In the mid-13th century, members of the recently founded Order of Friars Preachers devoted significant time and financial resources to uniting the liturgical practice of the rapidly expanding international order. Under the direction of Humbert of Romans (c. 1200–1277), Master of the Order from 1254 to 1263, fourteen liturgical books were promulgated that presented texts, chants, and rubrics for the Mass, Office, and other daily rituals of the Dominican friars. Despite their comprehensive character, these books presented certain challenges for Dominican nuns, who were unable to fulfill some of their prescriptions due to their non-ordained and cloistered character.

This monograph offers a groundbreaking study of the Dominican liturgy from the 13th century until the eve of the Reformation, focusing on the liturgical practices of Dominican nuns in German-speaking regions. In Jones’s view, Dominican nuns were active and expert participants in the medieval liturgy. In some cases, the sisters composed new texts and chants for the liturgy and wrote expert commentary on the conundrums posed by the interlocking cycles of the liturgy. More broadly, the very complexity of medieval liturgy required nuns (as well as friars) to achieve a high level of musical, textual, and ritual literacy to successfully celebrate the daily and yearly rites of the Mass and Office.

In the Introduction, Jones provides a succinct overview of the Ordinarium and Directorium: the first was an official part of Humbert’s reformed liturgy, while the second was an ad hoc contribution of Dominican nuns created to supplement and adapt Humbert’s rubrics for the use of the female branch of the Order. Jones situates the monograph within recent scholarly treatments of medieval monastic women, discussing the influence of liturgy on the daily lives and mystical experience of medieval women, the active and creative role of women in the medieval liturgy, and the question of female literacy in medieval Germany.

Chapter 1 offers an excellent introduction to the various overlapping cycles of medieval liturgy, as well as helpful theoretical reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of different heuristic definitions of the (modern) term “liturgy.” Jones provides a particularly nuanced treatment of the “horarium” or daily schedule of medieval Dominican communities. The chapter concludes with a detailed case study of the complexities of celebrating a particular feast, the May 24 Translation of St. Dominic, which was celebrated with varying liturgical texts based on whether it fell within or after the Easter Season in a particular year. Chapter 2 focuses on normative sources for Dominican liturgy, considering the Rule of St. Augustine, the Constitutions of the Order of Preachers, and the Ordinarium used by Dominican friars and sisters. Jones gives a succinct but informative description of the development of varying versions of these documents used by friars and sisters, and articulates the challenges that gradually emerged due to the immutability of the sisters’ constitutions and the inherent difficulty of distributing updated versions of liturgical texts and rubrics throughout the far-flung Order.

The following three chapters focus on manuscript sources that reveal the complexities of the reception of Humbert’s liturgy in medieval Germany. Chapter 3 gives detailed studies of several manuscript copies of the Dominican Ordinarium that include additional texts that provide guidance for difficulties that had arisen within the Dominican liturgy over the centuries following Humbert’s reform. The author’s treatment of the divergent developments within the Roman and Avignon branches of the Order during the Western Schism is particularly illuminating. Chapter 4 examines five distinct translations of the Latin Ordinarium into German, showing how the translators made different decisions regarding the adaptation of the texts and rubrics originally designed for friars to the liturgical needs of Dominican sisters. Chapter 5 examines several German-language Directoria written by and for Dominican nuns who sought to resolve complex liturgical conundrums that had arisen due to developments of the Dominican liturgy in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Chapter 6 returns to the case study of the Translation of St. Dominic discussed in Chapter 1, using the remarkably rich range of surviving manuscripts from St. Katherine in Nuremberg to narrate the celebration of the feast on the eve of the Reformation in 1516. The Conclusion of the monograph offers a fascinating description of the liturgical perseverance of Dominican nuns in cities that became Protestant, as well as a nuanced discussion of the liturgical agency of medieval religious women. The volume concludes with an extensive series of appendices giving valuable overviews of the Dominican liturgical calendar, the distribution of Psalms in the Dominican Office, the structure of the feast of the Translation of St. Dominic, manuscript sources of the German-language Ordinarium and Directorium, and a glossary of technical liturgical terms used throughout the book.

Jones’ attention to detail and clarity of expression is exceptional, and there is little in the book that I would presume to fix. One uncharacteristic oversight is the translation of “Dum versus noni responsorii cantatur, procedat Diaconus cum solemni apparatu ad cantandum Liber generationis sicut in festis totis duplicibus de Evangelio est notatum” as “When the verse of the ninth responsory has been sung, a deacon proceeds with solemn pomp to sing the Liber generationis, according to the music provided for the gospel on totum duplex feasts” (149, drawing on Ordinarium, 12 [§42]). Cum solemni apparatu likely refers to the solemn vestments of the deacon rather than the pomp of the occasion. Est notatum seems to refer to the mode of performance of the gospel on totum duplex feasts (cf. the Missale conventuale rubrics edited in Ordinarium, 237–238, §62), rather than to melodic notation; in fact, a distinctive melody was provided for the Liber generationis in the Dominican Evangelistarium (cf. London, British Library, MS Add. 23935, ff. 546v–547r), whereas the melody for most other gospels was fixed without regard to the rank of the feast.

Fixing the Liturgy is a remarkable achievement, and it lays a firm foundation for further scholarship on the rich and complicated liturgical lives of late medieval Christians.