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This chapter examines the theme of disruption and continuity in English religious life at the Restoration with reference to the differing fortunes of those twin pillars of the Anglican establishment, the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. The AV had commanded broad acceptance under the Commonwealth and its re-authorization in 1660 was unproblematic. The BCP, by contrast, had long been reviled by hotter Protestants for its conservatism, especially in Archbishop William Laud’s 1637 version which had helped trigger civil war. Its re-introduction in 1662 occasioned the resignation of one-fifth of the clergy. This chapter challenges the characterization of the 1662 Prayer Book (in contrast with the AV) as solely divisive, however. It argues that universal acceptance of the book was impossible under the circumstances but that, by rejecting the most offensive Laudian innovations, Convocation successfully minimized the inevitable backlash and avoided any larger-scale secession or civil unrest.

Following on from the previous chapter, Chapter 3 turns to the use of the liturgy within the Church. It considers the revival of interest in the forms of the Book of Common Prayer, again largely spearheaded by the Tractarians and the High Church, and notes the controversy over their use. Turning to poetry on the liturgy, the chapter then offers readings of poems by Wordsworth, Robert Montgomery, and others. The chapter also discusses the plainsong revival and some of its potential for fostering new poetic structures. The second part of the chapter takes a broad view of nostalgic representations of Anglican ritual, studying the impact of the discourse of nostalgia in the poets of ‘doubt’, and closing with a consideration of the poems of Thomas Hardy.

This chapter examines the relation between public worship and liturgical law in churches of the Anglican Communion. It suggests that the adoption of the Book of Common Prayer 1662 resulted in a consistency between churches and their laws on public worship and that the recommendations of the Lambeth Conference significantly influenced the actual laws in individual churches. The drafting and formulating of liturgical texts is the responsibility of the central church assemblies where the episcopate, clergy, and laity are all represented.

Feng Guo takes the discussion into the twentieth century and the mandate to produce a Chinese BCP for the use of the whole Church. In Chapter 5, he addresses the question of why a CHSKH Prayer Book was never produced, and considers the legacy of the BCP liturgy in the Chinese Church today.

In Chapter 4, Chlöe Starr explores how the BCP helped to shape debates on theology, identity, and practice in the Church. Focusing on the landmark edition of the Chinese BCP by John Burdon and Samuel Schereschewsky, both of whom were later made bishops, her chapter places the discussion in the context of the reception of texts in the late nineteenth century.

This chapter considers several aspects of the material embodiment of the Prayer Book in paper and ink. The topics range from general questions, such as identifying the sequence of words that constitute the Book of Common Prayer and how their integrity is maintained, to details such as orthography, punctuation, editorial updates, the use of red ink and blackletter type, printers’ interventions, and the curiously named Black Rubric. The chapter also touches on nonverbal features of Prayer Books as books, such as typography, and design. Included are a number of examples of illustrations, unofficially added to various editions, which both interpret the printed text and indicate how it was understood.

The last chapter explores the Bibles printed in the short minority reign of Edward VI. It reveals a period of intense creativity, when – free from financial or religious constraints – printers experimented with size, layout, and addenda. Different printers produced pocket or lectern Bibles to suit different audiences and uses. With the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer, Bibles began to make, for the first time, liturgical sense. The last Bible of the period reveals the most experimental book of the reign, and serves as a testimony to its abrupt end.

The long eighteenth century has been called the Prayer Book’s golden age. Nothing in the text itself changed. But the text was disseminated in works meant to aid and encourage the personal and domestic devotions of families and individuals. There were thoughtful but not hostile proposals for revising the Prayer Book, two of which are discussed in this chapter as indications of what the text was expected to be and do in an enlightened age. And beyond the limits of the ecclesiastical establishment, the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a development that won its way to acceptance in Scotland and influenced a new version of the Book of Common Prayer in the newly independent United States.

This chapter addresses how ‘the silencing of God's dear Ministers’ in 1662 affected John Bunyan and the Independent congregation at Bedford. It examines the history of this congregation, from its establishment in the 1650s under Oliver Cromwell's regime, in order to reassess the impact of the ejections of 1660–2 upon the life of Bunyan's church and upon some of his later writings, including The Pilgrim's Progress. Focusing particularly on I Will Pray with the Spirit, this essay shows how the Act of Uniformity unsettled not just those ministers forced to leave their parishes on Black Bartholomew's Day but also Restoration nonconformists like Bunyan: typically considered ‘separatist’, and therefore as largely untouched by the events of 1662, and who would be left without a place in Edmund Calamy's famous account of the Great Ejection.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and explores the reasons why Puritans criticized the book as a violation of the closed canon. It considers the role of Puritan ministers as modern-day prophets, the etymology of canon and its philological solutions to the contradictions of Puritanism, the role of Puritan confessions in defining the canon, and the relationship between Puritans' providentialism and their views of the scriptural canon. It shows how important the closed canon was in shaping virtually every aspect of ministerial culture within New England Congregationalism.

This chapter analyses the impact on the commemoration of the dead of the mid-Tudor decades, and the contrasting religious policies of Edward VI and Mary Tudor. It describes the 1547 dissolution of the chantries as well as the officially-inspired iconoclasm against tombs and monuments, and assesses popular responses to these developments. It investigates the ways in which the dead were commemorated in the 1549 and 1552 Books of Common Prayer. It then assesses the restoration of traditional doctrine and practice after the accession of Mary. While conceding that Marian theologians were cautious about purgatory, and that some significant shifts in attitudes had taken place at the popular level, the chapter employs testamentary and other sources to dispute that the issues were completely marginalised, or that notions of purgatory and intercessory prayer were a permanent casualty of reform by this stage.

A fundamental aim of English Protestantism was to make the Bible available to all. Yet the Bible is a potentially dangerous text, not least in its frank portrayal of unstable, confusing and even frightening emotions, both human and divine. Taking three test cases (the function of emotion-words in the order for Morning Prayer, the defusing of anti-Jewish emotionality in the Good Friday liturgy, and the tempering of Eucharistic devotion in the order for Holy Communion), this chapter shows how the 1559 Book of Common Prayer and I and II Homilies served to mediate and moderate the emotional repertoire of the Bible. It argues that criticisms of the emotional restraint of the BCP by the likes of the Admonitioners in the sixteenth century and of John Milton in the seventeenth should be seen in this context. A comparison with recent research on the emotionality of the German Reformation helps to contextualise this attempt to create a Protestant ‘community of emotion’ on English soil.

The chapter shows how itinerant preaching served to extend and nurture the work of the Connexion, where the initiative came from in opening new areas of work, how itinerancy was organised (including Lady Huntingdon’s personal role in this), and the source of funds for building chapels and running the Connexion. All the main reformed denominations were represented within the Connexion’s congregations; socially they appear to have consisted principally of artisans and small tradesmen. Ministry was supplied by students of Lady Huntingdon’s college, by Anglican clergymen, and occasionally by other established preachers. Other aspects of the Connexion discussed in this chapter include: instances of violent opposition; growing pressure for ministers to settle with congregations; sources of authority within congregations; the development of religious societies within the Connexion; pressures for regular Communion services; the use of the Anglican Prayer Book; the development of the Connexion’s own hymn book; the religious instruction of children; and the number, size, and catchment areas of congregations.

Three main topics are discussed in this chapter. One is the Hampton Court conference, the first of three largely unsuccessful attempts to take account of objections to the Book of Common Prayer on the part of “godly” protestant nonconformists. Another is the counter-puritan movement known as Laudianism and the abortive Prayer Book for Scotland, known as “Laud’s Liturgy.” The third topic is the parliamentary abolishment of the Prayer Book in England, which had the unintended consequence of elevating its status as a sacred text for those who continued to use it until its return as the Church of England’s statutory liturgy at the restoration of monarchy in 1660.

In the nineteenth century, pressures that strained the boundaries of Anglican Christianity, in so far as the Prayer Book defined them, came largely from the advanced “high-church” movement known as Anglo-catholicism, which sought to recover or re-introduce liturgical practices that had been abolished at the Reformation. An attempt to deal with the nonconformity of Anglo-catholic “ritualists” led to a proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer that Parliament declined to endorse. Nevertheless, revision gathered momentum, with the result that by the end of the twentieth century the “classical” Prayer Book had been superseded by other, modernized liturgies throughout the Anglican world. While it remains a venerable book, the Book of Common Prayer may be revered for what it once was more than for what it is.

The printing of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer was limited by royal privilege to three English publishers: the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge and the King's Printers in London. The chapter considers the transition of the 1670s, during which the Press ceased accepting a small fee from the King's Printers not to print Bibles and began to lease its privilege for substantially greater sums to designated independent printers. As the Bible Press grew and developed independently, it differed from the Learned Press in its financing, its work force, its distribution, and in the quantity and quality of its publications. The Bible Press did face difficulties in marketing its products, in maintaining textual standards and in facing criticism of the privileged monopoly of printing, but its annual output numbered in the tens of thousands and it provided an increasingly significant source of revenue for the University.

This chapter addresses two central themes found throughout the monograph – Elizabeth Isham’s personal piety and confessional identity. At the foundation of her life was religion and it served as the key factor in her decision to write the autobiography. Elizabeth’s account allows us to open a window into both her internal and external religiosity finding that she held a strong penchant for the Book of Common Prayer while also engaging in an intense form of internal piety common among the godly, a combination of practices best described as ‘Prayer Book Puritanism’. A great deal of recent scholarship has sought to blur the confessional differences that existed in early modern England, with an underlying assumption that what best characterized the period was a broad Protestant culture, defined more by consensual coexistence and commonalities than religious conflict. On the surface, Elizabeth appears a perfect candidate to illustrate this, but to see her as such leads to a lack of appreciation for the uniqueness of her devotional practices. Instead, viewing her as an ‘exceptional norm’ pays more dividends showing how an individual could live her piety, full of contours and facets, in the ambiguous, diverse, and divisive context of early modern England’s religious environment.