Fixing the Liturgy

CJ Jones is William Payden Associate Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame and author of Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Fixing the Liturgy is an excellent introduction to the Dominican liturgy that demonstrates the ways in which sisters engaged in the process of applying complex regulations to the circumstances of convent life. This monograph is useful for those unfamiliar with the daunting complexity of medieval liturgy." - Patrick J. Whittle (Catholic Historical Review) "In this magnificent and well-documented study, CJ Jones uses a rich assembly of unmined liturgical sources, in Latin and in the vernacular, to reimagine the lives of medieval religious women in southern Germany. The book will be crucial reading for historians as well as for scholars in religious studies, gender studies and languages and literature." (Margot E. Fassler, author of Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard's Illuminated "Scivias") "A pleasure to read. CJ Jones's careful, attentive analysis of manuscripts never before studied in this manner offers readers a primer on the Dominican liturgy as well as a substantial contribution to scholarly understanding of how medieval liturgists thought about their decisions, how they exchanged ideas with others, and how they found ways to fight for their local customs." (Anne Bagnall Yardley, Drew Theological School) "This book will not only be a useful guide to scholars interested in the history of the Dominican order, especially its female branch, or in the liturgy more generally; it will also serve as a helpful reference for nonspecialists and students seeking initiation into the dense thickets of medieval liturgical practice, which to the uninitiated can seem like an impenetrable jungle of complexities and inconsistencies. CJ Jones's exemplary scholarship and painstaking analysis often leave one feeling that one is eavesdropping, as it were, on the women to whom it fell to interpret the mandates they were given and to adapt them to their own local circumstances." (Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Harvard University)