she sang it in German and with such inhuman beauty that one thought she was singing with an angel’s voice…. This holy convent became senseless from great devotion and fell down as if dead and lay thus until they had all come to themselves. Then they sang their matins to the end with great devotion.
While singing the solo verse of a responsory, the choir mistress had been seized by divine insight, spontaneously translating the Latin song into her mother tongue and performing the inspired text with inhuman beauty. Rather than responding with the prescribed text of the chant response, the rest of the community fell, rapt in ecstasy.
This story exemplifies some commonly accepted characteristics of late medieval female piety: liturgical devotion, embodiment, vernacularity, ecstatic experience, and community. In keeping with Caroline Walker Bynum’s analysis of bodiliness and embodied response as a trait of women’s spirituality, the Engelthal sisters are physically overcome by the beauty of Hailrat’s song.2 A vernacular translation replaces the Latin of the Office, supporting the frequent association of women with vernacularity.3 Peter Ochsenbein has interpreted the story as an example of mystical exceptionalism, arguing that Hailrat was so overcome by a private experience of grace that she disturbed the performance of the Office for the entire convent.4 Erika Lauren Lindgren, on the other hand, asserts that the episode “emphasized the communality of monastic life,” since Hailrat mediates and communicates extraordinary devotion to her sisters.5 This account of communal ecstasy is indeed a rich testament to fourteenth-century female piety. Yet if one attends to the event’s context in the convent’s history, another aspect emerges: praise of life under the Dominican order.
Like many of the southern German Dominican women’s houses, the Engelthal community had begun as an assembly of beguines, that is, women living a pious life together but without having taken vows and without being enclosed in a convent.6 Their road to incorporation in the Dominican order was a long one, and they adopted some of the order’s practices, including the Dominican liturgy, before being fully incorporated. As Christina Ebner informs us, this experience of ecstatic song was granted to the community in the first Advent sung nach dem orden, that is, according to the Dominican Office. The miracle that graces their newly ordered liturgical song thus confirms the early Engelthal sisters in their decision to join the Dominican order by demonstrating the worthiness of its practices. Standing at the beginning of the sisterbook, the story foreshadows the importance of the order as a font of spiritual experience throughout the sisters’ lives as portrayed within the book.
Ruling the Spirit suggests a new paradigm for female liturgical piety in late medieval Germany by intervening at the nexus of two productive spiritual movements: fourteenth-century female Dominican spirituality and the fifteenth-century Observant reform. Rather than placing works by German Dominican women in conversation with spiritual writings by women of other orders and nationalities, I examine texts for German Dominican women for their statements about the Dominican order and the role of the order in fostering piety. Ruling the Spirit argues three related claims. First, contrary to received opinion that the Dominicans were not particularly interested in the liturgy, the friars placed the Divine Office at the center of Dominican women’s spiritual lives from the order’s origins through the end of the Middle Ages. Second, female Dominican liturgical piety was not a subversive expression of resistance or an attempt to wrest spiritual power away from the friars, but the fruition of the spirituality that the order’s forma vitae was intended to entrain. Third, fourteenth-century mysticism does not represent a moment of radical ecstatic spirituality that had to be stamped out by the fifteenth-century Observant reform. Rather, these two devotional movements represent two points in a continuous devotional history of ordered liturgical piety.
I approach this literature with the understanding that no texts exist, or ever existed, that record mystical experience as such. As Werner Williams-Krapp has argued for Heinrich Seuse (Henry Suso),7 the texts that purport to record mystical experience are always already mystagogy. Their primary purpose is not to relate a past experience but to teach others how to achieve spiritual fulfillment. Even the lives of Dominican nuns as recounted in the sisterbooks do not provide access to past performance. The experience of hearing Hailrat’s song is unavailable to us. All we can know is that the author, Christina Ebner, valued the Dominican Office as a source of devotion.
Pushing this argument even further, Ruling the Spirit is not, in a sense, about the lives of Dominican women at all. Rather, it is about the normative ideals presented to them in a variety of texts and genres by the friars responsible for their spiritual care. This holds true even in the case of the fourteenth-century sisterbooks, on which I focus in Chapter 3. These female-authored narratives present exemplary models of piety as much as they recount the lives of historical women. Moreover, they were revived and put back into circulation in the fifteenth century by the Observant reformer Johannes Meyer, who saw their pedagogical value. The Observance witnessed another blossoming of female chronicling, and Anne Winston-Allen and Heike Uffmann have done invaluable work bringing the first-hand accounts of fifteenth-century German religious women to scholarly attention.8 Whereas their work recovered women’s participation in and reactions to the late medieval regular reforms, this book examines the rhetoric of pious observance of the order in German Dominican normative literature produced primarily by friars for women from the early fourteenth through the fifteenth century. With remarkable continuity across genres and centuries, this literature encourages strict observance of the Dominican order and devotion to its Office as the wellspring of spiritual experience and reward.
The Southern German region, encompassed by the Dominican province of Teutonia, lends itself to such a study for two reasons. First, the imbalanced proportion of Dominican sisters over friars in this province made the cura monialium a special concern. Second, within this region the Observant reform movement enjoyed an unusual degree of success. In 1303, the General Chapter of the Dominican order carved the province of Saxony out of Teutonia’s northern regions, leaving the southern province with the vicariates of Brabantia (encompassing the Rhineland up to and including Cologne), Alsatia (which also contained Switzerland), Suevia (together with Franconia), and Bavaria (including Austria).9 At this time, a total of 141 communities of women were under Dominican care. Sixty-five of these lay within the province of Teutonia alone.10 The friars of Teutonia, possessing in 1303 only forty-seven houses, were significantly outnumbered by the houses of sisters.11 A hundred years later, Teutonia would become the first province to establish a reformed Observant friary;12 it would bury the first Master General to support the Observance;13 and it would see the greatest institutional success of the movement.14 The disproportionately large number of Dominican women and the success of the Observant reform (to which the women contributed no small part15) made Teutonia fertile ground for vernacular devotional and didactic literature urging adherence to the order and spiritualizing performance of its Office.
I ground my study in the library collection of the Dominican convent of St. Katherine’s in Nürnberg. Every text I treat was held by the convent library in the fifteenth century. St. Katherine’s was reformed to the Observance in 1428 and grew to be one of the most significant Observant women’s houses in the province, both by virtue of its zeal in sending reforming parties to sister houses and because of its vast library of books, both received from outside and copied by the sisters themselves.16 By the end of the fifteenth century, St. Katherine’s owned at least 726 manuscripts, of which 161 were Latin, primarily liturgical manuscripts. The remaining 565 contained a broad variety of German texts.17 Most importantly, a library catalog and two table readings catalogs survive. The library catalog and the second table readings catalog were drawn up in the 1450s by Kunigunde Niklas, who served St. Katherine’s as a prolific scribe before becoming librarian in 1451. Her catalogs reveal information about reception and use of the convent’s holdings. For example, Kunigunde Niklas allotted Johannes Tauler’s sermons, discussed in Chapter 2, for extensive reading before the community when they assembled
