depictions of the fourteenth-century Dominican sisters as “radical” in their spirituality and “subversive” to the later fifteenth-century Observant movement, which sought to reform the Dominican Order. Rather, Jones suggests that female Dominican spirituality and Observant reformers “represent two points in a continuous devotional history of ordered liturgical piety” (3). Jones tells a story of historical continuity within the Dominican Order when other historians have often emphasized change.

Jones begins by showing how legislative and normative documents of the Order reveal how Dominican leaders, such as Master General, Humbert of Romans (r. 1254–1263), forged a distinctive identity for the Dominican sisters (Chapter One). These documents present the foundational importance of prescribed convent duties (forma vitae) and the common practice of the Divine Office for Dominican sisters (13). These regulations—as mundane as they might initially sound—were different from the ones prescribed to Dominican friars. For the male members of the Order, Saint Dominic and later Humbert reduced the communal nature and complexity of the Divine Office and limited their manual labor to make time for study and preaching. Since the sisters did not share this academic and public pastoral calling, the framers of the Order emphasized the convent rhythms of the forma vitae and the Divine Office. This chapter looks forward to Jones’s later discussion of the Observant movement, which sought to reform sister houses by emphasizing the importance of the forma vitae and Divine Office. As we will see later, Jones argues that Observant reformers merely emphasized a point already made in the order’s founding documents. Jones recognizes that her emphasis upon liturgy raises the question of literacy among Dominican sisters. First, she recognizes that modern conceptions of medieval literacy have misguidedly linked it with reading higher-level theological treatises and composing Latin documents (5, 6). Jones claims that the sisters fulfilled the Order’s liturgical expectations through a “working literacy,” which reflected a myriad of different levels of reading competency.

Dominican nuns within the provinces of Teutonia found inspiration for their liturgical-centered lives in the works of two influential Dominican friars, Heinrich Seuse (1295–1366) and Johannes Tauler (1300–1361). Although some have treated their writings and influence as corrective efforts to control female spirituality, Jones sees their legacy as a “contiguous element that lays the conceptual and practical groundwork” for the spiritual practice and life of German Dominican convents (28). Both friars guided the Dominican order past the controversy surrounding Meister Eckhart, who seemed—though he denied this—to teach a sort of spiritualism that rejected outward works and institutional order. Jones tracks how Seuse and Tauler used the spiritual language of Eckhart, especially the notion of Gelassenheit (self-divestment), while directing it away from the quietism and libertinism that supposedly characterized his thought. Seuse’s devotional writings (Horologium sapientiae, Exemplar, and a collection of edited letters) and Tauler’s German-language sermons encouraged strict adherence to convent duties (forma vitae) and celebrated liturgical piety (56). They also warned against the danger of spiritual individualism and supererogatory asceticism that tended to isolate one from the community. Jones proves that these texts were available for reading within convents of Teutonia and that they were incorporated into the calendar of edifying works read aloud during meals known as “table readings.”

Next, Jones turns to a collection of sisterbooks, a genre of commemorative biographies of fourteenth-century Dominican women, to illustrate how the forma vitae and liturgical piety shaped female Dominican Spirituality (Chapter Three). Jones rejects the idea that these biographies depict “feminine hysteria,” a nineteenth-century opinion, as well as the more recent suggestion that the biographies contain subversive reactions to male leadership. Instead, Jones argues that the texts present female...