UNSTABLE AND MULTIPLE * The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. Edited by BRIAN CUMMINGS

Abstract

The English Puritan Henry Barrow hated the Book of Common Prayer. Writing from exile in the Netherlands in 1590, he mockingly described what he saw as his countrymen's unhealthy dependence upon this work. ‘By this Book are the Priests to administer their sacraments, by this Book to church their women, by this Book to bury the dead, by this Book to keep their Rogation’, he wrote: ‘This Book is good at all affairs; it is the only Book of the world’. Since 1549 – with several brief interruptions – the Book of Common Prayer has been the devotional handbook for the English Church. It sets out morning and evening prayer and the schedule of proper scriptural readings; it also defines the form of the sacraments and church rites, including baptism, confirmation, matrimony, burial, and Holy Communion. Barrow feared that a single book granted this much power might tempt us to idolatry. However, as Brian Cumming's excellent new edition makes clear, this was never a single book. It was instead unstable and multiple.