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Publication Date

2025

Keywords

Book of Common Prayer, Catholic literature, poetry

Abstract

Anyone who has observed the worship trends of the younger generation of Christians in the last ten to twenty years will have noticed a renewed interest in traditional, liturgically conservative forms of worship. Whether it is interest in liturgy itself, or in the materials of liturgy - ornate vestments, incense, candles, bells, chanting, etc. - young people today display a keen interest in forms of worship and reverence that seem to have been lost in the cultural upheaval of the late twentieth century, a revolution that affected both Protestant and Catholic forms of worship. However effective the late twentieth-century iconoclasm was at the time, vestiges of traditional piety have remained and are now seeing the fruits of what might be called minor liturgical revolutions. When reading recent publications like Thomas Rist's The Catholicism of literature in the age of the Book of Common Prayer, one cannot help but contemplate the similarities between 1625 and 2025 - two moments responding to revolutions of prior centuries. The cultural and religious revolutions that took place in the sixteenth century may have begun in England with Henry VIII's break from Rome in 1532, but they were essentially "finalized" by 1558, when his daughter Elizabeth I took the throne, the date Rist marks for the beginning of the period he defines as the "age of the Book of Common Prayer" (1558-1689). But one must put "finalized" in quotes, for, as Rist shows in his extensively researched book, vestiges of Catholic culture and Catholic worship remained strong, vibrant, and influential well into the seventeenth century.

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