In this volume, a recent addition to Boydell Press’s “Medievalism” series, Jasper and Smith thoughtfully investigate an instance of Victorian medievalism that emerged in the Oxford Movement and its aftermath. Tractarian interest in medieval religious culture ran deep, ranging from Gothic architecture to monastic piety. This volume focuses particularly on Tractarianism’s engagement with medieval liturgy, specifically with an edition of Middle English manuscripts published in 1879 under the name of the Lay Folks Mass Book. Their editor was Thomas Frederick Simmons, rector of Dalton Holme in the East Riding of Yorkshire from 1853 until 1884 and, for some of that time, a canon of York Minster. Simmons coined the title Lay Folks Mass Book. The Middle English “book” to which this title refers, and which exists in several permutations, is a sort of service book that instructed the laity in English concerning what they should be doing, thinking, and saying at each point of the Mass, even as the priest and his ministers are celebrate the liturgy of the Mass in Latin at the altar. In what follows, I abbreviate Simmons’ volume as LFMB (with italics), and the medieval service book to which it alludes as LFMB (without italics). Although Jasper and Smith teach their readers much about late medieval liturgies and paraliturgies themselves, their chief concern is with the interest that both held for Simmons and churchmen of his ilk.

While a high esteem for medieval Christendom generally unified the Oxford Movement, it could sometimes divide. It led some Rome-ward. F. W. Faber, for example, was so inspired by the controversial early English bishop, St. Wilfrid of York, that as he wrote the latter’s biography, he left the Church of England to become a Catholic priest, founding the London Oratory. This book shows how it led others, like Simmons, to remain more fixedly in what was imagined as a purer, more primitive form of a specifically English spirituality. For his part, Simmons became convinced through his studies that the medieval English tradition, no less than the Roman, exhibited its own spiritual genius—one so potent as to influence Cranmer’s 1549 Prayer Book and the central role that the laity played in the mode of worship it prescribed.

Jasper and Smith—the first a scholar of literature and theology, the second of philology—draw impressively on a wealth of medieval and Victorian sources, as well as Victorian and modern scholarship. Against sometimes scornful contemporary, professional scholars—one of whom described Simmons’ work as an example of “fey antiquarianism” (p. 24)—the authors aim to portray sympathetically both Simmons’ scholarship and the antiquarian research of other Victorian scholar-clergymen. They contend that such research and scholarship enhanced the pastoral work of these clergy and that their pastoral concerns gave direction to their research and scholarship. Simmons’ work, for example, presupposed that his parishioners at Dalton Home had much to gain spiritually from immersion in a tradition of vernacular liturgical practice that linked them with the LFMB’s implied fourteenth-century audience. Jasper and Smith want to suggest such a concerned scholarship is in no way inferior to the more dispassionate research of today’s professional academic. It is just different.

Chapter 1 surveys Thomas Frederick Simmons’ life and work. Chapter 2 situates Simmons in his wider guild, namely, Tractarians whose Romantic views on the English Middle Ages and its Church motivated their scholarship on medieval liturgies. A favorite vehicle for that scholarship, as the authors detail in chapter 3, was the Early English Text Society series, for which Simmons served as an editor and in which he published the LFMB. Although professional scholars would later constitute most of that society’s membership, most subscribers in Simmons’ time were amateur antiquarians and included such public figures as Trollope and Tennyson. Chapters 4 and 5 show how Simmons’ editorial expertise as both philologist and liturgist inform the voluminous notes and appendices he included in the LFMB. Chapter 6 shows that just as Simmons’ scholarly research on medieval liturgy influenced worship and catechizing at Dalton Holme, it also supported the active role he, as an active member of the Convocation of York, played in reforming the rubrics that appeared in its 1880 Convocation Prayer Book. Chapter 7 contrasts the friendly reception of Simmons’ LFMB in its own time and in the generation after with its less sympathetic reception, mentioned above, among modern scholars. The authors are eager to point out that for all the criticism that contemporary professional scholars aim at their Victorian amateur forbears, the latter are vindicated by the fact that the editions they produced have, in many cases, yet to be superseded. Two appendices round out the volume. The first contains a new edition of the LFMB, as it appears in one medieval witness, along with its accompanying translation into modern English. The second overlays the LFMB’s English rubrics and other instructions to the laity onto the Sarum Use’s more clergy-centered directives. Doing this gives the reader a fuller sense of what both clergy and laity were doing, and when, in a late medieval English mass.

The authors may have better oriented the reader in certain places. Their initial description, for example, of the LFMB as “a kind of vernacular libretto-cum-versified prayer book” (p. 21) left me in something of a fog and delayed for a time my fuller understanding of its function. Similarly, Chapter 4’s title, “Simmons as Editor: The Philologist,” did not seem to capture fully, for me at least, chapter’s broader thrust. In all, though, Smith and Jasper do a superb job of interpreting what Simmons was about in this work, helping readers to understand the LFMB’s context and aims, and to appreciate its quality. More than that, for those whose view of Tractarianism skews toward its Roman Catholic converts, this book usefully shows how determinedly English-oriented and English-interested its other side could be and, in divines like Simmons, actually was.