Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (review)

Focusing on the devotional practices of the early modern English church and specifically on common prayer, Ramie Targoff challenges the widely held assumption that English Protestantism cultivated private withdrawal, inwardness, spontaneity, and the individualized voice at the expense of more public, external, ritualistic, and communal forms of worship typically associated with Roman Catholicism. While she acknowledges that Puritans and other dissenters favored original and spontaneous prayer, she persuasively argues that the Protestant Church of England sought "to shape personal faith through public and standardized forms" (18). Drawing on a careful reading of primary texts—devotional books, liturgies, psalters, sermons, polemics, and theological tracts—she explores early Protestant beliefs in the efficacy of devotional practices, showing how, in the established church, the public performance of prayer was accorded the power to transform both the speaker and the witness. Once she establishes the role of common prayer in Anglican worship, Targoff explores "the ways in which the language of common prayer influenced the shape of early modern devotional poetry" (5), deftly showing how the religious lyrics of seventeenth-century poets such as George Herbert were "inspired by public and liturgical, as well as private and meditative, models of language" (6). By examining the relation between devotional poetry and a central Protestant devotional practice that has been largely overlooked by literary scholars, Common Prayer makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship on early modern literature and religious culture.

In an illuminating comparison of Roman Catholic and Anglican devotional practices, Targoff makes the surprising argument that, in sixteenth-century England, the Roman Catholic Church promoted private, individualized prayer during the Mass, while Protestant reformers such as Cranmer found such prayer dangerous and sought instead to impose a uniform, collective prayer in an effort to control the vain imaginings of individual worshippers. She compares the Latin liturgy of Roman Catholicism, which privileges the visual and the mysterious and which discourages the congregation from trying to understand the priest's prayer, with the vernacular liturgy of the established English church, which emphasizes the auditory and the participatory and insists on the congregation's understanding. The reformers, she argues, sought to eliminate the distinctions between the devotional "I" and the liturgical "we," the personal and the corporate. For them, the formal, collective, and uniform prayers in the Book of Common Prayer were more efficacious than spontaneous and original prayers.

This belief was, of course, challenged by the dissenters, and Targoff briefly sketches the position of nonconformists who advocate original prayer and view the reading of official sermons as fraudulent performance. But her focus is on the established church and its insistence that common prayer is more efficacious and edifying than spontaneous prayer and less apt to being manipulated or abused. Many of the recent books on early modern Protestant literature and culture have tended to privilege the radical thought and revolutionary impulses of Puritans, dissenters, and sectarians. Like the work of Debora Shuger, Targoff's book reminds us of the centrality of the Church of England in the religious cultures of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Targoff gives particularly close attention to Hooker's defense of common prayer "as a mechanism that successfully molds the naturally flawed impulses of the worshipper, whose faith can only be stimulated through regulated external forms" (48). Noting the originality of Hooker's position, she analyzes his conviction that common prayer had the power to arouse the individual to devotion, legitimize the petitions of the worshippers, monitor the congregation, and satisfy the individual's most profound spiritual needs.

Targoff then turns her attention to the influence of common prayer on the devotional poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She examines the role of verse in sixteenth- century liturgical culture and explores the impact of vernacular liturgy on devotional poetry. Identifying the...