The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

John Keble and his protégé Charlotte Yonge take ritual time in a seemingly humbler, domestic direction. Rather than using higher time to engage an overarching political project as Wordsworth did with the Revolution, they see the church calendar as sacralizing even the smallest mundane tasks – the trivial round, as Keble calls it. Yet, for Keble, the transfiguration of daily work performed in linear time leads to nothing less than humanity’s deification or theosis, to use the language of the Greek Church Fathers venerated by the Oxford Movement. For Yonge, higher time and the Prayer Book’s liturgies not only reconcile reason and faith but also structure the material work of parish reform – the building of a local school, the repair of a dilapidated neighborhood, the hiring of a responsible priest to replace an absentee one. Through liturgy, therefore, the Tractarians can attend to everyday life while still seeing that life as sharing in the divine.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

The Episcopal Church is the direct descendant of the Church of England in colonial North America and the primary claimant to the Anglican tradition in the United States. A member of the Anglican Communion, its structure combines a traditional hierarchical denomination with an American democratic approach. American Anglicanism also includes the Anglican Church in North America, a coalition of church bodies some of whom departed from the Episcopal Church as early as 1873. Churches of the Anglican Communion accept the 39 Articles of Religion as a common statement of faith, and worship according to a mandatory written liturgy. The Church of England was the first denomination in British colonial North America, but membership plummeted at the American Revolution; nevertheless, it retained importance after independence due to the prominence of its parishioners in public life and to its leadership in ecumenism, education, and social ministry.

This essay looks at the Christian context in which Britten lived and its impact on his work. When in 1940 he wrote that he was a member of a Christian nation, he could not have meant that Britain was a churchgoing nation, for most people were not active churchgoers. In fact, it would be necessary to go back to the seventeenth century to find a time when nearly everyone went to church. Britain was a Christian nation in the sense that its political, legal, ethical, and cultural life had been shaped by Protestant Christianity. By the 1920s this was a specifically English, rather than British, identity, for the disestablishment of the Welsh (1920) and Scottish (1921) churches, and the secession of the Irish Free State (1922) meant all three were intent on establishing their own distinctive identities and cultures. In mid-twentieth-century England, the Established Anglican Church, historically regarded as a ruling-class institution, remained closely associated with the monarchy and the state; thus, Anglican ritual governed public occasions and it was still regarded as part of an elitist and conservative Establishment.

It has recently been suggested that the Grafton edition of 1559 was not only the first of that year, but that it was printed even before Parliament sat. But the book not only quotes the Act of Supremacy accurately but its preliminaries also include the whole Act of Uniformity verbatim—and there are several other improbabilities and mistakes in that argument. This chapter also reveals that although every sheet of the 1552 book was duly reprinted in 1559 with the required revisions (each of which is discussed), Grafton had kept a large number of unused sheets from his last edition of 1552. Each of the surviving copies of his Elizabethan edition contains between one and twenty-three sheets recycled from his last Edwardian edition.

The second Edwardian Act of Uniformity required an ordinal (a booklet containing the services for ordaining priests and bishops) to be bound with each folio edition of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. No ordinal was mentioned in the 1559 Act, but the authorities evidently provided the printers with revisions for it, and each team of printers produced one. Only one copy of Grafton’s survives, and none of the extant copies of the ‘Jugge and Cawood’ ordinal is bound with their first edition of the prayer book. Moreover, unlike the 1552 contents lists, those of 1559 make no mention of an ordinal. The evidence suggests that it was withdrawn at the last minute, to be sold only as a separate item. Curiously, fewer than half the copies include the original sheet BB5:6. One simply lacks it; three have cancels printed in the 1580s by two different printers.

After the four folio editions (intended mainly for the use of the clergy), the printers produced some smaller editions for more general sale. They have survived less well than the larger volumes, and while one octavo is known from a complete copy, neither of the quartos is complete and the other octavo is known only from a small fragment. As in Edward’s reign, the small-format editions were accompanied by a psalter, and the quarto psalters reveal a conflict of ‘copyrights’. The stationer William Seres, a former household servant of Sir William Cecil (Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary) had managed in July to acquire a patent that ostensibly gave him a monopoly of psalters, and the two surviving quarto copies were printed for him rather than the Queen’s Printers. That unintended conflict, however, was soon rectified, and by the time the extant octavo was printed the conflict had been resolved.

The story I have tried to tell in this book is complex in many ways: in the politics of the authorizing Acts of Parliament, in the evolution of the text itself, and in the rivalries and collaborations between the printers of the successive versions of the prayer book. It has therefore often been been necessary to depart from a strict chronological order. In this final chapter I have therefore tried to recapitulate the overall story, and the numerous separate conclusions, as a more continuous narrative.

The Queen’s Printers, Richard Jugge and John Cawood, printed less than one-sixth of the first of the 1559 editions bearing their names. The first London book known to contain the work of more than three different printing houses, it also includes sheets printed by Reyner Wolfe, Edward Whitchurch, Owen Rogers, Thomas Marshe, Richard Payne, and John Kingston. Moreover, at least two of the leaves of the main text are cancels that replace leaves rejected for unknown reasons, each almost certainly introducing revisions neither specified nor permitted by the Act of Uniformity. Three of the printers involved were (like Grafton) not freemen of the Stationers’ Company, and therefore not legally entitled to print at all. One of them (and one of the Stationers) had recently been punished by Star Chamber for printing a piracy of a privileged book.

The year 1559 saw two more ‘Jugge and Cawood’ editions in folio, each printed by five of the original team (Jugge, Cawood, Kingston, Rogers, and Payne). The first of these is known only from a single copy that lacks the preliminaries (discovered during the research for this book); six copies are known of the later of the two. For the most part the relationship between the reprints is clear and straightforward, although a few odd sheets ‘belonging’ to one edition are found in one or more copies of the other. Amid the predictable crop of errors in each reprint, a few readings show that attempts were made to correct errors that were evidently noticed. But the overall trend in accuracy is (predictably) downhill.

In 1561 Elizabeth commanded that the liturgical calendar should be revised, because the Old Testament chapters assigned to each day included many that could profitably be replaced by more edifying ones. Because thousands of 1559 folio editions were already in use, Richard Jugge was commissioned to print cancel calendars that could be inserted to replace the obsolete ones. The revisions did not, however, really implement the queen’s wishes, because although thirty-five chapters were removed from the sequence, the only new insertion was Leviticus 26. More immediately noticeable, however, was a considerable increase in the number of saints’ days and fasts listed in the ‘miscellaneous’ column. Those additions have sometimes been interpreted as a resurgence of Catholic traditions, but it has seldom been noticed that most of them had already been added in the small-format ‘popular’ editions of 1552–53 by those unimpeachable Protestants, Grafton and Whitchurch.

The preliminaries of the Grafton edition and the first from ‘Jugge and Cawood’ show clear signs of cooperation and collaboration. The calendar quire in Grafton’s edition was printed for him by his former apprentice John Kingston; that in the other edition by Reyner Wolfe. In the main preliminary quire John Kingston printed three of the six sheets for Jugge and Cawood, one of which (probably a cancel) also appears in the Grafton edition. His contents list that backs the title-page is also identical in both editions. In the Grafton edition the other side of that sheet (with the almanack and the title-page with Grafton’s imprint) is also Kingston’s work, but Richard Jugge appears to have printed both the almanack and the title-page of ‘his’ edition. The evidence suggests that the two title-pages were printed on the same day.

Outlines Henry VIII’s attempt to impose uniformity on the English liturgy after breaking with Rome, the early careers of the printers Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, and the progress through Parliament of the 1549 Act of Uniformity. Closely examines the printing of their first two 1549 editions of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of the Common Prayer, in which various irregularities show that changes and additions were made to the text while those editions were being printed. Concludes that the accepted assignment of priority to the Whitchurch edition known as STC 16267 is mistaken, and that the only extant copies of the real first edition are a few copies supposedly ‘made up’ and incomplete. Explains the evolution of the official limits on the retail price, and how each printer subcontracted parts of his reprints to other printers.

Briefly recounts the parliamentary history of the 1552 Act of Uniformity, the revision of the communion service, and some common misconceptions about the so-called ‘Black Rubric’. Shows that this time it was Edward Whitchurch who began printing from the manuscript copy while Richard Grafton reprinted the text from Whitchurch’s sheets. Explains that each printer once again subcontracted parts of some of his subsequent editions to other printers, and how each reduced the size of his reprints to reduce his costs once the official limits had been imposed on the retail price.