CJ Jones (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)
Project Title
Binding Ritual: Enclosed Women, Cultural Authority, and Liturgical Books in Late Medieval Germany
Hurford Family Fellowship, 2025–26
Professor of German Studies; Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame
Email
CJ Jones holds an appointment as a professor of German studies at the University of Notre Dame, where they will assume the role of the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute after their fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Their interdisciplinary research draws together history, literature, music, liturgy, and manuscript studies to explore how medieval religious women negotiated gendered and religious structures of authority and how liturgical practice afforded flexible opportunities for creating and performing communal identity.
Their recent book, Fixing the Liturgy: Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite, 1256–1516 (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), constructs a new history of the Dominican order’s liturgy in the Middle Ages, told from the perspective of women’s communities. Using previously unstudied manuscripts, Jones reconstructs how Dominican sisters orchestrated the sounds, sights, and smells of women’s liturgy on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. Their current research examines small-format manuscripts for worship to uncover how medieval nuns designed and individualized the books guiding their community prayer lives.
Selected Publications
- Jones, CJ. Fixing the Liturgy: Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite 1256–1516. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
- Jones, CJ. “Negotiating Liturgical Obligations in Late Medieval Dominican Convents.” Church History 91, no. 1 (2022): 20–40.
- Jones, CJ. “Religious Reform and Liturgical Change in the Fifteenth Century: Chant as Women’s Protest Music.” In Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, edited by Lisa Colton and Anna Kathryn Grau, 91–117. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2022.
- Jones, CJ, trans. Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance. St. Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. Toronto: PIMS Publications, 2019.
- Jones, CJ. Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.