In this volume, Claire Jones offers new insights into the evolution of the Dominican liturgy of the late Middle Ages, with particular attention to how the order’s hierarchical and gendered governance shaped the liturgical experiences of friars and sisters differently. Drawing on a wealth of Dominican manuscripts from southern Germany, Jones highlights how both men and women engaged with liturgical change, particularly in response to the Observant reform movement, which sought a stricter adherence to the order’s foundational rules. The book follows a dual structure, moving chronologically whilst becoming more concerned with liturgical particulars.

The early chapters introduce the Dominican Rite as it was formalised in 1256 and explore the mechanisms of governance that allowed for liturgical modifications. Jones explains how Dominican legislation aimed to maintain uniformity but often led to inconsistencies in practice due to inexpert implementation and incomplete manuscript transmission. Chapters iii and iv analyse Latin and German manuscript witnesses of the ordinarium – the technical liturgical manual providing guidance and direction – from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, revealing how the Dominican Rite, though intended to be universal, was subject to local variation. A significant challenge was that Dominican sisters were clearly unable to occupy certain liturgical roles. Male translators struggled to adapt the ordinarium for women’s use. In response, Dominican nuns developed their own German-language directoria – liturgical manuals that addressed the shortcomings of male-authored texts and tailored the liturgy to their specific needs. These manuals, produced both within and outside the Observant movement, reflect the sisters’ agency in shaping their own liturgical practice. The final chapter revisits the feast of the Translation of St Dominic, first introduced in chapter i, to illustrate how liturgical regulations played out in practice. Using manuscripts from the Dominican convent of St Katherine in Nuremberg, Jones reconstructs how the sisters may have celebrated the feast in 1516, demonstrating both the complexity of the Dominican liturgy and the flexibility required to reconcile competing obligations. As a whole, Fixing the liturgy offers an important and novel contribution to liturgical studies, providing a fresh perspective on medieval Dominican liturgy, and emphasising the tensions between institutional authority and local adaptation, and making reference to a previously under-used and under-valued population of manuscripts.

What can liturgical manuscripts help us to understand about medieval Dominican women and their liturgical relationship with the friars? Are liturgical sources prescriptive or descriptive of liturgical praxis, or are they merely hopeful? These are wider questions which Jones helps us explore. The polysemy of the title points out from the start that ‘fixing’ is ‘at play’ throughout the study: at one moment ‘establishing’ and ‘entrenching’, at another ‘repairing’ and ‘correcting’, much like the shadowy figures implied in the study who establish and correct liturgical rites and liturgical books. Indeed, Jones offers proof of the assertion that every liturgical manuscript needs to be considered as a unique witness. The source material and Jones’s reading of it highlight the evolving role of women in shaping liturgical practice and underscore the expertise required to maintain coherence in an increasingly complex textual system.

Jones offers a great deal of help to the reader, both in the initial chapters in which liturgical jargon is demystified and in the substantial appendices. However, those readers for which this material was particularly intended may not always be able to discern whether what is discussed represents universal practice or convention or whether it is particular to the circumstances of this study. There are also some sweeping statements which deserve query. It is stated that the proper material for the Translation of St Dominic is ‘assembled from bits of Dominic’s primary feast’ (p. 61), with the implication that this is surprising. This was, of course, the case for a number of other saintly individuals and such borrowing presumably stabilised and clarified the status of the existing proper texts. There are few if any errors in the presentation of the book – but in a work in which great care has been taken to produce detailed artwork and high-quality images, it is surprising that the images of the Würzberg ordinarium contain the photographer’s fingers. But these are minor considerations.

Fixing the liturgy is a carefully constructed, accessible and profound offering to medieval liturgical studies which will be valued not only by those who study the Dominican rite or women’s religious communities but by all who want to discover how ‘hyper-local’ liturgical manuscripts offer a witness to the complicated interplay between centralising and localising influences on the worship of the medieval Church.