Dominican Sisters Together in Prayer: Reading, Praying and Singing in Portuguese Observant Reform Literature

Reading and singing were the primary methods of prayer in monastic and conventual communities. During periods of reform, concern for these collective worship practices tended to grow stronger, as they were understood to be sources of contemplation and spiritual experience, especially for enclosed religious women who could not fulfill what friars, called to public life, could do. This paper explores discourses on liturgy and collective readings in normative and didactic literature from two Portuguese Dominican convents of the Observant reform, the Convent of Jesus in Aveiro (founded in 1461) and the Convent of Our Lady of Paradise in Évora (founded in 1516). The focus lies on the non-liturgical books found in their libraries, which are mostly written in Portuguese and include both normative documents (the Rule of Saint Augustine, the nuns’ Constitutions) as well as para-normative texts, such as sermons, a commentary on the Rule, and a translation of Humbert of Romans’s Book of Duties. Finally, special attention is given to a female-authored chronicle that tells the story of the foundation of the Convent of Jesus by its first prioress, Beatriz Leitão, which reinforces the normative principles through a discourse intended to build the identity of her community. The same trends in the increased production of vernacular normative literature for nuns that have been verified in the well-studied reform of the Dominican Teutonic province can also be found in the Portuguese province during the 15th and 16th centuries.