Product Description

Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive survey of the history of the original Book of Common Prayer and all of its descendants throughout the world. The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer shows how a classic text for worship and devotion has become the progenitor of an entire family of religious resources that have had an influence far beyond their use in Anglican churches. The tale begins with the creation of the first Prayer Book in 1549. The Guide surveys how the Prayer Book developed and took root in English culture. The story then describes how Anglican missionaries and others brought the Prayer Book to far corners of the British Empire. In the twentieth century, Anglican churches throughout the world began to develop their own, unique versions of the Prayer Book to serve the needs of their local communities. The Guide describes the development of indigenous Prayer Books in Africa, the nations of the Pacific, Asia, North and South America, and Europe. It explains how, in the dozens of Prayer Books in current use, the same basic texts - Daily Prayers, the Eucharist, Marriage and Funerals, and many others - resemble each other, and differ from each other. Finally, a brief look at the future of "electronic Prayer Books" offers a glimpse at how this story of development and adaptation may continue. John Donne, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and P. D. James, among many others, worshiped from the Prayer Book, giving it immense literary influence. The Prayer Book family has created worship language that remains within Anglican tradition, while adapting to very different cultural contexts. Prayer Books in New Zealand, for example, incorporate Maori elements, and ones in Myanmar use Buddhist prayer forms - just a few of the fascinating facts in this rich and varied history. In this Guide any reader, Anglican or not, can learn why The Book of Common Prayer is a classic of liturgy and literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #374342 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

Review
This is a valuable book, which affords the latest overview of Anglican worship across the world, and reveals its rich diversity. (Donald Gray, Church Times )

This book will serve as a standard work of reference for many years to come, and should be a basic ingredient of every clergyperson's library. (Michael C. Kennedy, Church of Ireland Gazette )

This rich volume is sure to become the definitive source for studies of the Book of Common Prayer. (Publishers Weekly )

Customer Reviews

A MisleadingTitle and an Uneven Book: Caveat Emptor!
The first thing the potential buyer needs to know is that less than half of the text of this book deals with The Book of Common Prayer. Over 300 pages are devoted to explaining the reasons for abandoning it and reviewing the liturgical texts which have replaced it. If you are looking for a starting point for the exploration of modern Anglican rites and liturgies, this book is ideal. Certainly, the topics considered here are worthy of an Oxford Guide. However,why invoke the Book of Common Prayer so conspicuously in the title? Why not call it the Oxford Guide to Anglican Liturgies? Reference to Common Prayer conjures up something distinctly different in the minds of most Anglicans than what this book really addresses.

Leaving the issue of title aside, I would probably have bought this book for its first 226 pages, the ones that actually do address Common Prayer. This material is excellent and informative. In particular, the literary appreciation by Paul Stanwood is splendid.

Having ventured it once, I won't often read beyond that 226 page limit. I have heard and studied the clerical arguments for sweeping liturgical change extensively for the last thirty-five years. Not much is new except for the expanded range of alternative rites globally. While some contributers to this volume favour a valediction for the old services, others take it as an opportunity to continue their now unnecessary advocacy for the new. The result is that the poor old Book of Common Prayer can't even get a respectful parting eulogy.

The Book of Common Prayer seems to have become the proper concern of historians, teachers of literature, professors of linguistics, and their students rather than of priests and people. My rector tells me as much on a regular basis. I suppose I should feel grateful for the additional material in my field, but all I feel is sadness for the decline of a great tradition.

A not-altogether-accurate title and a wildly uneven book.
To most Anglicans, at least outside the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, the term Book of Common Prayer evokes the traditional service book of the Anglican Communion, which traces its ancestry to 1549 and which , despite minor variants, adhered largely to the form finalized in England in 1662. This highly beloved work seems unfortunately to be passing from the scene as a liturgical source, and becoming instead a literary and spiritual classic, as witnessed by its appearance as an Everyman Classic and in a deluxe Folio Society edition.

I was heartened by the appearance of an Oxford Guide to the Bookof Common Prayer" and embarked on reading it with great enthusiasm. I was a tad apprehensive after reading the subtitle, A Worldwide Survey, but still hoped for the best. This book is an interesting, often useful, but not very heartening book for the Anglican liturgical conservative.

Where this book is good, it is very good indeed, in fact, excellent.The problem is that over half the text is an account of the wholesale destruction of the Book of Common Prayer in favour of the so-called alternative or new books. This is, of course, hailed as a triumph of renewal by the various cheerleaders and apologists for the new texts, though in light of the progressive dwindling of the number of communicants and members in Anglican churches in the Western World, this is a tad difficult to square with the realities at a parish level. Indeed, my own church has declined from over 600 Easter communicants before the Canadian Book of Alternative Services was introduced in 1985 to a modest 320 now, including 60 who attended a said traditional BCP service at 8:00 a.m. There is a desperate attempt by some writers to argue that the new liturgies are very much in the "Common Prayer" tradition. This is, I think, an assertion which must be questioned, especially given the far more potent influence of Roman Catholic liturgical change, and the adoption of the often inscrutable ICET/ICEL texts into the new eucharistic prayers.

One is interested by the fairly uniform rationales (or rationalizations) offered for the new services. They, at least show a truly remarkable family resemblance. However, several really grievous lapses of good taste occur. To my mind the worst is the article by Colin Buchanan respecting "Preserving the Classical Prayer Books". This strikes me as an instance of sheer gall only excelled by O.J. Simpson's proposed book on how he would have murdered his wife (if he had in fact done so). Colin gets to vent some of his spleen at the Prayer Book Society, and Buchanan is as eager now as he was thirty years ago to write the obituary of the classical books.I, at least, hope he is just as wrong now as he was then. To his credit, he makes crystal clear the disingenuousness of the clergy in applying the word "alternative" to the new liturgies in England and Canada. You in Britain have the saving grace of Royal Peculiars, collegiate and cathedral churches to preserve the classical texts, at least in part. No such havens exist in North America, where one goes to the cathedrals to behold ever more breath-taking strangeness. Parish churches in Canada look like Anglican churches, albeit often in distinctly Gothic revival form, but generally sound more like a fusion of the Grand Old Opry and a song-fest for a Christian Infants School. One has a sense of mere anarchy being loosed upon the Anglican world

That may not be the case, though God knows that the present Anglican Communion is a pastiche of radically divided member provinces often hopelessly at odds. But, I suppose that is not the point and should not be laid at the door of liturgical change exclusively. The point is that this volume is as much or more a Requiem for Common Prayer as it is a guide to it. Interesting it definitely is. Satisfying it is only in part. Repetitive it certainly is in the second half. A better title might have been "The Oxford Guide to Anglican Liturgies Past and Present, with a Special Emphasis on and Defence of the Rise of New Rites". Alternately, it could have born a warning that it was the Book of Common Prayer as seen by writers often hostile to it as a living spiritual tradition.