Draws together some of the world's leading liturgical scholars and historians who offer a comprehensive and accessible study of the Prayer Book and its impact on both Church and society over the last three and a half centuries. Includes new and original scholarship here about the use of the Book of Common Prayer at different periods during its life. Sets out some key material on the background to the production of both the Tudor books and the seventeenth-century book itself. The book is unique in the way that it studies the Prayer Book and looks at the impact of it, both on the Church and on English society.

Draws on a broad range of original sources to offer a re-assessment of the role of the Book of Common Prayer in defining the identity of the Church of England and its worship from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to conventional accounts, argues that the decades after 1750 were also a time of significant renewal and reform.

Places the development of Cranmer's theology of the Eucharist in the context of his sacramental theology and overall policy towards the reform of the liturgy. The first part of the book describes the traditional practice and perceptions of the Eucharist and Baptism (a somewhat different picture from that presented e.g. by Duffy's Stripping of the Altars). It then follows the evidence for liturgical reform and the development in Cranmer's thought through the reign of Henry VIII and the beginning of Edward VI's reign leading up to the two Prayer Books. Detailed examination of the 1549 Prayer Book confirms scholarly consensus that its theological standpoint is identical to that of 1552, the fullest and clearest liturgical expression of Cranmer's standpoint; however there are sections in it which (along with the Order of Communion of 1548) suggest the influence of a less radical sacramental and eucharistic theology. It is suggested that the 1549 Prayer Book was originally drafted as a liturgy to accompany the King's Book of 1543 but was hurriedly changed as Cranmer's thought developed through 1548

Attends to the prayerbook's importance in England's political, intellectual, religious, and literary history. The first half of the book presents extensive analyses of the Book of Common Prayer's involvement in early modern discourses of nationalism and individualism, and argues that the liturgy sought to engage and textually reconcile these potentially competing cultural impulses. In its second half, Liturgy and Literature traces these tensions in subsequent works by four major authors - Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, and Hobbes - and contends that they operate within the dialectical parameters laid out in the prayerbook decades earlier. Rosendale's analyses are supplemented by a brief history of the Book of Common Prayer, and by an appendix which discusses its contents.

Part 1 deals with the Ritual, Royal Commissions and Reply to the Royal Letters of Business. Part 2 deals with Cul-de-sac of the Deposited Book. Until Further Order be Taken.

Also available here:
http://anglicanhistory.org/essays/wright/1549.pdf

Explores the culture of conformity to the Church of England and its liturgy in the period after the Reformation and before the outbreak of the Civil War. Provides a necessary corrective to our view of religion in the period by a serious exploration of the laity who conformed, out of conviction, to the Book of Common Prayer. Through the use of church court records and parliamentary petitions, the views of lay people are examined - those who were neither 'puritan' nor 'Laudian', yet were committed to the reformed liturgy and episcopacy out of sincere belief, and not as a matter of political expediency.