This book is timely. Recent years have seen something of a spate of books relating to the Book of Common Prayer, and as we await the forthcoming Oxford University Press Handbook of the Book of Common Prayer, Jasper’s judicious selection of commentators on the Prayer Book provides an interesting parallel to the Prayer Book itself and a fascinating trajectory. Another happy coincidence is that the book was adopted as the 2025 Alcuin Club Collection. The first object of the Alcuin Club, when it was founded in 1897, was ‘the study of the history and use of the Book of Common Prayer’ and this makes the book an apt 100th Collection to be published by the Club. The book ranges broadly and is set out chronologically with seventeen short chapters, each one providing a crisp biography of each commentator on the Prayer Book and a concise account of their respective contribution to its contemporary understanding and use. Jasper’s account of these commentators begins with Anthony Sparrow, the author of the well-known A Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer written in 1655 during the dark days of the Commonwealth when the Prayer Book was proscribed. It ends with another prominent Anglican liturgist, Walter Frere CR (1863–1938), whose work marked the beginning of a century of liturgical revision. In between these authors are a range of writers, a few who occupied academic positions, but many others who exemplified the old Anglican tradition of scholar-priests who exercised a pastoral ministry while continuing to pursue their intellectual interests.
Most of the authors included in this study wrote directly about the Prayer Book; some, like Francis Proctor, revised and corrected earlier commentaries, while others, such as the historian William Palmer, wrote more broadly about the patristic and medieval liturgical sources and antecedents of the Prayer Book. As Jasper is keen to point out, not all the commentators were original scholars; some indeed were antiquarians, but nearly all were ordained ministers. By bringing this gallery of authors together, Jasper demonstrates how the Book of Common Prayer, over the span of over 400 years, was seen as ‘living literature’ as it was endorsed, critiqued and presented as being food for the mind and the soul, and for providing religious rites to cover the whole spectrum of human existence, literally from the cradle to the grave. It is this double sense of the Prayer Book as a handbook for worship and for pastoral care that motivated some of the key writers included in this study to write for those who exercised pastoral care. Perhaps, there is also an insight here about an Anglican way that needs to be recovered in our own time, namely that what today is described as ‘liturgical leadership’ is something relational, something that should be integral to the pastoral care that is given to those within and to those beyond the worshipping community. It was no accident that the Ordinal came to be bound up with the Prayer Book.
Nevertheless, common prayer and pastoral care are also shaped by theological convictions and perspectives, and many of the earlier commentators of the Prayer Book were driven by a theological agenda. Consequently, much of what they wrote was sharply polemical. Anthony Sparrow, for example, was anxious to present the Prayer Book as a lodestar showing how the Church of England, though ‘catholic’, is located between Rome and Puritan understandings of the Church. The work of the layman, Hamon L’Estrange’s work, The Alliance of Divine Offices (1659), forged in the crucible of controversy, also provided a balanced account of the theological bearings of the Prayer Book. Generally, however, the leitmotif that emerges from most of the writers in this study is the emphasis on the congruence and supposed lines of continuity between the English Prayer Book and ancient liturgical forms and their medieval successors. Charles Wheatley’s comparatively slim volume, A Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer, (1710) perpetuated the myth of the pristine era of worship in the Patristic era and was hugely influential well into the 19th century. Wheatley’s work, together with the lesser-known but substantial work of William Nichols, is further evidence that the English Church in the 18th century was far from moribund.
Jasper expresses some sympathy with the largely shared conviction of the commentators of the continuity between medieval and later Reformed English rites. This is especially apparent in his account of Thomas Frederick Simmons, who studied the medieval York Missal and edited The Lay Folks’ Mass Book for the Early English Text Society, and about whom, Jasper, together with the philologist Jeremy J. Smith, has recently published a detailed study, tellingly titled Reinventing Medieval Liturgy in Victorian England. Not all the 19th-century commentators shared this preoccupation with medieval liturgy, however, and one conspicuous exception was Edward Cardwell. Vehemently critical of the Oxford Movement, he curiously downplayed the Reformed influences on Thomas Cranmer (p86). In Cranmer’s day, thanks to Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr, both Cambridge and Oxford, were awash with feverish discussions of the views of the Continental Reformers. Another figure whom Jasper rescues from comparative obscurity is William Maskell (1814–1890), now recognized as a pioneer scholar of medieval liturgy. Maskell published The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of England in 1844, lamenting the liturgical ignorance of the clergy of the established Church. He converted to Roman Catholicism, recognizing that one cannot simply posit a line of continuity solely using historical antecedents.
Having read these fascinating and sometimes tantalizing cameos of those who wrote on the Prayer Book, I am left wondering whether, for the sake of balance, the book should have included some authors who wrote critiques of the Prayer Book from a convinced Puritan and non-conformist perspective. Even those who loyally defended the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) recognized its deficiencies, including Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), whose writings significantly influenced the development of the Prayer Book and its final iteration in 1662. Further additions to the mix of authors might be those who composed and compiled books of prayer and devotion, to supplement what was provided in the BCP. Examples might include the authorized books of the Elizabethan era, the ‘private prayers’ of Lancelot Andrewes, and later, the Devotions of John Cosin (1594–1672). This intriguing genre witnesses to a sense that although the provision in the BCP was acknowledged as the devotional staple, the more literate and the more spiritually agile required supplementary material. The addition of these elements would, however, have meant a larger and rather different book. In terms of what we have here, the slight niggle is the occurrence of slight repetitions (as on page 40, 74 and 77, 86 and 87, 94 and 95 and 112 and 113) which have not been picked up by a copyeditor. Otherwise, however, Jasper has given us in this study a gem of a book – one that will reward the attention of all those with an interest in the Book of Common Prayer. Finally, the substantial footnotes to each chapter deserve mention as a gift to the serious student of the Prayer Book.
