The Rhetoric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

Although Manuals Offering detailed instructions in private prayer are both a distinctive and highly popular form of post-Reformation English literature, relatively little critical attention has been paid to these texts, either by literary critics or historians of religion. Surveys of English devotional literature, such as Helen White's Tudor Books of Private Devotion and English Devotional Literature 1600-1640 and C.J. Stranks's Anglican Devotion, describe the more prominent of these prayer manuals, but no critical study of this large body of literature yet exists. The reasons for this critical neglect are several. As Sam D. Gill's essay on prayer in the recently published Encyclopedia of Religion suggests, the study of prayer itself is still “undeveloped and naive” (2.489).