Making and Breaking the Rules: Discussion, Implementation, and Consequences of Dominican Legislation

The Dominican Order's exponential growth in the first decades of its existence brought with it the challenges of providing a stable organizational framework for the order and its members, and maintaining unity and cohesion, from local to provincial and order-wide levels.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the theory and practice of introducing order in all areas of Dominican life by means of rules and guidelines. With the rich transmission of acts of Dominican general and provincial chapters providing a fruitful starting point, the essays branch out to take account of a wide range of materials, including literary sources, codicological and musicological evidence, and architectural remains. Among the overarching questions asked are: by what means were rules and guidelines disseminated and implemented in the Dominican Order; what impact did they have and what were their intended, but also unintended, consequences; and what were the effects and outcomes of not following the rules laid down by the Order. The volume asks whether the historical evidence in normative sources such as the Acts of the General Chapters, widely used as a point of reference in modern scholarship, might represent an inaccurate and incomplete picture of the Order, one which was far removed from the reality on the ground.

Cornelia Linde is a Research Fellow in Medieval History at the German Historical Institute London. She holds an MA in Medieval Latin, Classical Latin, and Auxiliary Sciences of History from the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and an MA in Cultural and Intellectual History as well as a Ph.D. in Combined Historical Studies from the Warburg Institute, University of London. Her research interests include the history of the Latin Bible in the Middle Ages, medieval theology, and the history of universities. Among her publications are How to Correct the 'Sacra Scriptura'? Textual Criticism of the Bible between the Twelfth and the Fifteenth Century (2012), and, most recently, 'Arguing with Lollards: Thomas Palmer, OP, and De translatione scripture sacre in linguam barbaricam', Viator, 46/3 (2015).