Description
The Book of Common Prayer is likely one of the most vital and influential books in English history, but it surely has received reasonably little attention from literary scholars. This study seeks to treatment this by attending 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 up to date discourses of nationalism and individualism, and argues that the liturgy sought to interact 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 inside the dialectical parameters specified by the prayerbook decades in advance. Rosendale’s analyses are supplemented by a brief history of the Book of Common Prayer, and by an appendix which discusses its contents.