Download PDF | Claire Taylor Jones - Fixing the Liturgy_ Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite, 1256-1516 (The Middle Ages Series)-University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. (2024).
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INTRODUCTION
To the modern reader, medieval liturgy can seem impossibly complex, so much so that introductions to its study usually acknowledge this affective hurdle. John Harper, for example, warns his readers that “complexity, ambiguity, and confusion can deter the faint-hearted at every point in the struggle to piece together medieval liturgy.”! Bruce Holsinger similarly laments that “one aspect of medieval liturgy that often deters literary scholars from pursuing it in depth is its overwhelming organizational and textual complexity.”2 Scholarship on medieval liturgy has even been portrayed as “an ancient mystery cult,” whose “arcane” practices make it “hard for a mere layman to penetrate these mysteries.”
Far be it from me to claim otherwise. Indeed, medieval liturgy often was also extremely complex for the people who practiced it daily. This complexity arose from the intricate system of interlocking elements that made up the liturgical year and the schedule of religious observances performed each day. Over the course of the Middle Ages, this complex liturgical system evolved and expanded. Changes to existing rituals and the addition of new celebrations increased the complexity of the liturgy and made the task of coordinating its performance more difficult. In addition to change over time, local piety also obligated religious communities to regional observances that needed to be integrated with widespread liturgical structures. Even in the Dominican order, which took pains to enforce a uniform liturgy throughout its communities, liturgical coordination entailed negotiating multiple obligations and reconciling internal inconsistencies, often through independent judgment calls on a case-by-case basis. As Maura O’Carroll comments, “The minutiae of this process could and sometimes did defeat the very purpose of liturgy.”4 Many communities, however, had the benefit of written guidelines developed to help people get a fix on this complex system.
This study concerns these written guidelines and the ways in which they facilitated the work of liturgical planning in the Dominican order. My focus does not lie on the performance of the liturgy, its aesthetic qualities, or its sensual experience. Instead, I lay bare the work behind the scenes, so to speak, by analyzing the practical manuals used to coordinate the liturgy in advance. Most of the manuscript sources I consider in this book have never been examined before—some have not yet even received published catalog descriptions. These documents have fallen between the cracks of scholarly attention for various reasons: Some have erroneously been assumed to be strict copies of an edited source, some have been discounted or unrecognized because they are written in the vernacular. Yet these normative guidelines for liturgical practice are all invaluable sources for late medieval religious culture, and they reveal a new narrative about the evolution of the medieval Dominican liturgy. Moreover, the method for using them in scholarly research is similar to the way in which they were used in medieval practice. Understanding how they were employed by medieval users prepares modern researchers across disciplines to access these rich and largely untapped sources. In this book, I explain how these liturgical manuals were originally designed to function, I demonstrate how they changed over time, and I expose how the guidelines composed for men’s communities were adapted for women’s use.
With this attention to change over time and to gendered context, my title —Fixing the Liturgy—has a twofold sense: Fix can mean to establish, make firm, entrench in law; it can also mean to repair, correct, put back in working order. These two definitions of fixing are at play throughout this study as I trace the evolution of the Dominican Rite from its formal inauguration in the mid-thirteenth century to its lived practice in the reform circles of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In the later chapters, I focus on women’s communities because the liturgical experiences and opportunities open to convents of Dominican sisters differed from those of the friars for whom the Dominican Rite had been designed. Attending to women’s liturgy therefore reveals the tensions in the Dominican liturgical system and the areas in which—at least for women— something needed to be fixed.
Liturgy is a key framework for understanding medieval cultural production, especially in religious communities. Scholarship on medieval religious women has largely taken for granted that liturgical performance occurred, assuming that it happened more or less automatically. The processes of administration and planning that enabled this performance and on which this book focuses have not been fully appreciated and have rarely been previously considered. Yet liturgical coordination was centrally important to convent life. Given the complexities mentioned above, fulfilling this responsibility required practical training, complex reasoning, and a broad knowledge base. As I demonstrate in this book, even when friars and sisters sought to follow the rules imposed on them as strictly as possible, the liturgy was complex, unwieldy, and even internally incoherent enough that it demanded independent thought and action. The friars and sisters who planned the liturgy in their communities developed an astounding degree of expertise. The task facing these expert administrators was both facilitated and governed by written documents containing guidelines for selecting texts and melodies and for scheduling celebrations. In this book, I focus on the Dominican order’s formal regulations and the sisters’ practical manuals: the genres of ordinarium and directorium.
Defining Ordinarium and Directorium
The Dominican ordinarium belonged to a liturgical genre generally designated in modern scholarship by the terms ordinal or liber ordinarius. Medieval Dominican sources, in particular the acts of the general chapter, consistently used the term ordinarium rather than liber ordinarius, and I follow that usage when referring to the standardized, order-wide Dominican text of this genre. Such books have been described as stage directions for the liturgy. They served first and foremost to assist in scheduling, coordinating, and choreographing liturgical worship according to specific performance patterns, which varied by region, diocese, or religious order. This book type originally developed to record practices and processions in a specific location, but the reform orders of the high Middle Ages (including the Dominicans) used the genre to standardize liturgical worship across all affiliated houses.
In high and late medieval religious communities, the task of liturgical coordination was undertaken by an administrator called the cantor or chantress.£ This person worked in consultation and collaboration with a small group of other administrators, such as the sacristan (responsible for the church building and liturgical instruments), and was subject to the approval of the community’s superior (in Dominican communities, the prior or prioress). Orchestrating the musical aspects of liturgical performance entailed selecting the appropriate chants and readings, running group rehearsals, assigning various participants to solo or small-group parts, and training participants for their roles.
From an organizational perspective, this task was hampered by the layout of liturgical books, which were designed to facilitate performance, not planning. For practical reasons, the vast majority of liturgical manuscript types contain the texts and melodies pertaining only to one participant role and one location in the worship space. For example, a lectionary contained the readings (lessons) for the use of the lector and belonged on the lectern.2 The chants to be sung by soloists were in a different book, which was located where singers could access it in the open space between the two halves of the community, who sat facing each other. The prayers to be said by the prior or prioress or the hebdomadarian (the weekly presider) were in yet a third book placed on a pulpit. Each liturgical celebration involved multiple liturgical actors situated in different locations within the church or the choir (i.e., the architectural space in which the community gathered for worship and communal prayer). Therefore, the texts and melodies necessary for a single performance were strewn through several different books. This arrangement was the best solution to help those with special roles during the liturgy itself, but it required the cantor or chantress to juggle several books while planning.
By the high Middle Ages, most religious institutions, monastic and secular, had compiled a liber ordinarius (also called ordinal or ordinarium) to facilitate collating these sources. This book type contained a flexible set of texts unified by their function of giving abbreviated instructions for the liturgy, which aided the cantor or chantress in the task of organizing the community and preparing them for worship.2 Unlike the various other liturgical books with full texts and chants, ordinals generally gave only the incipits (first words) of liturgical texts and had no musical notation.
Ordinals lacked these elements because these books had no place in liturgical performance; they merely assisted in preparation. They provided guidance for selecting chants and texts, information on which books contained them, and advice about resolving calendrical conflicts, especially with regard to the shifting dates of Easter. Writing about the 1404 ordinal from Barking Abbey in England, Anne Bagnall Yardley notes that “many of the instructions in the ordinal exist simply to clarify the exact precedence of one feast over another depending on the day of the week and the liturgical season in which it falls.”2 Ordinals also often contained rubrics (instructions) with a wealth of information about ritual gestures, processions, vestments, lighting, paraphernalia, and even instructions for ringing the church bells. The ordinal was the cantor’s or chantress’s reference volume, or handbook, to aid in preparing the community for all aspects—musical, textual, ritual—of the liturgy each year.
Broad religious and social shifts spurred the invention of the genre and its spread. The explosion of new feasts in the high Middle Ages prompted communities to preserve their increasingly complex liturgical traditions by fixing them in writing or to reform (fix) liturgical variants through written coordination.42 Ordinals arose as hyperlocal guidelines pertaining to only one church, sometimes to protect their traditional customs in response to some sort of perceived threat to communal identity. For example, Jeffrey Hamburger and Eva Schlotheuber argue that the liber ordinarius for the Abbey of Nivelles was recorded during a power struggle among the abbess, the canonesses, and the canons in which the chapter challenged the sovereignty of the abbess.! Similarly, Jiirgen Barsch links the “defensive postures [Abwehrhaltungen]” of diocesan ordinals to the papacy’s thirteenth-century adoption of the Franciscan Rite.“ Ordinals were often produced in times of liturgical reform, change, threat, or pressure either to protect the old or to propagate the new.
Although the genre was invented to codify and thereby protect the practices of a single church, it lent itself to implementation over broader geographical areas. Aimé-Georges Martimort correlates the evolution of ordinals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the rise of the reform orders (e.g., Cistercians, Franciscans, and Dominicans), for whom liturgical purity, simplicity, and above all uniformity formed important goals. Standardized ordinals became a tool for religious orders or reform movements interested in greater uniformity and centralization, especially from the thirteenth century on.4 The Dominican ordinarium belonged to this genre of standardizing ordinal that aimed to ensure a uniform liturgy throughout the order.
In this book, I use the term directorium to designate a specific group of manuscripts that have been called a wide variety of names by catalogers, most often liber ordinarius in acknowledgment of their function in coordinating liturgical performance.22 (I provide an_ extensive disambiguation with a discussion of medieval terminology in Appendix 5.) To be sure, the contents and structure of these manuscripts fit the criteria that normally qualify documents as ordinals. They provided bare-bones instructions for liturgical observances throughout the year; they were tailored to the local community’s special practices and circumstances; chants were indicated only by incipit (i.e., the opening words); and melodies were designated by name without musical notation. However, these manuals were not exhaustive in content. Marius Schramke describes one directorium as “a form [of the liber ordinarius] reduced to peculiarities [eine auf Besonderheiten reduzierte Form].”!£ The directoria were instead supplemental, and they could not be effectively used without a standard Dominican ordinarium on hand, as well. These manuals addressed faults, lacks, or uncertainties in the standard Dominican ordinarium, focusing largely on local observances and scheduling conflicts. Most important, unlike the standard Dominican ordinarium, the manuscripts I include in this set were compiled not only for but also—in every case—by Dominican sisters.
These two manuals, the ordinarium and the directorium, each held a different regulatory status and enjoyed a different breadth of distribution. The ordinarium was a fixed legal document that could only be changed through the legislative process that I describe in Chapter 2. The Dominican order centrally propagated this universally valid, Latin-language ordinarium in order to achieve uniformity in the celebration of the Dominican Rite. Yet it was translated into German multiple times and, in the process, adapted to reflect the liturgical restrictions placed on women. Furthermore, as new saints and new feasts were introduced to the calendar (for example, Corpus Christi, instituted at the beginning of the fourteenth century), the instructions of the standard ordinarium grew insufficient, particularly regarding the scheduling guidelines. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Dominican sisters produced supplemental directoria in German, seeking thereby to fix (i.e., correct) the insufficiencies in the ordinarium manuscripts they possessed and to fix (i.e., establish) the variations required by local circumstance and by the limitations on women’s liturgy. The ordinarium and the directorium together governed the way Dominican sisters celebrated the liturgy.
Liturgy in Scholarship on Religious Women
Scholarship on medieval Christianity has long recognized the centrality of the liturgy to daily life and cultural production within religious communities. Indeed, the word centrality does not adequately capture the complete pervasiveness of liturgy, understood as ritualized communal action. Given the highly regimented nature of life according to a religious rule, even banal activities such as eating meals had a liturgical aspect.“ Whereas earlier liturgical scholarship often focused on ceremonies that involved priests, more expansive definitions of liturgy have now become widely accepted, allowing scholars to analyze the communal rituals of religious women as “liturgy” even in the absence of male clerics. As Gisela Muschiol points out, the celebration of mass required a priest (i.e., a male celebrant), but the divine office (the daily cycle of prayer hours) did not and “during the high Middle Ages, there are also many examples of women filling the role of liturgical presider within female monastic communities.”!2 Furthermore, attempting to differentiate between “devotion” and “liturgy” is not entirely commensurate with medieval conceptions of pious ritual. As Jiirgen Barsch writes, “No distinction was drawn between the official liturgy of the Church and the ritual practices of the faithful. Terms such as para-liturgy or popular piety, and the ideas behind them, are largely anachronistic.”22 Many medieval Christians, especially those living in a religious community, experienced liturgy as an encompassing practice that organized almost their entire lives.24
Three major areas of inquiry into the place of liturgy in medieval religious communities have contributed substantially to our understanding of the cultural production not only of Dominican sisters in particular but also of medieval religious women more broadly. First, scholars have increasingly devoted attention to liturgical texts and rituals as inspirations and intertextual touchpoints in mystical and visionary literature by and about religious women. Second, in addition to composing texts that reflected their experiences and interpretations of liturgy, medieval women created original works for direct use in liturgical performance, ranging from textiles to books to chants. Finally, growing consideration of women’s visionary writing and artistic production has fueled a recurring scholarly debate concerning whether and to what degree religious women, especially in the late Middle Ages, were literate in Latin. All three of these areas of scholarship pertain to the liturgical manuals I examine, especially those in German, and these documents in turn can further these strands of historical research.
Liturgy as a Source for Mysticism and Visionary Literature
Texts by and about enclosed religious women in the Middle Ages are steeped in liturgy. Scholars have long recognized the role of liturgical experience in accounts of visions. Already in 1938, Stephanus Hilpisch gathered accounts from the vitae (lives, or life stories) of Dominican sisters in which saints and angels participate in the community’s liturgical performance.22 These Dominican accounts share many features with other visionary literature, especially with the Latin accounts written by the Cistercian nuns of Helfta.22 As Barsch notes, it should not surprise us that the writings of religious women across multiple orders teem with references to the liturgy, since “day, week, and year were structured by divine worship, ... these women lived these modes of expression. For this reason alone, the liturgy should be seen as one of the most significant sources of female mysticism.”24 Intense liturgical devotion was not the exclusive purview of women. The spiritual literature written by religious men in the Middle Ages likewise reflects deep engagement with the liturgy through pervasive citation of the scriptural texts encountered daily during communal ritual.2° Mary Carruthers influentially argued that practices of memorization, including liturgical recitation, provided the framework for medieval writing: “Composition starts in memorized reading.”26 Building on Carruthers, Anna Maria Busse Berger demonstrated that well-developed techniques of liturgical memorization supported musical performance and
composition not only of monophonic (single-voice) chant but also of polyphony.22 Liturgical training formed the basis of much elite cultural production.
Recent scholarship on women’s visionary literature has gone far beyond simple observations that the liturgy was omnipresent in their writings because it was omnipresent in their lives. For different writers, the liturgy served varying functions within visionary literature—or, perhaps better, different elements of liturgical performance inspired religious writers in different ways. Liturgy was (and is) a multimedia performance experience comprising sound, images, text, and movement, and it elicited synesthetic accounts and descriptions.22 Medieval visionary writers—and the modern scholars that study them—display diverse emphases that reflect their own orientations to liturgical practice. For example, Racha Kirakosian and Andrew Albin have drawn attention to the sensory accounts of sound, especially liturgical music, in visionary writings.22 Jeffrey Hamburger’s groundbreaking work laid the foundation for studies of visual culture and its place in visionary literature, and Kirakosian has recently turned her attention to liturgical textiles.22 Liturgy’s multimedia character offers multiple avenues for sensory engagement.
Liturgical experience in the Middle Ages was not uniform, and this fact influenced visionary texts. Caroline Emmelius has demonstrated very different forms of liturgical reception in the writings of two visionaries who both lived in the convent of Helfta. Mechthild of Magdeburg, who only entered the convent late in life, recounted visions of liturgical celebrations, but these were not strictly located in or triggered by real-life liturgical participation. In contrast, the visions of Helfta chantress Mechthild of Hackeborn not only occurred during liturgical performance but in fact offered exegetical interpretations of the chant texts being sung. Despite the fact that they lived, at least temporarily, in the same community, these two women’s different forms of engagement with liturgical practice in their daily lives influenced their differing engagements with liturgy in their visions.24
I have argued elsewhere that the Dominican sister books interpreted the liturgical chants they cited and presented these interpretations in ways that assumed the reader’s intimate familiarity with the liturgy. The narratives presuppose knowledge not just of the Latin text of liturgical chant but also
its use context in particular liturgical celebrations and even the ritual gestures that accompanied its performance.-2 As the appreciation of liturgical references in medieval mystical and visionary literature becomes more nuanced, detailed knowledge of liturgical practice in increasingly local contexts correspondingly gains in importance. The manuals that religious women used to coordinate their liturgical rituals, such as the Dominican ordinaria and directoria, describe the normative framework within which visionary accounts were composed and received. Bringing such manuals to bear on interpretations of medieval mysticism can enrich scholarly understanding of the multisensory environments in which visionary literature was written and read.
Liturgy as a Sphere of Creative Activity
Religious women engaged creatively with liturgy more directly than merely as an inspiration for devotion and visionary writing. Scholars have highlighted the many ways in which medieval women contributed to the practice of the liturgy, from the production of liturgical textiles to the composition of new chants. At first glance, making liturgical textiles conforms to preconceptions of embroidery as women’s work. In the context of the prohibition against women touching the altar, however, Fiona Griffiths has argued that embroidering priestly vestments and altar cloths gave women a way Of indirectly “touching” the mass that was otherwise forbidden to them.22 Women also contributed to liturgical performance— including the mass—by composing chants tailored to the needs of their communities. The creative polymath Hildegard of Bingen has long been recognized for the music she composed both for regular liturgical observances and for her drama, the Ordo virtutum.4
Although it is rare to find a name attached to liturgical compositions, many more medieval religious women composed chants, even if only in the form of contrafacta, that is, new or altered texts set to preexisting melodies.22 Margot Fassler has presented compelling evidence that German Dominican sisters composed their own sequences (a genre of chant for mass) and even an entire office (a set of chants for the prayer hours) for John the Baptist.2° Such activity likely was not limited to German-speaking areas. Paula Cardoso identified an office for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception transmitted in only two manuscripts, both of which belonged to Portuguese Dominican convents. As Cardoso explains, the existence of this office in Dominican women’s manuscripts is remarkable, first, because the feast was theologically rejected by the Dominican order and, second, because a different office was used to celebrate the feast in the surrounding region.22 Even when we cannot securely attach individual names or communities to unique chants and unusual texts, religious women were certainly engaged in tailoring their liturgical corpora to their local needs. Anne Bagnall Yardley goes so far as to include the ability to compose new chants as an indispensable skill for a competent chantress.=8
In contrast to the poor record for musical compositions, scholars have confidently identified named religious women as the scribes and artists who produced liturgical books. Women’s activity as manuscript illuminators gained popular attention in 2019 when public media reported the archaeological discovery of lapis lazuli embedded in the teeth of female skeletal remains.22 Lapis lazuli was an expensive blue pigment used in manuscript painting. Researchers suggest that particles lodged in the female artist’s teeth when she licked her brush. This was not news to medieval historians, who have long known of religious women’s prolific work producing manuscripts.22 German Dominican sisters demonstrably produced liturgical manuscripts not only for themselves but also for the friars.44 Many scribes recorded their own names at the end of their works, making it possible to identify individual women as the copyists of specific sets of manuscripts.42 Art historical studies have also identified named illuminators among the southern German Dominican sisters, prominently including Barbara Gewichtmacherin (St. Katherine in Nuremberg), Magdalena Kremerin (St. John the Baptist in Kirchheim unter Teck), and Elsbeth Tépplin (St. Mary Magdalene in Freiburg im Breisgau).42 Anne Winston-Allen’s prodigious work, especially on the productive Clarissan artist Sibylla of Bondorf, has proven that religious women not only illuminated their manuscripts but also collaborated with each other in their production, sometimes between convents and even between orders.“
The most fascinating set of illuminated books produced by German Dominican women is the collection of liturgical manuscripts from the northern German convent of Paradies near Soest.42 Nestled within the intricate penwork illuminations are tiny letters and miniscule speech scrolls.
These marginal texts are not original compositions but rather citations, usually from scriptural or patristic sources, that witness to an intense engagement with and a deep understanding of the Latin texts. This engagement bore fruit in exegetical modes of thought that are developed through the juxtaposition of these marginal citations with the liturgical texts that fill the center of the pages. Furthermore, this practice of textual commentary embedded in illumination was cultivated as a community tradition, which sister illuminators a century later tried to replicate in honor of their foremothers.
Liturgical performance offered medieval religious women numerous ways in which to contribute creatively, whether through the production of liturgical textiles and liturgical books or the composition of new texts and chants. The directoria produced by southern German Dominican sisters also reveal unique variations in choreography and performance practice, highlighting ritual action itself as a field of creative activity. Furthermore, Sacristans’ manuals, such as the one surviving from St. Katherine in Nuremberg, provide detailed instructions for deploying the community’s unique textiles and art objects for specific liturgical feasts. In cases where they survive, such manuals can refine our understanding of religious women’s artistic production by supplying the use contexts in which women’s work was experienced.
Liturgy and the Debate over Latin Literacy
The evidence for highly advanced Latin literacy found in the liturgical books from Paradies near Soest is by no means common. In fact, quite the opposite assumption still prevails, especially in the popular imagination, namely, that medieval religious women had an extremely poor command of Latin and many could not read in any language at all. Among scholars, the older all-or-nothing approach to medieval women’s latinity has long since given way to more nuanced analyses that account for regional and personal differences and that distinguish degrees and forms of literacy.42 I address the issue of Latin literacy at length here so that the later chapters can focus on the high degree of administrative expertise attested by these documents, without the distracting discussion about their German language.
These bilingual manuals contain guidelines and ritual instructions in German, but the chant incipits are uniformly and with only one exception given in Latin. The directorium from the convent of Engelthal records that the community sang the widespread German-language song Christ ist erstanden at the office hour of matins on Easter. Of all the manuscripts examined in this study, that is the only reference to a German-language song.42 The bilingual character of these texts raises a set of questions that have appeared frequently in scholarship on medieval religious women. If the Dominican sisters needed liturgical guidelines in the vernacular, does that indicate poor command of Latin? Conversely, if the Dominican sisters understood enough Latin to perform the liturgy properly, why did they write their liturgical manuals in German? I argue that the way in which these questions frame Latin competence in relation to German is incommensurate with today’s understanding of second-language acquisition, pedagogy, and the variety of linguistic skill sets. Approaching medieval literacy with the tools and standards of today’s language pedagogy both permits a more nuanced understanding of the various medieval practices of Latin education and forces us to confront the limitations of historical evidence.
There are very few texts composed in Latin by southern German religious women of any order at the end of the Middle Ages.*8 This was not a universal state of affairs and should not be taken for granted. As Eva Schlotheuber has shown, in the fifteenth century many northern German convents cultivated an intellectual milieu that valued both writing and speaking in Latin, and they provided their sisters with the opportunity and the pressure to learn.42 No such pressures or motivations existed for the southern German sisters, so they wrote their texts in German. In fact, what evidence we do have for women knowing Latin in southern German regions often comes in the form of major translation initiatives intended to serve consorors who could not read the Latin texts in the convent library. Important translators include Sister Regula in the Cistercian convent of Lichtenthal and Elisabeth Kempf in the Dominican convent of Unterlinden, as well as the translation project overseen by Caritas Pirckheimer in the Nuremberg Clarissan convent.22 The absence of newly written Latin literature does not point to cultural decline; there was a glut of religious literature available in the regional vernaculars of the German-speaking south. Scholars have proposed an inverse relationship: Once a sizeable body of devotional literature had been produced in the vernacular, one could have a rich spiritual life without learning Latin and the motivation to learn it was thus greatly reduced.=! Since vernacular devotional literature proliferated in southern Germany, religious women no longer understood any Latin because they did not need to. Or so the argument goes.
However, translations into the vernacular could be (and some demonstrably were) used as tools for learning Latin rather than as replacements that obviated the need for the Latin original.22 Schlotheuber highlights one young nun’s rapturous expression of the delight that came with understanding the liturgy in contrast with the immense tedium of performing the liturgy without comprehension. “Oh, what a delight it is to hear or read the sacred readings in the divine liturgy, the words of the holy gospel from the mouth of the Lord, the words of the holy teachers of both the Old and New Testaments.... And conversely, what a great tedium it is to stand in the choir, to read, to sing, and not to understand. [O quales delicie sunt audire vel legere in divino cultu sacras lectiones, verba sancti ewangelii ex ore domini, verba sanctorum doctorum tam veteris testamenti quam novi.... E converso magnum tedium est stare in choro, legere, cantare et non intelligere.]”2: Approaches that focus on the devotional literature kept in the convent library or owned privately by religious women overlook the liturgy as a place in which women routinely encountered Latin texts and the degree to which the desire to understand the liturgy could itself be a motivator to learn.
Research on medieval women’s Latin literacy is hampered by the fact that the act of reading a text while grasping its meaning does not necessarily leave material traces that can be recovered and analyzed by modern scholars. Original textual composition in Latin therefore remains the gold standard for proving religious women’s Latin competency, simply because it is the most obviously reliable indicator. Yet, as Hamburger and Schlotheuber argue, demanding proof of Latin competency in the form of original compositions in Latin, even if only correspondence, rather misses the point, since first and foremost, medieval religious women needed to know enough Latin to perform the liturgy.*4 This was, after all, their job. Education in the Middle Ages prepared men and women alike for professional careers. University scholars certainly enjoyed better mastery of Latin than people in most other walks of life, but Latin-illiterate shopkeepers likely had a better literacy in accountancy than the average university master.2= The profession that religious women were trained in was the liturgy, and their education was oriented toward this career.% Correct and complete performance did not require writing treatises in Latin, but it did require engaging with Latin texts in specific, task-oriented ways.
To conceptualize the place of Latin competence in women’s religious communities, David Bell proposes an analytical framework involving four degrees of Latin literacy, with particular attention to the liturgical demands of convent life.22 For him, basic literacy was essentially phonetic, the ability to pronounce the letters on a page without needing to understand the words. This enabled a person to “perform” the liturgy in the strict sense that one could produce the proper sounds and, for some religious writers, this was all that was required to please God.® Bell’s second degree of literacy entailed a general grasp of the gist of a text, without necessarily being able to parse the grammar and syntax. This fine-grained grasp of a text’s grammatical structure pertained to the third level of literacy, in which nonliturgical texts and less commonly encountered liturgical texts could be understood. The fourth, and highest, degree of literacy was the ability to compose an original text. Bell argues that most religious women would have been amply served by “level two” Latin literacy, especially when the Latin liturgical texts were supplemented by vernacular translations that supplied the general sense.
Working from Bell’s four levels, Anne Bagnall Yardley outlines four levels of musical literacy also adapted specifically to the context of medieval liturgical performance. The most basic level included the ability to sing common chants from memory, while the second level added some basic familiarity with notation, as well as the organization of manuscripts and the ability to use them as a memory crutch. The third level of musicalliturgical literacy represented the ability to sight-read diastematic notation, to explain or teach music theory, and to compose plainchant (that is, singlevoice melodies), while the fourth, and highest, level was reserved for the ability to sing and compose polyphony (music for more than one voice). Both Bell and Yardley offer ways of getting past the all-or-nothing approach to literacy by working out a scale that begins with knowing just enough to avoid being disruptive and culminates in the creation of sophisticated new content, acknowledging that certain individuals within any community, male or female, would never have made it past basic competence.
There is much to recommend Bell’s and Yardley’s systems, but their elegant simplicity obscures important aspects of language learning. The learning progressions that Bell and Yardley offer do reflect aspects of medieval pedagogical practice. For example, Yardley’s definition of the foundation of musical-liturgical literacy as memorization conforms to what Busse Berger has demonstrated concerning the role of memorization in medieval compositional practice. However, both of these systems collapse different skill sets into a single hierarchy, which leaves little room for different skill levels within a single activity, let alone for high degrees of competence in one skill paired with total neglect of another.
Communication in different media requires different skills, and language learners do not advance in all areas at the same speed. Current assessment systems developed for teaching foreign languages take this phenomenon into account. For example, the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) organizes its learning and assessment system by skills, further subdivided by medium. Its broad categories are Reception, Production, and Interaction, each of which can be either oral or written (listening comprehension and reading comprehension; oral production in a monologue and written production in essay form; oral interaction in conversations and written interaction in correspondence). Within the Common European Framework of Reference, listening comprehension and reading comprehension are conceptualized as more closely related to each other than listening comprehension is to speaking production. Similarly, the ability to hold a conversation is considered a different skill from giving a speech. Language learners may attain a high degree of competence in reading comprehension, while their written production lags, and they may be completely incapable of asking for directions on the street.
The CEFR guidelines codify the insight that learning a language entails an array of very different skill sets that develop to differing degrees. This insight has repercussions for the way in which historians can interpret surviving evidence of medieval women’s Latin literacy. Evidence of competence in one skill area does not automatically imply competence in a second area. Conversely, lack of evidence for one skill does not indicate deficiency in all skills. The existence or nonexistence of original Latin textual composition from religious women’s houses cannot reliably indicate how many women understood liturgical Latin and to what degree because written production and written reception are different skills.
Furthermore, these different skills require different pedagogical strategies for their development. Evidence of various pedagogical practices survives from some fifteenth-century communities of religious women and, indeed, the form of the attested pedagogy corresponds to the form of attested Latin competence. The rich survival of Latin-language texts composed by northern German religious women in the fifteenth century is partnered with accounts of language pedagogy that support and encourage linguistic production. Schlotheuber points to a pedagogical practice decreed by the northern German Bursfelde congregation in order to foster Latin oral competence among the reformed nuns. The sisters were expected to speak Latin among themselves and with their male spiritual advisers. To support learners, the communities developed a practice that recognized their limitations, while challenging them to grow.
It is to be observed as a rule, that the sisters who are nuns or will become nuns should speak Latin and not the vernacular among themselves and with the religious fathers. Otherwise, they are to be punished as if they were breakers of silence. But the unformed ones and those who have less Latin instruction, so that they might more quickly become accustomed to speaking Latin, when they want to say something that they do not know how to express in Latin, they should always first say the phrase “with Jesus’s permission,” then say in the vernacular what they do not know how to express in Latin, then repeat in Latin what they do know, until they have become perfectly accustomed to speaking in Latin.
Observandum regulariter, quod sorores monache aut monachande latine loqui inter se et cum patribus religiosis debent et non vulgariter, alioquin ut fractores silencii sunt puniende. Rudes autem et in latinitate minus instructe seu institute, ut tanto citius latina [!] loqui assuescant, cum id loqui voluerint, quod latine exprimere nequeant, hoc semper proverbium cuilibet orationi “cum Iesu licencia” semper premittant et sic exprimant vulgariter, quod exprimere latine nequierunt, et rursum repetentes latinum, ubi sciunt, donec perfecte latino [!] loqui assuescant.©
This procedure encourages learning by compelling the sisters to attempt to use Latin even if they do not have all the tools. Expressing the thought in German permits their interlocutor to assist them with their grammar or vocabulary during their attempt to formulate it in Latin, but it is clear that the learners are expected to try the Latin themselves and not simply to rely on the expert speaker. This pedagogical practice is designed specifically to foster oral interaction in the target language.
In contrast, the Latin pedagogical methods used in the Dominican convent of St. Katherine in Nuremberg were very much focused on reading, especially accuracy in reading aloud. The prioress ensured that postulants learned the psalter before entering the convent, but until they learned enough to sing the liturgy with the choir sisters, novices simply recited the Pater noster as the lay sisters did. The novices were not thrown directly into the full cycle of liturgical performance. Rather, the community divided liturgical tasks into various levels of difficulty, taught the novices gradually, and assigned them mentors: “At first, so that they can read well, they learn to recite their prayer hours properly. After that, they learn to sing, at first to sing the versicles and the Venite, then two antiphoners all the way through, then the missal and the sequences, and whatever one is required to sing by the [Dominican] order. [Am ersten lerend sy, dz sy wol kunind lesen, ir tagzit ordilich sprechen, darnach lernend sy singen, zum ersten versicel vnd die Venite singen, darnach 2 antiffoner gantz vs, damrmach dz messbuch vnd sequensen vnd wz man denn von orden singen sol.]”® Prioritizing enunciation above all else, the community required novices to recite the Latin liturgical texts properly in a speaking voice before introducing the melodies of the chant. These melodies were also divided by difficulty, and the novices learned the shorter and less ornate genres (e.g., versicles) before working their way through the rest of the order’s chant repertory.
Similarly, novices were gradually integrated into liturgical performance itself. Once they knew enough to follow along in a prayer book, they were expected to attend the liturgical hours but not to sing.
And once they have gotten to a point where they can follow the community, they allow them to come to choir and sometimes to sing the versicles at none or compline, until they have learned them better. Afterwards, if they have the talent for it, they have them sing at the other office hours as well, but for an entire year they do not have them sing anything during the mass, except for the introit and Kyrie eleison.... Item, the sister who teaches the novices to sing and read shows them what matins for that night will be. And then the novices read it together in pairs, following along in the back of the choir where one sings, and they help each other. And when they do not know a word, they ask a sister who is not going to choir out of frailty.
Vnd wenn sy also darin sind kumen, dz sy dem convent volgen mugend, so lassend sy sy zu cor gon vnd zu ziten zu der non oder complet versickel singen, bis sy es bas lernend. Darnach, sind sy geschickt darzu, so lasend sy sy zu den andren tagziten och singen, suss so lassend sy sy dz gantz iar nuntz in der mesz singen, denn dz officium vnd Kyrie eleyson.... Item die swéster, die die nouitzen singen vnd lesen lert, die wist in, wz die metti dieselben nacht ist. Vnd darnach uberlesend ye zwo nouitzen mitainandren in der absiten des cors mit, da man singt, vnd sechend ainandren vf. Vnd wo sy ain wort nit kunnend, fragend sy ain swéster, die etwa nit zu cor gat blédikat halben.s5
Novices were first assigned to sing a versicle, the first chant genre they learned, at the little hours of none or compline, which did not vary much over the course of the year. During the office hour of matins, which involved musically challenging chants and a great deal of variation day-today, novices continued to focus on the text, sitting off to the side and learning through partner work with the assistance of an experienced mentor. As they gained greater experience and familiarity with the community’s practice, the new sisters took on additional roles corresponding to their acquired skills and knowledge.
The pedagogical practice outlined in the letters from the southern German convent of St. Katherine in Nuremberg was radically different in both design and outcome from the northern German practice of the Bursfelde congregation. It was, however, no less sophisticated. This account sets forth a refined pedagogical program that distinguished and separately trained different skills (reading text versus singing melodies), as well as accommodating levels of difficulty within each skill, reinforcing schoolroom education with practical experience, and fostering learning through collaboration with other learners. No part of this description ever addressed the ability to produce statements in Latin, whether orally or in writing. This skill did not form part of the program. Did the northern German nuns of the Bursfelde congregation have “better” Latin than the Dominican sisters in Nuremberg? Certainly, the northern German education program included a broader array of skill sets than the skill sets described for Nuremberg. However, the Dominican sisters cannot be judged to have failed at something they were not trying to do. Judging the linguistic abilities of the northern and southern German sisters against one another is like comparing the outcomes of summer-abroad immersion programs with intensive “German for reading” courses: apples and oranges.
Moreover, neither of the programs described above addressed one of the most important literacy skills that medieval religious women practiced and which was certainly cultivated in all these communities: writing; that is, scribal activity. For the Middle Ages, we must distinguish carefully between writing in the sense of original textual composition and writing in the sense of physically making marks on parchment or paper. As Jennifer Summit points out, employing a secretary to compose by dictation belonged to high social status, but it means that the person we today would think of as the “writer” often was not, taken literally, writing anything. Wholly separate from textual composition, scribal competence constituted an additional category of literacy that, at the highest levels, would entail mastery of multiple forms of script and the ability to determine which script was appropriate for which kinds of texts.
Understanding a written document versus accurately and intelligibly reading it aloud, producing clean and legible handwriting versus formulating original content—these are different skills that sometimes develop in tandem, but not always. For this reason, relying on original written production to gauge the reading comprehension of historical persons has a significant limitation. Namely, reading activities do not always leave material traces. The survival of original composed texts in Latin can reliably indicate that this person also understood the Latin she read and very likely lived in an environment that fostered the linguistic skills of both production and reception (writing and reading) for others, as well. However, lack of evidence for individual textual expression in Latin does not mean that the women of a given community could not understand the Latin they were required to enunciate in the liturgy. It is simply a lack of evidence.
In the southern German liturgical handbooks that I discuss in Chapters 4 through 6, there are no counterexamples of highly Latinate female authors writing original treatises in their second language. German translations of the Latin Dominican ordinarium were widespread and clearly saw practical use, and the women composed the directoria in German, apparently confirming that southern German Dominican sisters had largely stopped using Latin by the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, these documents cannot be interpreted as conclusively proving that the women who created and used them were incapable of understanding liturgical Latin. While dialect slipped into Latin spellings (my favorite is the Augsburgism “brofidentek” for “profitentes”),®2 errors in transcription that attest to grammatical incomprehension or an inability to resolve abbreviations are rare.
In fact, many of the technical terms used in Latin rubrics were seamlessly incorporated into the German texts in the same way that they are in liturgical scholarship written in English or German today. It did not even occur to me to remark upon the knowledge of Latin indicated by the phrase “a feast that is semiduplex [ein hochzit daz semiduplex ist]” until I encountered the absurd expression “a one-and-a-half-fold feast [ein anderhalpueltige hochgezit]” in a manuscript that was likely produced by overcompensating friars.2 The southern German Dominican sisters may or may not have been able to read theological treatises in Latin, but their chantresses understood enough liturgical Latin to use professional jargon accurately. Their jobs did not require them to compose original textual expression in Latin and expecting this from them effaces the impressive degree of professional expertise they attained.
The Dominican Liturgy and the Manuals That Fixed It
The Dominican Rite was initially fixed in a set of codified liturgical books, but its ordinarium had two shortcomings that repeatedly needed to be fixed. On the one hand, the Dominican order’s legislative body (the general chapter) sought to maintain tight control over the liturgy in its communities, but the changes it ratified were not always conscientiously recorded and they occasionally produced unforeseen internal contradictions. On the other hand, the Dominican order never issued a centralized ordinarium in a version for sisters, as they had with the Augustinian rule and the Dominican constitutions. As the later Middle Ages wore on, liturgical change affected all communities, but the Dominican order’s gendered hierarchies and structures of governance affected men’s and women’s liturgies differently. An extraordinarily richly preserved set of late medieval sources from southern Germany records the work of liturgical experts in numerous Dominican communities. Fixing the Liturgy uncovers the efforts of the friars and sisters who grappled with the challenges of late medieval liturgy.
The structure of this book builds in two parallel ways, proceeding chronologically while also growing in specificity. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the structures of Dominican liturgy and governance as they were instituted in the thirteenth century. Chapters 3 and 4 examine fourteenthand fifteenth-century witnesses of the Dominican ordinarium in Latin and German to show how the Dominican liturgy changed over time. The manuscripts analyzed in Chapters 5 and 6 were all produced in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. I show how the practices recorded in these manuscripts reflect the changing religious landscape at the close of the Middle Ages, especially the impact of the Observant reform.
In parallel, the chapters follow the order in which the manuals were layered both conceptually and in practice. The structures of the liturgy I describe in Chapter 1 were shared by a number of secular churches and religious orders, of which the Dominicans were only one. Chapter 2 then presents the mechanisms for governance and liturgical change that were unique to the Dominican order and begins to explore their long-term consequences. Chapters 3 and 4 turn from an idealized uniform Dominican code to its particular manuscript witnesses, demonstrating the imperfect and contingent dissemination of a Dominican Rite that was supposed to be universal. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze manuals that women produced as supplements to fix the Dominican ordinarium; Their contents assume that the user also has access to an ordinarium and consults the manuals in tandem. Moreover, in large part, these manuals record and codify liturgical observances as they were practiced in the particular community that owned that specific manuscript. By structuring the book in this manner— proceeding in time while increasing in specificity—I reflect both the historical evolution of the Dominican liturgy and the relationships of these book types to each other as foundations and supplements.
In Chapter 1, I introduce the basic framework of the Dominican Rite as it is laid out in the earliest ordinarium, confirmed by the Dominican order in 1256. The chapter provides a basic introduction to the medieval Dominican liturgy for readers without previous experience in this discipline. It describes the structures and performance of office and mass, and it introduces the aspects of liturgical planning that occupy the rest of the study, especially scheduling the cycles of Temporale and Sanctorale feasts. Finally, I illustrate how cantors and chantresses used the ordinarium’s concise instructions to orchestrate a full liturgical event, with the feast of the Translation of Dominic (May 24) as an example.
Similarly, Chapter 2 introduces the three documents of governance to which communities of the Dominican order were subject: the Augustinian rule, the Dominican constitutions, and the Dominican ordinarium. The friars’ constitutions not only regulated daily life but also described the processes of the order’s legislative body. The general chapter, as this legislature was called, was empowered to change the constitutions—and the liturgy. Chapter 2 explains the legislative foundation for the liturgical change traced throughout the later chapters of this book.
After Chapters 1 and 2 lay the liturgical and legislative groundwork, Chapter 3 turns to the close studies of manuscript witnesses that occupy the remainder of the book. I trace liturgical change over time by examining two physical witnesses of the Dominican ordinarium, one thirteenth-century manuscript from the Wiirzburg friary and one fifteenth-century manuscript from the convent of St. Katherine in Nuremberg. These manuscripts reveal that the coherence of the Dominican Rite was undermined over the two hundred years following its codification both by inexpert legislation and by incomplete maintenance of manuscripts. Neither of the Latin-language ordinaria examined in Chapter 3 handle the major issue facing Dominican sisters in coordinating their liturgy: the fact that they were forbidden from performing many of its central rituals. Chapter 4 turns to the Germanlanguage translations of the Dominican ordinarium to show how each translator changed the text in attempts to accommodate the circumstances of women’s communities. However, the translators were all men, and many of their inadequate interventions reveal their lack of expertise in women’s liturgy.
Chapter 5 uncovers how Dominican sisters expertly fixed these issues by generating and disseminating manuals themselves: the German-language directoria. The earliest surviving directoria were produced and transmitted within the context of the Observance, a religious reform movement that exhorted a return to strict observance of the order’s rule, constitutions, and ordinarium. Expert reforming chantresses fixed new guidelines in the directoria, specifically adapted to women’s ritual practices and needs. At the end of the chapter, I turn to two surviving directoria from nonObservant convents, both produced in the early sixteenth century. These documents betray the efforts of Dominican sisters to avert the pressures of reform and protect their cherished local liturgies. Observant and nonObservant alike, the directoria witness to women’s direct engagement with the challenges of liturgical change.
Chapter 6 returns to the feast that closes Chapter 1, the Translation of Dominic, to illustrate in vivid example how all of this worked in practice. Whereas Chapter 1 presents this feast according to the generic rules laid out by the 1256 Dominican ordinarium, Chapter 6 draws together the Germanlanguage manuals from the Dominican convent of St. Katherine in Nuremberg in order to reconstruct how the sisters might have celebrated this feast in 1516. The rich specificity afforded by this convent’s extant manuscripts highlights how complex Dominican liturgy had become, how much flexibility existed even for communities striving to adhere strictly to Dominican regulations, and how much expertise was required to reconcile competing obligations into a coherent performance.
This book opens a remarkable set of fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century manuscripts to further research. One study cannot exhaust the informative potential of these documents, and I do not attempt to treat their contents comprehensively. Instead, I provide a new narrative of the medieval Dominican liturgy with a focus on the manuals that regulated the Dominican Rite, the ways in which these manuals interacted, and both the mechanisms and the side effects of liturgical change. This book not only introduces the German-language manuals used by late medieval German Dominican sisters, it also explains the creeping change in the Dominican Rite that motivated both friars and sisters to fix their liturgical expertise in writing, in hopes of fixing the increasingly complex system that was their liturgy.
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