Johannes Meyer's Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens (Book of the reform of the Dominican order) is one of the most significant sources for the Observant Reform of the Dominican Order in the German-speaking regions of Europe and especially of the reform of the women's houses. Until the publication of Claire Taylor Jones's excellent translation, Women's History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer's Chronicle of the Dominican Observance, Meyer's text was available only in a flawed early twentieth-century edition and thus was accessible only to a limited audience of Germanist medievalists. Now, it is easy to imagine a more multifaceted audience for this important text. With its concise yet comprehensive introduction, useful footnotes, and clear modern English that effectively conveys Meyer's often conversational tone, it will doubtlessly find a place in undergraduate medieval history classrooms. But it should also find interested readers among scholars of the Observant Reform in non-German-speaking regions, medieval religious reform more broadly, and medieval Dominicans.Jones's introduction to the translation provides a concise overview of the Observant reform, emphasizing the importance of local politics, the connection of the movement to larger trends such as increasing lay piety and the rise of humanism, and the regional nature of Observant reform for nuns. Each of these aspects is crucial for understanding Meyer's chronicle. The “grand narrative of decline and renewal” that Meyer presents, featuring friars and nuns who face extreme difficulties and even risk death but ultimately achieve success, is of course “too simple to be true” (6). Jones is attentive to Meyer's strengths as an historian, though, and not only to his obvious biases. Meyer's career, which never included university study possibly because of ill health, was centered around the interrelated tasks of acting as a confessor to numerous Dominican convents, participating in reform efforts, and writing many works both for and about the women he seems to have admired so much. As Jones points out, not only does Meyer draw on female genres of writing and the archives of the convents he writes about as well as nuns' oral histories and personal recollections, he also offers an “expansive treatment of the skills and competencies of medieval women” (25). For instance, Meyer treats nuns' literacy and learning in both Latin and the vernacular capaciously: some nuns are skilled at translating difficult Latin into German, others copy liturgical manuscripts (of tantamount importance to the reform, as Jones showed in Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018]), and yet others have phenomenal memories for the biblical readings and sermons that they hear during Mass despite being unable to read or write.Jones's translation comes directly from Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire MS 2934, which has several advantages among the four surviving complete manuscripts of Meyer's chronicle. Although it is not related to the other three manuscripts, for which Werner Fechter identified a clear line of transmission (Werner Fechter, “Die Nürnberger Handschrift von Johannes Meyers Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 110 [1981]: 57–69), it is the oldest and scribal efforts to correct ich and mir (“I” and “me”) to er and ihm (“he” and “him”) suggest that it is the closest to Meyer's original text (30–31). Jones also referred to the oldest manuscript among the three other complete manuscripts, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 8081, when necessary for comparison or clarification. Fortunately for interested scholars and students, all of the complete manuscripts (the other two are St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek cod. 1916 and Tübingen, Universitätsbibliothek Hs. Md 456), as well as additional short excerpts identified by Jones in a book of prayers and contemplations for Dominican nuns, Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek St. Peter pap. 9, are digitized and freely available online. Not only is this useful for scholars wishing to consult the manuscripts, but it is easy to imagine a host of classroom activities discussing manuscript production and exchange in late medieval convents after undergraduate students have read the chronicle in part or in full. Jones's transparency regarding her choices also will help scholars familiar with the 1908 diplomatic edition (Johannes Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, ed. Benedict Maria Reichert, 2 vols [Leipzig: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1908–9]), which relied on the St. Gallen manuscript and thus, among other problems, features some chapters regarding the reform of friaries out of the chronological order of the rest of the text. The translation is amply footnoted, identifying the various popes, bishops, princes, dukes, and Dominicans that Meyer mentions. Additionally, there are useful appendices providing a list of the relevant masters general of the order and priors provincial of the Dominican province of Teutonia and the names and reform dates of both friaries and convents in Teutonia, which collectively help to make the text more accessible to students. In general, Jones's footnotes to the translation are helpful rather than overburdensome, providing an entry into the most current scholarship of the Observant Reform in Germany; the field is well developed in Germany but much less so in the United States. Unfortunately, undergraduate students may find the accompanying map of the Dominican province of Teutonia difficult to use, as it lacks identifying landmarks and a scale; fortunately, the map of the region around Schönensteinbach is more user-friendly.Meyer's chronicle itself draws on the genre of the “Sisterbook.” Produced in fourteenth-century German Dominican convents, these books began with a foundation history of the convent and then highlighted the lives of exemplary sisters as models for future generations. Thanks to manuscript copying and exchange throughout the fifteenth century, nuns at reforming convents may very well have been familiar with this genre, making it an effective and purposeful choice for Meyer's chronicle. The Book of the Reform is a doubled version. The first two books are the foundation history of the convent of Schönensteinbach, which was at the forefront of the Observant reform for nuns. Book I deals with the original foundation of the convent by two noble daughters who asked their father for a chapel because the convent where they were nuns was not strict enough for their tastes; he gave them a barn on his freehold property instead. Meyer traces the difficulties the original generations of women had in obtaining the proper pastoral care: initially, they received this care from a Cistercian abbot, and then from a nearby Augustinian canonry. As the canons regular declined spiritually, sisters left the convent. Eventually, war and plague (probably the Black Death) decimated the convent and it was deserted. Book II traces the renewal of Schönensteinbach, spurred on by Friar Conrad of Prussia, as the first and foremost community of Observant Dominican nuns in Germany. In this book, readers first see the process of reform: reforming sisters were led into the convent accompanied by a crowd of priests, friars, important local political figures, and townspeople, especially women; the convent was officially enclosed; the liturgy was sung. Meyer also catalogs the sufferings that these sisters faced, including having to flee from Schönensteinbach four times because of war in the neighborhood. The book concludes with recommendations for right behavior to maintain observant religious life, which the Schönensteinbach sisters did despite the hardships they faced.Books III and IV are the second half of the Sisterbook genre, the vitae of the exceptional early sisters: in the case of Meyer's chronicle, the initial generations of reforming sisters in Book III and the friars who began and continued the Observance in Book IV. By 1468, when Meyer had completed the bulk of the book, he was already well familiar with the genre, having copied, edited, and/or redacted several of the fourteenth-century Sisterbooks, including those of Adelhausen, Töss, St. Katharinental, and Oetenbach. Much like their predecessors, Meyer's vitae cover the hardships that nuns experienced for the sake of the Observance, how they carried out their offices, their zeal for masses and prayer, and their good deaths. Unfortunately, Meyer informs his audience, the “imprudent humility” of the early sisters caused them to suppress many of the miracles and graces that they experienced, not sharing them with the community or recording them so that future generations might know of the fullness of virtue that the Observance brought to Schönensteinbach (87). By and large, these vitae focus on the communal values prized by the Observants, rather than the types of mystical experiences commonly reported in the fourteenth-century Sisterbooks. A representative example is the vita of Sister Lukardis, who held the office of bursar. Meyer describes her as “mild, gentle, and kind, quiet yet also firm,” skilled in managing convent affairs and carrying out her office, but also “completely humble.” Her generosity to the poor and to pilgrims, as well as to her convent sisters, was noteworthy. But even as she lived out this active life, imitating Martha, she also “never neglected the contemplative life” of Mary either. In fact, Meyer says that her “fasting, vigils, prayer, kneeling, prostrations, other devotions, and good holy exercises” were so numerous that he has no room to recount them. Upon her death, on the Feast of Mary Magdalene, a saint she held in especially high regard, the sisters found a bloody hair shirt and whip in her mattress, proving her devotion and virtue (112–14).Finally, in Book V, Meyer pivots from his focus on Schönensteinbach to the efflorescence of the Observant Reform among the Dominicans in German-speaking regions. Although Meyer's focus is on the convents of nuns, he does also include some accounts of the reform of friaries. These latter accounts Jones has returned to their chronological order within the text. Some descriptions of reform are more detailed than others—it is clear when Meyer had access to more complete sources and when he was scraping the bottom of the archival barrel—but, in keeping with his grand narrative of triumphant reform following great struggle, Meyer recounts the people and steps involved in reforming convents. As Meyer says in the prologue to Book V, “it is much easier to found a convent peacefully … than it is afterwards to reform and restore one that has fallen from its religious ways” (159). Unfortunately for modern readers, Meyer finished working on the chronicle in 1468, with some additions made in the 1470s, before some of the reform's later triumphs—and also before one of its most spectacular failures, the bitterly contested and ultimately revoked reform at Klingental in Basel, which pitted nuns, their families, and townspeople against each other for two years (for more on this failure, see Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004], 93–94, 148–51).To modern readers familiar with the Sisterbooks and almost certainly to Meyer's fifteenth-century audiences, the Book of the Reform clearly serves the same two purposes as the history recounted in the Sisterbooks: it is intended both to memorialize past generations of reforming sisters and also to act as a model for subsequent generations of how to live in a community of Dominican nuns. Jones also finds within its pages a salutary lesson for modern historians of medieval women on treating medieval women's talents and capabilities capaciously and generously (2, 25). This translation is a vital step in bringing Meyer, his chronicle, and the women about whom he wrote and to whom he dedicated his life to a much broader audience.