ABSTRACT
The earliest Dominican constitutions were composed by Dominic himself in 1216, when he established the interior way of life of his communities, with many borrowings from the Premonstratensian constitutions. In 1220–1 he and the General Chapter passed a number more (exactly how many is not known); in 1221 they laid the foundations of the provincial organisation and the provincial and General Chapters. These were considerably expanded early in Jordan of Saxony’s regime, and in 1228 the first ‘Generalissimum’ Chapter passed a substantial tidying up of the whole framework. Subsequent chapters made further changes, so that in the late 1230s a new edition became necessary, which was undertaken by Jordan’s successor, the eminent canonist Raymond de Peñaforte, in the years 1238–41.
