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

Medievalists tend to avoid liturgical studies. This book, however, concerns liturgy in its widest sense: the services of the church (the mass, the canonical offices, the little office of Our Lady) rather than the intimidating minutiae of introits and antiphons. It focuses on the convent of St Katherine in Nuremberg, which was reformed by Observant Dominican friars in 1428, and whose library contained over 700 manuscripts, about a quarter of them Latin liturgical texts.

Claire Taylor Jones argues that although the Dominicans were primarily a preaching order, for the nuns preaching was replaced by the performance of the Latin office: didactic texts written for them by Dominican friars and found in St Katherine’s library showed how this activity could fulfil Dominican spiritual ideals. In the first half of the fourteenth century, Johannes Tauler in his vernacular sermons and Heinrich Seuse in his Latin treatises had taught the virtue of true detachment (gelassenheit) achieved through orderly liturgical devotion governed by discretion (bescheidenheit), as opposed to disorderly mystical experience. Tauler had discouraged extra-liturgical prayer and Seuse urged conscientious attendance at mass and office.

Jones then turns to the numerous ‘sisterbooks’ produced by Dominican nuns in southern Germany and Switzerland, also in the fourteenth century, but favourably received by the Dominican reform in the fifteenth. Again, many were owned, and copied, by the St Katherine’s nuns. These texts not only celebrated visionary experience but also obedience to the Dominican rule and strict liturgical observance. This raises the question of the nuns’ fluency in Latin, and Jones cites some interesting examples from the ‘sisterbooks’ of the use of Latin liturgical texts.

But in the later fourteenth century liturgical observance fell into disrepair among the Dominicans, leading to the reform movement at the end of the century. This was slow to gain traction, and it was not until 1428 that St Katherine’s was reformed by a third Dominican, Johannes Nider. This included reform of the Office and the correction and updating of liturgical books. There was a new concern for the nuns’ ability to understand Latin, leading to the production of vernacular translations, to be read aloud at mealtimes or studied privately.

The immensely prolific Nider produced The Twenty-four Golden Harps, a sermon-cycle inspired by Cassian but with his liturgical emphasis excised, for the pious laity and religious. Later he made a close German translation of Cassian for the nuns alone (St Katherine’s owned two copies). The widely disseminated Harps promoted ‘contemplative visualization of Christ and Mary’ (p. 104) and the use of the imagination, but the translation, of which only three copies survive, privileged liturgical prayer, particularly the recitation of psalms.

Nider oversaw the retraining of the St Katherine’s nuns in the conscientious performance of the Office, which ‘supported the virtue, contemplative devotion and piety of those who participated’ (p. 122). In addition, their library contained texts designed for communal reading—Humbert of Romans’s commentary on the Augustinian Rule, William Durandus’s Rationale, Tauler’s sermons, German translations of gospels and epistles—which helped the nuns to understand the literal and spiritual significance of the liturgy.

Finally, Jones turns to Johannes Meyer, chronicler of the reform movement, editor of ‘sisterbooks’ and author of the Book of the Reformation and Book of Duties, both written in the vernacular for the nuns. The latter prescribes ‘the banal day-to-day activities’ (p. 144) that freed most of the nuns for prayer. It also recommends readings for mealtimes such as Cassian, Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, the Augustinian Rule, and liturgical readings, and requires various office-holders, particularly the novice mistress, to train the nuns in the performance of the Office.

His Book of the Reformation presents an exemplar of the ideal of communal worship in the lengthy life of the Dominican nun Clara von Ostren. Because she ‘could not sing’ she was...