Religious Women and Liturgy in a Fifteenth-Century Portuguese Codex: Gendering the Reception and Profession Ceremonies in the Dominican Convents

Abstract The problem of whether Dominican nuns adopted the order’s official liturgy, implemented in 1256, remains a complex topic. The rarity of liturgical sources containing instructions for the performance of religious ceremonies in female communities hinders the study of this subject. This is complicated by the fact that a substantial number of these texts were redacted in the masculine form, thus not reflecting the reality of the nuns’ performance. Analysis of a codex from the Dominican convent of Jesus of Aveiro (1491), containing gendered vernacular versions of the ordines for the nuns’ reception and profession ceremonies, can contribute to further clarification of this issue. Through comparison with surviving ordines from other territories (Spain and Italy), this study shows how, in the particular case of these ceremonies, female communities adapted and deviated from the friars’ liturgy in order to mirror and respond to their own identities and realities, which, as will be shown, varied from convent to convent and revealed different degrees of autonomy and enclosure.