CJ Jones

Biography

CJ Jones is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on liturgy and religious women in medieval Germany. Their work 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.

Their recent book, Fixing the Liturgy: Friars, Sisters, and the Dominican Rite, 1256-1516 (Penn Press 2024), constructs a new history of the Dominican order’s liturgy in the Middle Ages, 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. Their 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. Their research has been supported by the DAAD, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Jones is interested in liturgical ritual and communal song as an enthusiastic singer of medieval and Renaissance music, especially polyphony. Since coming to Notre Dame, they have sung with the Collegium Musicum, a small chamber choir with a focus on Renaissance and Baroque music.