The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 ed. by Brian Cummings (review)

Brian Cummings has produced an edition designed (according to its introduction) to make the Book of Common Prayer available to the general reader (p. xi). This guiding purpose accounts for some of the limitations of the volume, which may perplex the historian or liturgical scholar, even as it makes the book more accessible to its target audience.

Cummings has chosen to use the texts of the 1549, 1559, and 1662 prayer books—or rather, to use the entire text of the 1662 book and portions of the books of 1549 and 1559. The psalter, the ordinal, the calendar, and the lectionary are omitted, except in the 1662 text. This makes his edition far less bulky, but it deprives the scholarly reader of important material that is significant in the history of the Church of England. Nevertheless, the omissions make the edition more affordable and accessible.

Similarly, the omission of the text of the influential 1552 revision of the prayer book may frustrate those studying the development of liturgical text. The 1552 book was—as Cummings notes (p. xxxii)—a much more radical version of the prayer book than its predecessor, restructuring several of the church’s rituals. Subsequent prayer books largely followed the 1552 pattern. Yet Cummings opted to include the 1559 text instead of the 1552 text, although the former was simply a light revision of the latter. The 1559 book was in use for a far longer period than that of 1552, and it is this longevity that explains the editorial choice.

Despite these limitations, this will be a useful volume to many, not least among them students of English literature or nonspecialist historians who cannot find another modern edition of each prayer book or who would prefer not to squint at the page images in the Early English Books Online database. The glossary will be useful both to those unfamiliar with liturgical terminology and to those unaccustomed to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usage (or orthography).

The notes are generally helpful, although there are some substantive errors. The blessing at the end of the Communion liturgy, “The Peace of God, which passeth all understanding…,” was not in fact the medieval kiss of peace (p. 704). The kiss of peace survived earlier in the prayer book’s Communion liturgy, in the text, “The peace of the Lorde be alwaye with you” (p. 32). The evolution of the rite of confirmation was not linked causally to the emergence of infant baptism, as the notes imply, but rather to the spread of the Church and the paucity of bishops, who retained a monopoly on postbaptismal handlaying and anointing in the West (p. 709). By 1549, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer did not consider marriage a sacrament, but only baptism and the Lord’s Supper (p. 714). It is anachronistic to speak of a “Puritan party” in 1552 (p. 757). In other cases, the requirement of brevity no doubt forced Cummings to simplify matters: for example, the patterns of early-church baptismal procedure and the historical development of the church calendar were each more varied than the relevant notes suggest.

All of these reservations aside, if this edition makes the prayer book texts available to—and appreciated by—more general readers, it will have served its admirable purpose.