2 - The Book of Common Prayer and individual identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
And yet this notwithstanding, a great number of people in divers parts of this realm, following their own sensuality, and living either without knowledge or due fear of God, do wilfully and damnably before Almighty God abstain and refuse to come to their parish churches and other places where common prayer, administration of the sacraments, and preaching of the word of God, is used upon the Sundays, and other days ordained to be holy days.
DISORDER AND SUBJECTIVITY
If the Tudor state enhanced and consolidated its power – as the preceding chapter suggests it did – by its appropriation of Reformation discourses of hierarchical national order, it did so at considerable cost. For while the Protestant political order may have been highly congenial to the interests of the Crown, it was not a free-standing ideology. The discourses of post-papal sociopolitical order were dependent upon an even larger and more fundamental, and far more unruly, discourse: that of the Protestant individual. An important recent study of the Prayerbook explicitly sets out to “challenge one of the governing premises of our understanding of early modern religious culture: that the private sphere fostered by the Protestant Reformation represented a powerful alternative to the superficial and depersonalized practices of the medieval Catholic Church.” While I would not reject a critique of the latter characterization of Catholicism, this chapter will aim to critique this implied dismissal of Protestant subjectivity in Prayerbook theology and worship, which, I will argue, allows – indeed, encourages and demands – a crucially individual authority in religious life and activity.
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- Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England , pp. 70 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007