Rewriting Spiritual Community in Spenser, Donne, and the Book of Common Prayer

I. Liturgical Poetics

Who will pray with me? Who will mourn with me? Who is my neighbor? As English religious reformers composed, compiled, and promulgated vernacular Christian liturgies in the midst of a kingdom wracked by religious divisions, such questions called for a careful new way of writing liturgy, a new rhetorical approach to communal religious rituals.¹ Despite the ubiquity of liturgy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English life, and despite long-standing scholarly interest in the religious writing of the period, most literary scholars still pay little attention to the spiritual, cultural, and literary implications of the new vernacular liturgical texts that began to emerge in England in the first half of the sixteenth century.² These texts provided influential scripts for both public and private religious practices in Tudor and Stuart England. The formulations of spiritual community found in the vernacular liturgies were at least as important to English religious life as the language of the vernacular bibles—if not more important—and thus, as Judith Maltby and Timothy Rosendale have persuasively argued, we should look more carefully at the role that liturgical texts played in shaping the English sense of spiritual and national identity (Maltby 126-27; Rosendale 34-69).

Liturgical books are not only interesting mixed-genre literary objects in themselves, but also useful textual lenses for gaining insight into the spiritual inflections of other, more "literary," forms of writing. Liturgical books like the Book of Common Prayer incorporate a wide variety of texts, including everything from religious poetry, to scriptural narratives and epistles, to didactic theological prose, to ritual scripts. The last of these invites further consideration. To participate in a liturgical service is to involve oneself in a scripted communal performance. These performances are often designed to produce what they represent in the process of representing it. I do not mean merely the well-known fact that liturgies often involve performative utterances—as in marriages, ordinations, curses, and the like—but that one major function of most early modern liturgies was to produce the community of performance, to create or reconstitute the congregation itself.³ This distinctive performative character alone would qualify liturgical texts for serious literary study by anyone interested in theatrical forms and practices.⁴ However, if we recall that nearly all of the writers studied by scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature were, whether by genuine religious commitment or by legal compulsion, themselves more-or-less-regular liturgical performers, we should expect that the liturgical texts that provided scripts for these performances affected Elizabethan and Jacobean writers in a variety of significant—if subtle—ways. Sketching out a preliminary study of some of those effects is the object of this essay.

To begin that sketch it will be necessary to examine closely a few particularly significant liturgical texts in order to highlight some of the linguistic and spiritual possibilities and problems that they posed. I will focus on two especially controversial sections of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer: the words of administration in the rubric for the Holy Communion (or Lord's Supper) and the prayers at the graveside in the Order for the Burial of the Dead. These two texts throw particularly strong light upon some of the ways in which English liturgical texts were designed to shape the very communities in which and by which they were performed. Establishing a clear understanding of some of the affective and conceptual pressures produced by the distinctive formal characteristics and rhetorical techniques of these liturgical texts—linguistic techniques that I call their "liturgical poetics"—will allow us to give a better account of how the liturgical texts not only offered a storehouse of felicitous phrases to English writers, but also helped to produce new ways of thinking and writing about spiritual community. Such an account opens the possibility of attaining a more sophisticated liturgical perspective on both sacred and secular lyric poetry and exposes the necessity of more nuanced examinations of the ways in which liturgical poetics were significant to writers who regularly participated in the authorized religious services of...