The Medieval Dominicans

Book excerpt: The Order of Preachers has famously bred some of the leading intellectual lights of the Middle Ages. While Dominican achievements in theology, philosophy, languages, law, and sciences have attracted much scholarly interest, their significant engagement with liturgy, the visual arts, and music remains relatively unexplored. These aspects and their manifold interconnections form the focal point of this interdisciplinary volume. The different chapters examine how early Dominicans positioned themselves and interacted with their local communities, where they drew their influences from, and what impact the new Order had on various aspects of medieval life. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as the making and illustrating of books, services for a king, the disposition of liturgical space, the creation of new liturgies, and a Dominican-made music treatise. In doing so, they seek to shed light on the actions and interactions of medieval Dominicans in the first centuries of the Order's existence.