Book of Common Prayer

A classic book of ceremonies and services according to the Western Rite, for all services other than the Eucharist which a parish priest would normally carry out. It contains orders of service for baptism, marriage, funerals, sick visiting, home communion and penance, as well as numerous blessing ceremonies for buildings, objects and events.

This major, revisionist study upends our thinking about the ancestry and origins of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, revealing it to have necessitated unprecedented levels of shared printing. In its close analysis of Anglican liturgy it will have considerable appeal to bibliographers and historians of Reformation and Tudor England.

An account of the rise and demise of a world classic, which still informs our common language as well as much of the great literature of the last four centuries.