Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (review)

Timothy Rosendale's new survey of the Book of Common Prayer offers a dense and intricate survey of the prayer book as a product of both Protestant reform and Renaissance literature and as a political instrument and an agent for private grace. He situates the prayer book and his own study in the different worlds of religious history and literary theory. His work indicates the two strands of his analysis, the more traditional study of Reformation liturgy but also the less common scholarly approach of interpretimg literature from the perspective of Reformation theology. His book firstly examines the prayer book in the context of English national identity and secondly interprets the influence of the prayer book on a range of writers, including Shakespeare and Hobbes, whom Rosendale places in a distinctively reformed context.

His text is very much a product of recent impulses in Early Modern studies which have stressed the importance of interdisciplinary work. Rosendale's work incorporates theology, history, politics and literary theory. In terms of literary studies, Rosendale reacts against a particular scholarly approach to literary texts, New Historicist theoretical writings, which he argues, typically ignored the importance of religion in interpreting literary texts. He instead interprets the contribution which reformist ideas made to the literature of the Renaissance, and argues for the Book of Common Prayer to be regarded as a literary text as much as a prayer manual.

Rosendale himself argues that literary scholars have neglected the prayer book as a literary text and points out the profound influence of its phrases on modern language, with common expressions in modern language such 'dead and buried' originating in the offices of the prayer book. Rosendale in fact argues for the prayer book to be taken as a major product of Renaissance literature. This observation points the way to the major argument of this book, which is the importance of the prayer book in shaping the collective identity of Protestant England, and also as a means of shaping Protestant individual identity.

Some of Rosendale's study is unoriginal, notably his potted history of the prayer book from its original publication and authorization by Archbishop Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI in 1549 and then its subsequent revisions in 1552 and 1662; later chapters also deal with its temporary proscription during the Commonwealth. Rosendale also offers a brief history of the dominant strands of historical interpretation of the English Reformation of which the prayer book was a product. He provides a context for the prayer book and its interpretation in the 'top down' and 'bottom up' accounts of reform which have emanated from seminal works by Hughes, Dickens, Haigh, Maltby and others. Rosendale places his own work between the opposing camps of popular reform versus imposed reform, a stance which harmonises with his major claims for the prayer book to have functioned both as an agent of state control and coercion and as a medium for private religious identity.

In narrating the history of the prayer book in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rosendale emphasises that the prayer book was humanly devised and was not a divine object. He therefore argues for the Book of Common Prayer functioning as a force for order and authority, as the uniform prayer manual ensured political stability and religious uniformity. His ideas on this point cohere with historians such as Haigh, who perceive the Reformation as emanating from the top of society and being imposed upon the English people. Rosendale argues that the point of prayer books in general is to bring order, as common prayers are those shared by all. He also argues that the public rituals embodied in the Book of Common Prayer, such as baptism, confirmation, the churching of women, visitation of sick, as well as daily morning and evening prayer were exercises in communal activity and worship.

But while Rosendale situates his text in the middle of a scholarly debate between 'top down' and...