I. Religious Identity and Regional Identity
In her introduction to Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca Lester describes how reading scholarship on medieval women's piety shaped her expectations for her anthropological field work in a Mexican convent. Coming from a psychiatric background in eating disorders, Lester was fascinated by Caroline Walker Bynum's magisterial scholarship on medieval women's embodied piety and especially their manipulation of food practices.Footnote 1 With a research question inspired by medievalist scholarship, she writes, “I arrived in Puebla expecting to find frail, depleted nuns who wished to escape their bodies, disciplined women who saw their materiality as an impediment to saintliness. I didn't.”Footnote 2 Instead, she discovered a profound nationalism among women who articulated their pursuit of religious femininity as “a mission for the restoration of the Mexican nation.”Footnote 3 For the Mexican sisters studied by Lester, even the seemingly banal practices of daily life become spheres where they reconcile religious life and order with regional or national identity, both of which are inflected by gender in different ways.
The kinds of sociocultural ties and regional connections that still inform the identities of Catholic sisters have been affecting religious women for centuries. Indeed, as medievalist scholarship has expanded beyond ecclesiastical history and scholastic theology by examining charters, account books, everyday objects, and architecture, the past four decades have significantly advanced our understanding of the ways in which material and visual culture, economic conditions, and local secular politics influenced the lives and activities of medieval religious women.Footnote 4 Attention to local factors is all the more important for communities in German-speaking Europe since the German-speaking regions of the Middle Ages did not have any concept of nation or national identity in the way we do today.Footnote 5 This fact highlights the importance of microregional contexts and the ways in which local connections interacted with broader networks.Footnote 6 One of the current frontiers of this research is liturgy, an inherently interdisciplinary object of study that rewards hyperlocalized approaches—for example, through history of the senses with its attention to specificity and performance context.Footnote 7 Yet beyond the history of piety and spiritual experience, liturgical sources also provide insight into the less lofty aspects of communal religious life, including the relationships religious women had with people outside their walls,Footnote 8 the political struggles within communities,Footnote 9 and the local impact of major historical events such as the Protestant Reformation.Footnote 10 In late medieval Europe, each city had its own cultural profile and religious traditions, which affected the everyday life of communities differently according to religious order, the sex of its members, and the degree of enclosure. Medieval women who changed communities (as reformers, for example) needed to adjust to new political and cultural circumstances. Liturgical manuals reveal some of the ways in which religious women navigated internal and external pressures in order to keep their communities running on a daily basis.
The profound reach of these various pressures meant that they affected each community's liturgy even at the most basic level of yearly planning. Determining the appropriate date on which to perform a liturgical celebration was a complex affair. Beyond the recurring controversies over the date of Easter,Footnote 11 different kinds of feasts were scheduled in different ways such that they could end up falling on the same day. Today, dioceses publish guidelines every year to reconcile the Church's universal calendar with local observances and special saints. In the late Middle Ages, bishops were beginning to use the new medium of print to exercise greater control over liturgical practice within their territory,Footnote 12 but this proved only one of the many pressures felt by those responsible for planning in religious communities. The ways in which different communities resolved overlapping feasts and conflicting obligations provide particularly fruitful insight into the degree of self-determination religious women enjoyed and how they negotiated the social and political networks in which they were embedded. Even an activity this mundane provided an opportunity to assert or reject various influences in the construction of a community's liturgical identity.
II. The May 1519 Conflict and Its Context
In 1519, a series of overlapping feasts following Easter seemed problematic enough that the Dominican convent of St. Mary Magdalene (known as the Reuerinnenkloster, hereafter the Penitents) in Freiburg im Breisgau recorded their decision and a justification.Footnote 13 Easter was celebrated on April 24, so the Easter octave with its special observances fell on Sunday, May 1. However, May 1 was also the date for the feast of the Apostles Philip and James. Both the Easter octave and the Apostles could not be celebrated on the same day, so one of them would have to be postponed. To make matters worse, in the previous year (1518) the Dominican order had confirmed the yearly celebration for the relatively new feast of Saint Catherine of Siena: it should be the first Sunday in May.Footnote 14 Dominican communities struggling to reschedule not one but two high-ranking feasts contended with a cascade effect of conflicting feasts and octaves with no obvious resolution. Moreover, their decisions had repercussions for their ability to cooperate with the liturgical celebrations happening both in nearby religious communities and in secular parishes.
Within the Holy Roman Empire, this Easter calendrical clash was far from the most pressing event of 1519. Emperor Maximilian I had died in January, and the enormously powerful Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger was financing the election of Charles V.Footnote 15 In Leipzig, Martin Luther engaged in a debate that would influence the future development of the Protestant Reformation.Footnote 16 Many Dominican convents in German-speaking lands would soon be facing dispossession, destruction, and dispersion at the hands of Protestant city authorities.Footnote 17 Freiburg im Breisgau would remain a haven of Catholic practice in the southwest, but sympathy for Luther's ideas was not wholly absent.Footnote 18 The religious landscape in Germany was beginning to shift, but 1519 was squarely in a period of overlap between the Protestant Reformation and a reform movement that had blossomed in the previous century: the Observance.
The Observance was a reform movement that participated in the broad reforming impulses of the later Middle Ages and affected almost all of the religious orders.Footnote 19 Although their rhetoric preached a return to origins, the Observant Dominican reformers developed innovative administrative structures that existed in parallel to the order's primary hierarchy.Footnote 20 The Observant network absorbed a convent by sending experienced reformers from an Observant house to the new member community in order to introduce Observant practice there. For Dominican sisters, many of whom actively engaged in and even agitated for the Observance, this procedure created a paradoxically high degree of mobility for strictly enclosed religious women as well as a network of personal connections between Observant convents.Footnote 21 Whereas for friars religious poverty was the flash point of Observant reform, for women stricter enclosure proved both a strong motivation and a point of contention.Footnote 22 Beyond making contact with family members difficult or impossible, strict enclosure could also lead to a significant loss in a convent's financial autonomy, and, in fact, economic motivations could drive lay powers in their support of a reform.Footnote 23
Yet reform and strict enclosure also provided fertile ground for women's literary and artistic activity.Footnote 24 The Dominican Observance has been credited with the explosion of German-language devotional literature in the fifteenth century; reforming sisters bought, borrowed, and copied books for the edification of their communities or received them as gifts from friars and lay people.Footnote 25 Even more important for a community's daily life than the vernacular devotional literature were the Latin liturgical manuscripts sent with the reforming party to help them ensure proper adherence to the order's rite.Footnote 26 As Stefanie Neidhardt has observed, the reforming sisters and the books they brought with them played a crucial role in the transfer of knowledge that instituted and supported the reformed community's new way of life.Footnote 27 For the southern German context, the role of Observant Dominicans (both friars and sisters) in producing and disseminating vernacular literature has received a significant amount of scholarly attention.Footnote 28 Less work has been done to trace the influence of Observant reform on Dominican liturgical manuscripts and practices in southern Germany.Footnote 29 The study of Observant liturgical reform is being opened up with new research on Spain and Portugal, which reveals Dominican sisters negotiating between local practice and Dominican standardization. Paula Cardoso highlights that manuscripts from Portuguese convents contain liturgies for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, important regionally in Portugal but rejected by the Dominican order.Footnote 30 For Spain, Mercedes Pérez-Vidal has been able to show the extensive influence that noble laywomen could exercise over the convents they supported, as well as the liturgical innovations possible for women with personalities as strong as their piety.Footnote 31 Similar dynamics between local connections, reform networks, and the order's regulations influenced the practices and the decisions of the Freiburg Penitents, as we shall see. Although newly composed chants and newly choreographed processions present themselves as more compelling objects of study, even the banal practice of coordinating liturgical obligations could become a contested site of religious identity.
This process of liturgical identity formation could not be completed once and then permanently fixed as an in-house tradition; it had to be constantly reassessed, renegotiated, and performed anew. A certain amount of this change was necessitated by the introduction of new feasts, by changing affiliations, by the rise and fall of different donor or advocate families, or by the shifting boundaries of bishoprics and terminus districts. There was, however, an impetus that operated on a much shorter time scale and was inherent to the liturgical calendar itself: the kaleidoscopic rotation of fixed feasts, moveable feasts, and votive obligations. “Fixed” feasts were always celebrated on the same date (Valentine's Day is always February 14); “moveable” feasts were scheduled by reference to Easter and thus fell on different dates (Ash Wednesday is always forty-six days before Easter, no matter the calendar date); and by the late Middle Ages, the Church had just begun planning feasts using the method we now use, for example, for Mother's Day (in many countries always the second Sunday in May).Footnote 32 Religious communities also needed to integrate the special saints of their order and the patron saints of the individual community, as well as the local saints of the bishopric and of the city in which they were located. In addition to these special feasts, most communities had further obligatory liturgical observances.Footnote 33 With all these obligations to juggle, the simple task of deciding when to observe what could quickly become a nightmare. Even for a single community, it was impossible to create a firm and eternally valid set of decisions for coordinating feast days, since each of these dating systems operated independently and the conflicts changed year to year. In some years—such as 1519—no less than three feasts would all fall on the same day. These calendrical conflicts were resolved through the aid of guidelines applied flexibly in consideration of the community's hierarchized networks. The ever-changing calendar of liturgical feasts required each community to negotiate their priorities and obligations each year anew, producing ephemeral configurations of local liturgical worship.
The three-feast pile-up on May 1, 1519, supplies an excellent case study that illuminates how a community might negotiate conflicting obligations to find creative solutions. Since early May was, for Dominicans, liturgically very busy, rescheduling Philip and James and Catherine of Siena created a cascade effect with repercussions for a variety of observances that were important to different aspects of a community's identity and different strands in their network. The series of decisions necessitated by this calendrical confluence is exhaustively recorded in a manuscript from the Dominican convent of St. Mary Magdalene in Freiburg im Breisgau. This manuscript belongs to a little studied source type: German-language Dominican liturgical manuals that I call directoria.Footnote 34 These Dominican directoria assume a special profile as local supplements to the standardized ordinarium valid throughout the Dominican order, and, as such, reveal how Dominican sisters at the end of the Middle Ages coordinated the various obligations on their liturgical practice.
III. Dominican Sources for Coordinating the Liturgy
Medieval Dominican cantors and chantresses relied first and foremost on the order's ordinarium for guidelines in planning their community's liturgy. Like other medieval ordinals, the Dominican ordinarium did not have musical notation, nor even the full text of chants; those were found in other books laid out for use in performance.Footnote 35 Instead, the ordinarium provided instructions to facilitate organization of the liturgy by designating which chants were sung when, describing ritual gestures and processions, and regulating yearly schedules, among other things. For the Dominicans, the ordinarium was one of the fourteen liturgical books codified in 1256 by Master General Humbert of Romans.Footnote 36 By the end of the thirteenth century, it had assumed a legislative status similar to that of the order's constitutions. This is to say, the order controlled its standardized liturgy by requiring that any changes or innovations to the ordinarium be ratified by three successive general chapters.Footnote 37 Also like the constitutions, the ordinarium was translated into German for the use of Dominican sisters in the fourteenth century.Footnote 38
However, by the fifteenth century any given copy of the ordinarium, whether Latin or German, could easily have become unwieldy or out of date, since the general chapters continually passed legislation pertaining to the liturgy.Footnote 39 Already in the first Observant convent north of the Alps (Schönensteinbach, founded 1397),Footnote 40 one of the sisters, most likely the chantress, began to record her solutions for thorny problems with the ordinarium, as well as the advice she received from the Colmar friars, producing the base text for the Observant directoria. The directives are predominantly in German, but the incipits of the chants are in Latin; to judge from these manuscripts, the liturgy was celebrated in Latin, and German was used solely for administrative purposes. The directoria do not permit conclusions about how much liturgical Latin the women understood.Footnote 41 When Schönensteinbach began reforming other convents, copies of their directoria were sent to the newly Observant convents; in addition to the manuscripts considered here, no less than eight Observant directoria with the Schönensteinbach base text survive. Directoria did not have the same regulative status as the ordinarium, and, for the Observance, they should be classed with other pararegular texts that were normative but non-binding.Footnote 42 Such manuals supplemented the constitutions and ordinarium to assist in organizing the convent's liturgical life. For example, in St. Catherine in Nuremberg, they would have been used together with the surviving sacristan's manual and the table reading catalogue.Footnote 43 Convent scribes designate all three texts as “notel,” and all three address aspects of liturgical coordination understood broadly.Footnote 44
The two Observant directoria under consideration here are the only exemplars known to me that do not have a connection to Nuremberg and, as such, are important witnesses to reform practices and Observant networks apart from the prolific community of St. Catherine.Footnote 45 In their organization and concept, they match the Nuremberg branch of the transmission (unsurprisingly, since all ultimately derive from Schönensteinbach), but they sometimes differ in wording and sometimes in text order.Footnote 46 Observant directoria are divided into paired volumes, one of which treats feasts of the Temporale (pertaining to the life of Christ, including Christmas, Easter, and related feasts) while the other contains feasts of the Sanctorale (pertaining to saints, including the Virgin Mary). St. Peter pap 5 contains a Temporale cycle that complements the information for the Sanctorale cycle found in B3/25. This latter manuscript was originally created in Schönensteinbach and was likely brought to Freiburg when the Penitents were reformed to the Observance by a party of sisters from Schönensteinbach in 1465 or shortly thereafter.Footnote 47 In contrast, St. Peter pap 5 is a later copy that was not itself made for or used in Schönensteinbach. In both manuscripts (indeed, in all such Observant directoria), the Schönensteinbach base text is supplemented by further information that postdated the text's transfer from Schönensteinbach and/or was local to the Freiburg context, although the different stages of additions are somewhat obscured in St. Peter pap 5 because it is a later copy. St. Peter pap 5 has previously been associated neither with Schönensteinbach nor with the Freiburg Penitents, yet annotations with localizable information and the dates given for the anniversary of the church dedication establish its connections to these communities.Footnote 48
From its contents, it is very clear that B3/25 originated in Schönensteinbach and moved to the Freiburg Penitents. Of the Observant directoria known to me, this is the only manuscript that was originally produced in and for Schönensteinbach, making it an important comparison text for the Sanctorale of the Nuremberg transmission branch. This fact also makes it comparatively easier to separate out the Schönensteinbach information from later additions by comparing the hands. The location in Schönensteinbach is attested by the inclusion of the feast of Bridget of Sweden, Schönensteinbach's patron saint, as well as her translation (ff. 127r, 129r, 161r) and memoriae for Saint Adelf of Metz in the main hand (ff. 195v, 206r, 246r).Footnote 49 More clearly yet, an interlinear insertion clarifies that “we” (wir) means “in Steinbach” (ze steinbach) (f. 20r). The Schönensteinbach layer of entries also establishes Schönensteinbach's church dedication anniversary (kilwi, that is Kirchweihe) as the octave of Easter: “if Saint Ambrose falls during Holy Week, then one celebrates him on the Monday after the octave of Easter, that is, on the day after our dedication anniversary.”Footnote 50 Later use by a convent dedicated to Mary Magdalene is also clearly indicated in the lengthy addition detailing the procedures for profession of novices, who must beg forgiveness “for the sake of God and Our Dear Lady and Our Holy Father Saint Dominic and Saint Mary Magdalene” (f. 101v), as well as the addition of the feast of Mary Magdalene's translation (ff. 80v–81r). It can be more specifically assigned to the Freiburg Penitents, since another addition notes that the dedication anniversary (here kylwyn) is always on Laetare Sunday (f. 80r), which the Seelbuch and martyrology from the Freiburg Penitents confirms.Footnote 51 This combination of evidence shows that B3/25 was created for use at Schönensteinbach, migrated to the Freiburg Penitents, and continued to be used there. The layered additions by different hands permit a reconstruction of the stages during which the manuscript was used at Schönensteinbach and subsequently in Freiburg after the reform.
The provenance of St. Peter pap 5 is more difficult to establish, partially since it is a later copy so the evidence of entries by different hands is obscured, and partially since it is missing some critical components that help localize the other Temporale directoria. Particularly disappointing is that it is missing the section describing the Maundy Thursday altar washing ceremony which, in the other directoria, records the saints to whom each altar is dedicated and the antiphons sung in their honor. However, the set of early sixteenth-century additions that now close the manuscript can be fairly securely located. They include a reference to the bishopric of Constance that would correspond to Freiburg provenance (f. 144r). Furthermore, the additions specify that in 1519 the feast of Saint Ambrose (April 4) was the day after their dedication anniversary (kilwy, f. 141r): April 3, 1519 was Laetare Sunday, the dedication anniversary of the Freiburg Penitents. These elements permit attribution to the Freiburg Penitents at the very least of the liturgical decisions in 1519 (including those for the feast of Catherine of Siena, to which I will return), even if the production of the main part of the manuscript cannot be securely localized. The main part of the manuscript contains, like B3/25, guidelines originally compiled in and for Schönensteinbach, an attribution supported by the shared text with the Nuremberg branch of transmission, including the repeated mentions of Colmar.
To sum up, like all surviving German-language Observant Dominican directoria, the manuscripts B3/25 and St. Peter pap 5 contain a base text that was compiled in Schönensteinbach and transmitted to other convents through the networks of the Observant reform. This base text is supplemented by later additions, which in both manuscripts permit localization to the convent of the Freiburg Penitents. B3/25 stands out from the other surviving directoria for the extraordinary amount of liturgical information pertinent only to Schönensteinbach, which was skipped in St. Peter pap 5 and in the manuscripts of the Nuremberg branch. Even in their differences, these two manuscripts are representative of their genre, and their contents exemplarily demonstrate how liturgical decision-making, even for Observant convents, was influenced by networks that reached not just outside the convent walls but also outside the Dominican order.
IV. Networks, Authority, and Liturgical Agency
The entries in these manuscripts often record the source of a particular directive, and these indications or justifications exemplarily illustrate the different vectors of obligation that shaped a convent's liturgical practice. Furthermore, the detailed resolution of the May calendrical crisis in 1519 allows unparalleled insight into the process of decision-making and of negotiating obligations and networks by which Dominican sisters organized their liturgy. The relationship of these manuscripts and their trajectory from Schönensteinbach to St. Mary Magdalene in Freiburg already reveal one way in which liturgical information might pass between Dominican convents in late medieval Germany. However, the ties of the Observant reform were not the only networks to which communities belonged, nor the only influences on their liturgical practice. Four main sources of authority or influence appear in the Schönensteinbach/Freiburg directoria: the ordinarium, the friars, other women's communities, and the local parish.
Since directoria were composed as supplements to the ordinarium, it is not surprising that they should contain numerous references to it as the source of particular practices or regulations. More interesting is the evidence that Schönensteinbach possessed both Latin and German copies of the Dominican ordinarium and consulted both of them. St. Peter pap 5 notes when a certain practice is contained in both.Footnote 52 B3/25 mentions an instance when the two ordinaria disagreed and the chantress turned to the Colmar friary for advice. Perhaps contrary to what one might expect, the German-language ordinarium turned out to be correct, because at some point it had been updated with decisions of the general chapter which had not been appended to the Latin copy.Footnote 53 The Freiburg Penitents evidently also owned two ordinaria, although it is not certain which language either was in. The same hand that added the feast of Mary Magdalene's translation (B3/25, f. 80v) also added a set of rules concerning conflicts with Ash Wednesday, concluding with the claim that “one finds all this correctly in the old parchment ordinarium and in Lindauer's ordinarium.”Footnote 54 Whatever language either of these ordinaria may be in, the Penitents had access to a newer ordinarium but continued to use and refer to an old parchment one, as well. Both Schönensteinbach and the Penitents owned at least two ordinaria, which they knew differed from each other and both of which they consulted when planning the liturgy. These convents were not alone; no less than three ordinaria survive from St. Catherine in Nuremberg, one Latin exemplar and two strongly divergent German translations.Footnote 55 In cases of disagreement, the directoria adjudicate which ordinarium contains the correct practice. The Dominican ordinarium thus figures as an important authority but an ambiguous and multiple one, whose material witnesses were known to be imperfect.
In addition to the ordinarium, other Dominican communities appear as sources both of authoritative information and of alternative practice. The friars in Colmar are recorded as the source of the decision in favor of Schönensteinbach's German-language ordinarium, and indeed they appear as the liturgical experts quite frequently in both manuscripts, along with a few other individual friars. Dominican sisters were institutionally excluded from the order's legislative processes and thus relied on the friars for information about the decisions of the general chapter, which released mandates concerning the liturgy at almost every meeting.Footnote 56 When it was refounded as an Observant convent in 1397, Schönensteinbach was entrusted to the oversight and care of the Observant Colmar friary. This relationship explains the frequent mentions of the Colmar friars as authorities and even the familiarity with which the chantress writes to her brothers with questions.Footnote 57 In this context, it is striking that the Colmar friary is the only one mentioned and the Freiburg friars do not appear, even in the later additions. This friary did not belong to the Observance and was apparently not in the Penitents’ network or was not considered authoritative for their practice.Footnote 58 Instead, the later additions refer to single friars: a slip of paper tucked between folios 91 and 92 of B3/25 records its source as “the new provincial prior” and one addition to St. Peter pap 5 mentions as a source of information Father Johannes Walter, who is attested as a confessor in the necrology of the Freiburg Penitents.Footnote 59 Although the Freiburg Penitents continued to receive advice and information from authoritative friars, they do not seem to have enjoyed a relationship of close consultation with the local Freiburg friary such as Schönensteinbach had with Colmar. The Nuremberg directoria also mention individuals, as well as noting when a practice is shared with the friary.Footnote 60 One directorium notes that the renowned Dominican Johannes Nider (best known as the father of witchcraft literature) had ordered them to ceremonially wash the altar in the sisters’ choir.Footnote 61 Another records that the provincial prior Peter Wellen had given them special permission to celebrate Saint Barbara with nine lections.Footnote 62 Each convent's connection to the order's broader network was configured a bit differently, creating different ties to the friars. The Freiburg Penitents only mention individuals (the confessor or provincial prior), whereas St. Catherine in Nuremberg had strong ties to the local friary and Schönensteinbach to the friary in Colmar.
Other women's convents serve as sources of information as well. The most obvious example of this direct exchange is, of course, the reform that brought both women and manuscripts from Schönensteinbach to the Freiburg Penitents, but the Observant network fostered other connections as well. The note about Unterlinden, an Observant women's convent near Colmar that had also been reformed by Schönensteinbach, is couched in the same first-person language as many of the notes about the Colmar friary: “once it was communicated to me from Unterlinden” (B3/25, f. 52v). Reforms were not the only means of networking with other convents. The note on B3/25, f. 130r about the feast of Saints Vitus and Modestus attests to knowledge of their feast within the Augsburg diocese, for which there are two possible connections.Footnote 63 Sister Katharina Langmantel (d. 1442) was from Augsburg and had served as prioress of St. Catherine in Augsburg before transferring to Schönensteinbach where she also served as prioress.Footnote 64 Alternatively, this knowledge could be derived from one of the five sisters who spent a year from 1445 to 1446 at St. Catherine in Augsburg when armed conflict in Alsace forced Schönensteinbach temporarily to disperse.Footnote 65 These notes demonstrate that Dominican women compared their liturgical practices with their sisters in other houses. Such contacts fostered awareness that their own liturgical custom was contingent and highlighted the ties that permitted or necessitated divergent practices.
As was the case with Vitus and Modestus, some liturgical variance arose from bishoprics, but, even within the same diocese, different convents had different relationships to local ecclesiastical authorities, which had different effects on the convent's liturgical practice. When the reforming sisters moved from the secluded Schönensteinbach to St. Mary Magdalene in Freiburg, they not only moved from the Strasbourg to the Constance diocese—they also moved into a city. This meant giving up the privilege of following the Dominican ordinarium to the letter and instead conforming to the local parish. The main hand of the Schönensteinbach layer in B3/25 describes Schönensteinbach's privileges in a passage that is remarkable for its description of different liturgical influences from the Dominican ordinarium and the diocese and for its distinction between convents within and outside of cities in giving advice about prioritizing between these demands.
In the ordinarium it says that one should never postpone Candlemas. Instead, one should celebrate it on whatever day it happens to fall. It was also told to us by Colmar, from the friary, that this is correct, and whoever is in the wilderness, as at Schönensteinbach, should act according to the ordinarium. However, the communities in the cities must sometimes act according to the parish; otherwise, it would cause discord and conflict for them. But for the feast of the Annunciation, one should always find out when the secular clergy are celebrating it, if it happens to fall in a way that there is any doubt regarding how one should handle it. This is Our Dear Lady's Day during Lent. About this day, the ordinarium says: if one celebrates this feast on a certain day in the diocese, then the sisters should also celebrate it on the same day. Otherwise, they should postpone it as is written about other feasts in the ordinarium. Concerning the postponement of feasts: there one finds all of this written. (B3/25, f. 18r–19r)
Much of this passage is simply a German translation of the chapter of the ordinarium De translatione festivitatum, but it inserts further details of local relevance, including when not to follow the ordinarium.Footnote 66 For Schönensteinbach, this passage interpreted the ordinarium to explain why the convent could make their own choices regarding the feast of the Purification but had to defer to the diocese for the Annunciation. The privilege of isolation created differences of practice from the Colmar friary, which was in a city and had to conform to the parish more often.Footnote 67 As we shall see, the directive to follow the parish would also have repercussions for the Freiburg Penitents. In isolation, liturgical practices could be planned as an order-internal affair, but for communities with closer ties to local networks, the Dominican ordinarium was merely one factor among numerous considerations within and outside of the Dominican order.
There were many potential obligations and authorities that assumed differing configurations of influence for each community. When planning out liturgical performance, the Dominican ordinarium was a chantress's most important source, but it was not always an unambiguous one. Convents owned multiple copies, which sometimes differed from each other and did not always contain the innovations that had been introduced by the general chapter. The diocese or the city in which a convent lay could influence both the rank of feasts, as in the example of Vitus and Modestus, and the scheduling of feasts, as with the Purification and the Annunciation. In cases of doubt, sisters could turn to friars, such as their confessor or the friary responsible for their spiritual care, or they could field advice from other convents. Organizing the liturgy entailed correlating information and prioritizing demands from various entities whose relative degrees of authority might differ convent to convent and feast by feast.
V. May 1519
The Freiburg Penitents’ resolution to the conflict on May 1, 1519, beautifully exemplifies the way in which a convent might draw on these different sources in order to solve liturgical problems, largely because the triple conflict and the busy schedule in early May necessitated an entire series of decisions. The problems to be resolved were as follows: Easter fell on April 24. The special observances for Easter Week overrode all other feasts and required that they be postponed until after the octave on May 1. In 1519, this rule affected Saint Mark (April 25) and Peter Martyr (April 29). This accident created a special complication, since the feast of Saint Mark was the date for the Major Rogation, a city-wide ceremony that entailed a public procession to each of the churches in town, including those attached to the Dominican convents.Footnote 68 Thus, on top of the two feasts conflicting with the Easter octave on May 1 (Catherine of Siena and the Apostles Philip and James), there were already two additional feasts postponed from Easter Week. Of these four feasts, one required coordination with the parish and two belonged to the Dominican order (Catherine and Peter). Worse yet, the first week of May contained six further feasts: Invention of the Cross (May 3), Crown of Thorns (May 4), Peter Martyr's octave (May 5), John Before the Latin Gate (May 6), Peter Martyr's translation (May 7), and the Apparition of Michael (May 8). During the entire week, only May 2 was free, and, with four feasts to reschedule, it was guaranteed that the complications would drag out into the second week of May. Each Dominican convent would have to decide which feast took precedence over what, whether any should be skipped entirely, and how important it was to coordinate with the parish and with the other Dominican communities in the same city.
The decisions of the Freiburg Penitents are recorded at the end of St. Peter pap 5 on ff. 141r–142v. Easter feasts take precedence over all others, so Philip and James were pushed back a day to Monday, May 2, the only free day that week. The Invention of the Cross was celebrated on May 3, as usual, but on Wednesday the community could not celebrate the Crown of Thorns. On that day, the parish churches were celebrating the postponed feast of Mark and the Major Rogation, in which the convents had to participate.Footnote 69 Under normal circumstances, the octave of Peter Martyr would fall the following day (Thursday, May 5), and, indeed, the Penitents chose to celebrate his octave as an octave “as one otherwise does when the feast is not postponed” (f. 141v), even though they had never celebrated the main feast at all. In accordance with this decision, they also celebrated the remainder of the week, as usual, with John Before the Latin Gate (May 6), Peter Martyr's translation (May 7), and the Apparition of Michael (May 8) falling on their proper days. At this point, the Freiburg Penitents made the unusual decision to celebrate Catherine of Siena on Monday, May 9, wrapping up this intense liturgical period with the rescheduled Crown of Thorns on Tuesday, May 10. The feast of Philip and James had been unproblematically postponed only by a day; Mark and the Major Rogation were rescheduled in compliance with the parish observances; the first of the three feasts for Peter Martyr was simply cancelled; and Catherine of Siena and the Crown of Thorns were scheduled for the first free days available, which happened to be a Monday and Tuesday.
However, this final decision to celebrate Catherine of Siena on a Monday is more problematic than it at first appears. This choice violated the most recent pronouncement of the Dominican general chapter, which, as I noted in my opening, had confirmed in 1518 that her feast should be celebrated on the first Sunday in May, killing a 1513 proposal to change the regulation to the first free Sunday in May.Footnote 70 Either way, most Dominicans evidently considered it important that Catherine's feast be observed on a Sunday. For example, a directorium, likely from St. Catherine in Augsburg, attests that in 1516 the community bumped the Crown of Thorns to May 5 in order to celebrate Catherine of Siena on Sunday, May 4.Footnote 71 Yet more pertinently, a directorium from St. Catherine in Nuremberg also records their decisions for this period of 1519. The order of feasts during the week falls out differently, since the city of Nuremberg celebrated Saint Mark and the Rogation on Monday instead of Wednesday as in Freiburg, and the convent's dedication anniversary two weeks after Easter adds a further complication. Yet the Nuremberg community still skipped available weekdays in order to schedule Catherine of Siena for the third Sunday in May.Footnote 72 As St. Peter pap 5 records, even the other Dominican convents in Freiburg pushed the Apparition of Michael to May 9 in order to celebrate Catherine on a Sunday in 1519. The Penitents, however, defied both their sisters and the Dominican general chapter with an appeal to the ordinarium:
Some convents celebrated the feast of Saint Catherine on Sunday and the Angels [the Apparition of Michael] on Monday, but the ordinarium forbids that one should push any feast from its day for the sake of a feast that is already postponed. Unless it were the case that the parish were holding such a feast, for which reason one would have to push another feast from its day. Otherwise, one should never do this. (St. Peter pap 5, f. 142v)
This defense openly criticizes other Dominican communities for having ignored or misunderstood the ordinarium, while conceding a degree of authority to the parish. The feast of Catherine of Siena was supposed to be the first Sunday in May, but this had fallen on the octave of Easter, forcing Catherine to be postponed. Some communities postponed Michael, because they prioritized Catherine, the order's own saint, and the general chapter's proclamation that her feast should always fall on a Sunday. The Freiburg Penitents, however, prioritized the letter of the ordinarium, insisting that Catherine's already postponed feast could not push another feast from its proper day, because this was forbidden as a rule. In this, they followed their Sanctorale directorium, which makes this regulation explicit with regard to Catherine of Siena's feast: “Item, this feast for Catherine should be celebrated on a Sunday in May, if it can be. One should not push any other feast from its day because of it” (B3/25, f. 110r). The Penitents had, however, just violated precisely this rule when the postponed feast of Saint Mark pushed the Crown of Thorns from its proper day. Admitting this fact required adding the explicit exception that this is only permissible when the parish makes you do it. Within this short passage, the Freiburg Penitents assert their liturgical agency by criticizing the practices of their sister communities and defying the declarations of the general chapter in order to prioritize the letter of the Dominican ordinarium, all while begrudgingly acknowledging necessary concessions to the local parish.
VI. Conclusion
The liturgy held a special place in the textual and spiritual life as well as the communal identity of Dominican convents.Footnote 73 To be sure, Dominican friaries had cantors who directed their liturgies in the same way, making the same kinds of local yearly decisions. However, Dominican friars also had other ways of enacting their communal religious identity within their local secular networks and within their order, respectively through preaching and through scholarly education, for example.Footnote 74 The other kinds of networked relationships that Dominican women possessed through property ownership or ties to biological family were not necessarily marked by the distinctly Dominican character of their community. This “not necessarily” should be understood as an important qualifier. Not all communities who identified as Dominican were formally incorporated into the order.Footnote 75 Among those who were, adherence to the Observance had a profound impact on the means by which women communicated with the outside world, as well as their relationships to the order's governing structures.Footnote 76 Yet even in strictly reformed Observant convents, a certain degree of variance and local customization was permitted.Footnote 77 Certain aspects of a convent's liturgy performed their attachment to the Dominican order (for example, commemoration of Saint Dominic every Tuesday), whereas other elements expressed their ties to their cities and families (in Nuremberg, for example, internal observances for the Heiltumsweisung, the day when the city publicly displayed the imperial regalia).Footnote 78 The liturgy thus served as an important site of religious identity—by its nature flexible in a way that many aspects of Observant practice were not.
The decisions of the Freiburg Penitents in early May 1519 exemplify the kinds of obligations and networks that placed demands on the women organizing their convent's liturgy, but they also show that these women were able to negotiate these obligations in order to actively shape their convent's performance. Not only did they have to weigh the relative importance of each conflicting feast but they also had to weigh the community's dedication to the order's rules, as well as the strength of the sisters’ local connections and the political importance of conforming to other regional communities or to the parish. In this case, avoiding conflict with the parish was important enough for them to displace the Crown of Thorns, but conformity with the other Dominican convents of the city and their devotion to Catherine of Siena were not important enough for them to displace the Apparition of Michael. Organizing a convent's liturgy entailed a complex negotiation both of the continually shifting calendar of feasts as well as the persons and authorities, local and distant, secular and religious, that belonged to each convent's network. The German Dominican directoria mention numerous different sources of regulations or advice, each of which grounds its authority in a different way and each of which plays a different role in the construction of the community's liturgy. The references to these sources allow us to reconstruct the networks that influenced Dominican convents in making their liturgical decisions: directoria needed to be used together with the standard Dominican ordinarium; higher authorities within the order, including the general chapter, the master general, and the provincial prior, also appear as sources of liturgical change or mandates; in addition to these institutional authorities, the manuscripts name other Dominican communities of both friars and sisters as sources of advice or contrast; finally, the local parish clergy appear not as authorities on the Dominican liturgy but because they make liturgical decisions that sometimes affect the women even inside the convent. In compiling these manuscripts, the women who wrote them weighed the strength of the various connections in their networks and the potential consequences of following or ignoring one or the other authority in order to prioritize when resolving various liturgical conflicts. This very act of inscription itself produced a new authority constructed as precedence, should analogous situations arise in the future, and contained in a new quasi-institutional, ambiguously authoritative book type: the directorium. Each year's iterative decisions produced a liturgical performance through which these women enacted a dynamic communal identity at the nexus of their status as Dominicans, their connection to local community outside their walls, and the unique spiritual commitments that differentiated them from other Dominican convents.
In the introduction to this article, I called attention to the ways in which sociocultural background and regional belonging affect contemporary Catholic sisters’ identities. This also pertains for medieval religious women, whose daily lives, experiences, and choices were differentially affected by the order to which they belonged, affiliation with a reform movement, the financial stability of their convent, age of entrance, socioeconomic background, family ties, and geographical location, and so on. It has long been recognized that the organization of the liturgy provides a special window into the performed identity of a religious community.Footnote 79 This process did not occur in a vacuum; rather, a community liturgically constructed its identity at the nexus of competing obligations and affiliations. Writing about the monastery of Farfa, Susan Boynton drew attention to the fact that liturgy “included certain elements typical of its geographic area, some aspects particular to the abbey's own customs, and other components that were more universal.”Footnote 80 Even for strictly enclosed religious women, the liturgy was not an internal affair but rather a complex negotiation of competing demands from various entities within the convent's network. The religious order to which the convent belonged, the city or bishopric within which it lay, the patron saints to whom its altars were dedicated, and the human patrons who supported it materially all exercised a due degree of influence over the community's liturgical practice.Footnote 81 These competing demands, however, were not perforce invasive and unnatural pressures on an independent entity to compromise its unique liturgical identity by conceding to external worship practices.Footnote 82 In cases where different obligations came into conflict, the religious community could not compromise their identity or choose their own liturgy because “their own liturgy” was not fixed but rather was continually created through the living, flexible, and dynamic intersection of these obligations, networks, and performed decisions.Footnote 83 As Sigrid Hirbodian has written, meticulous analysis of hyperlocal sources in the tradition of German regional history “leads to fresh answers to the more general question of how the religious identities of women were shaped: not only through formal religious affiliation, but also by social background, by political climate in the hometown, and by spirituality, especially by the model of neighboring institutions that followed a very different way of life.”Footnote 84 In addition to the legal and economic records that have traditionally formed the basis of Landesgeschichte, liturgical documents such as these directoria provide invaluable insight into the ways religious women in the late Middle Ages reconciled their obligations to perform a networked identity.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the Church History editors, to James Mixson and the journal's reviewers, and to my writing group, Dana Oswald and Kathryn Maude, for their meticulous and generous feedback. Remaining errors and infelicities are my own.
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