BRIAN CUMMINGS (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662..

Abstract

NO sooner had the celebrations of the King James Bible’s 400th anniversary drawn to a close in 2011 than another commemorative party got underway, this one to mark the 350th birthday of the Book of Common Prayer in 2012. This fortuitous pairing of round numbers does in fact point to a more fundamental relationship between the two books: arguably no other literature has done more to shape the cultural sensibilities of the English-speaking world, with the possible exception of the works of Shakespeare. That said, neither the Authorised Version of the Bible of 1611 nor the Prayer Book of 1662 was without precedent, and both owed substantial debts to earlier efforts. Upwards of 80 per cent of the King James New Testament, for example, has been traced back to the translation work of William Tyndale in the 1520s. Likewise, the version of the Prayer Book put in place as part of the Restoration Settlement of the early 1660s—the one being fêted at present—was a modest reworking of the Edwardine and Elizabethan texts of the previous century. As Brian Cummings observes in this new edition of the Prayer Books of 1549, 1559, and 1662, the last of these deliberately evoked a sense of continuity with the earlier texts. Its production, he says, was ‘a deliberate enactment of cultural recuperation’ (xvi) after the violent rupture of the Civil War and Commonwealth period.