The Book of Common Prayer occupies a very special place in English culture: it is humanly authored, but treated as nearly divine; it is a historical document, subject to change, criticism and revision, and also a sacred text whose patterns of language seem unalterable. Alan Jacobs's lively and intelligent ‘biography’ of this book traces its history from its first formulation in the hands of Archbishop Cranmer through the late twentieth century. Along the way, we learn many things both about the resistance and vulnerability of this liturgy – its capacity to be adopted, reformed and reused in an extraordinary range of religious settings and cultures –and about the often pivotal role that the Prayer Book played in the history of the English state.

Very often, some of the greatest changes turn out to have been accidental. The fact that the American Samuel Seabury would have been required to take the Oath of Supremacy to the British crown in 1783 in order to be ordained in the Anglican Church in Connecticut meant that he sought confirmation in Scotland; this led, in turn, to the Anglicans of Connecticut adopting not the Book of Common Prayer but the so-called ‘wee bookies’ of Scotland. The passion of John Henry Newman for the Book of Common Prayer and its centrality to the Tractarian movement led to its being printed by anyone who could get their hands on a printer, including Boots the Chemist. The archbishop of Uganda, who had developed the great South Indian liturgy in the 1950s, published a rather transformative Liturgy for Africa in 1964, which received almost no attention due to its being overshadowed by an even more radical liturgical revision, the issuing of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the sacred liturgy authorising the mass in vernacular languages. These are just a handful of coincidences between the Prayer Book and world history in the past five hundred years, but they convey a sense of Jacob's gift in bringing out the terrific vitality and centrality of this text. His narrative ends on a slightly less cheerful note – like most mortal lives, the once young strapling has now become an antiquated text, over-revised, under-used, and perhaps headed for near extinction. But despite this somewhat pessimistic conclusion, the overall force of this book pulls in the opposite direction: it conveys very powerfully how much the English liturgy has meant, and continues to mean, to those who read and recite its words.