CJ (Claire Taylor) Jones

CJ Jones is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on liturgy and religious women in medieval Germany. Jones’s research explores how women’s communities used liturgy to negotiate gendered and religious structures of authority and how liturgical practice afforded flexible opportunities for creating and performing communal identity.

Jones's forthcoming book, Fixing the Liturgy: Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite, 1256-1516 (Penn Press), constructs a new history of the Dominican liturgy, told from the perspective of women's communities. Offering clear introductions to medieval liturgy and Dominican governance, the book illustrates how medieval Dominicans adapted their liturgy to the changing world around them. 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. Jones’s first book, Ruling the Spirit (Penn Press 2018), reexamines the mystical literature of the Dominican order, arguing that strict adherence to the order’s rule was considered a source of—not an impediment to—spiritual experience. Women’s History in the Age of Reformation (PIMS 2019) presents the first full-length English translation of Friar Johannes Meyer’s Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, the most important source for the role of German nuns in late medieval religious reform.

Jones has published numerous articles and essays on broader aspects of religious culture and literature in late medieval Germany and has received research support from the DAAD, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.