Claire Taylor Jones, Fixing the Liturgy: Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite, 1256–1516. Cursor Mundi, 42. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024, 456 pages, 13 b/w ill, 4 tables.

We tend to see the liturgy of the medieval western Church as unchanging in its purposes, abstruse in its structures, arcane in the complexity of its texts, and complicated in its means of their employ. The liturgy’s supposed rigidity often stands in for the whole of the backward and inflexible Catholicism that Protestantism excoriated. This extraordinarily rich and readable book by Claire Taylor Jones puts the medieval liturgy in a different light, not only by showing it as a real lifeforce within religious communities but also by illustrating its adaptability to communal and individual needs. The book draws much of its evidence from the female house of St. Katherine in Nuremberg within the Dominican Order of Preachers. The remarkable richness of the Nuremberg texts has put them at the center of a long tradition of scholarship about German-language textual production and about late medieval devotional literature, but here they offer unparalleled insight into the practice of the Dominican liturgy in its far-flung convents. The book’s foremost gift to readers is that it shows women developing expertise in the construction and performance of the liturgy, creating agency for themselves and their sisters within and against normative boundaries.