Negotiating Liturgical Obligations in Late Medieval Dominican Convents

Abstract

AbstractLiturgy has often served as a source for studying the identities of medieval religious communities through examining local saints and special chants or ceremonies. This article deepens such approaches by considering the practice of liturgical coordination, which required each convent to reconcile the obligations imposed upon it by the order to which it belonged, the diocese in which it lay, and the personal networks of its sisters. The shifting dates of the Easter cycle created a wide variety of possible calendrical conflicts and necessitated that each convent's liturgical practice be organized anew every year. Focusing on German-language liturgical manuals from Observant Dominican convents, this article introduces these sources and examines the various obligations, authorities, and sources of advice that Dominican sisters coordinated when planning each year's liturgy. It then turns to the concrete example of a major calendrical conflict on May 1, 1519, which illustrates how convents negotiated their networked obligations and defended their decisions. Supplementing traditional sources such as chronicles and charters, liturgical administrative documents reveal how each convent's liturgical identity was both iterative and networked and how the tensions between these features opened up spaces for assertive decision-making.