Read, Mark, Learn

In addition to other momentous British occasions (the Olympics, the Diamond Jubilee), 2012 has seen numerous events organised by the Prayer Book Society to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer. The 1662 text of the prayer book has been handed down to the modern age, largely unchanged: although a number of new alternative Anglican service books have come into use over the last fifty years, its services continue to be practised daily in many of England’s cathedrals, and weekly in numerous parish churches. The BCP anniversary website observes:

[It] has been familiar to generations of men and women: for worship, baptisms, marriages and deaths. It is loved for its theology as much as for its wonderful language. Phrases from it have come into everyday use and have been quoted in literature: ‘till death us do part’, ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’, ‘peace in our time’, ‘ashes to ashes’…¹

This promotional blurb captures the key characteristics of the Book of Common Prayer, which Brian Cummings draws out so clearly in the introduction to his new edition: that it is simultaneously ‘one of the most extraordinary books in history’ and a text that is both familiar and commonplace, ‘beckoning to a treasured Englishness as stereotyped as rain or hedgerows, dry-stone walls or terraced housing, Brief Encounter or Wallace and Gromit’ (pp. ix–x).

But if the Book of Common Prayer has become either of those things, it is largely thanks to its users; those who have read or repeated its words, observed its rituals over the centuries, until they have become embedded within cultural memory. A helpful way of thinking about the influence of readers on the ubiquity of the prayer book is offered by Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, which explores the ways in which consumers are able to express their autonomy within the structures imposed on them by society. The idea prevails, he argues, that ‘although the public is more or less resistant, it is moulded by (verbal or iconic) writing, that it becomes similar to what it receives, and that it is imprinted by and like the text which is imposed on it’. His contention, however, is that power rests with a book’s readers, not its producers, ‘that text has meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered to accord with codes of perception that it does not control’.² De Certeau’s thesis gives us a useful way of thinking not only about why the Book of Common Prayer is so fondly regarded, but also why it is quoted by people as diverse as Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, and appears in variants in churches inside and outside the Anglican communion in over fifty different countries and in over 150 different languages. Oxford University Press’s catalogue states that this is ‘one of the seminal texts of human experience and a manual of everyday ritual: a book to live, love, and die to’. But rather than seeing this volume as one that dictates the patterns of people’s lives – with its seasonal services, and rituals for marking birth, death, and marriage – de Certeau’s view of consumer society enables us to understand how people inhabit this prayer book with their own meanings, experiences, and memories.

Perhaps more importantly, de Certeau’s book offers a way of thinking about reading as rebellion which is so vital to the early history of the Book of Common Prayer. The Prayer Book Society is celebrating the 1662 text of the prayer book, but its origin is more than a century earlier, when Archbishop Thomas Cranmer responded to the need for the Church of England to have a service book that was independent of the Catholic liturgy. The first 1549 text is described by Cummings as ‘an engine of change, imposed on congregations’ (p. xiii). Although its sources were largely from the Catholic tradition, it...