Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer was an argument in book form: that the worship of the church should be understood by the people praying it. Thomas Cranmer's 1549 volume replaced the Latin service books of the medieval English church, missal, breviary, manual and more, with one book in English, and its title announced the program, prayer held in common. The monastic round of eight hours was folded into two public offices, Morning and Evening Prayer, built on psalms read in course, scripture read through in a year, and the great canticles; the litany, which Cranmer had already Englished in 1544, gave the church a processional prayer of supplication; the communion service rendered the Mass into English with a reformed theology; and the occasional offices carried the book into every parishioner's life at baptism, confirmation, marriage, the visitation of the sick and burial.

Cranmer's prose became part of the English language. Till death us do part, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, read them over and the cadence is the point: the book was written to be spoken aloud by congregations, and its collects, short prayers of astonishing compression, remain models of the form. The Prayer Book also fixed the psalter English worship would sing, retaining Coverdale's translation long after other versions superseded it elsewhere, which is why English choral music sets psalms in words otherwise found nowhere else.

The Prayer Book's history tracks the Church of England's. The cautious 1549 book was followed in 1552 by a more thoroughly Reformed revision; both were swept away under Mary, restored in modified form under Elizabeth in 1559, and lightly revised in 1604 under James. An attempt to impose a version on Scotland in 1637 helped ignite rebellion, and under the Commonwealth the book was banned outright, its use a punishable act.

The Restoration settlement produced the edition that endures: the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, which remains the official liturgical standard of the Church of England more than three and a half centuries later. As Anglicanism spread, the book multiplied. The American church issued its own in 1789, adapting the state prayers for a republic; provinces across the communion followed, and the twentieth century brought thorough modern-language revisions, among them the American book of 1979 and England's Common Worship services of 2000, which now stand alongside 1662 rather than replacing it. The 1662 book meanwhile became a cultural monument as well as a liturgical one, its phrases embedded in English literature and law, its marriage and burial services shaping how the language talks about both. Editions in hundreds of languages carried Cranmer's structures worldwide, making the Prayer Book one of the most translated liturgical books in Christian history.