The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography by Alan Jacobs

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


American academic Alan Jacobs is a Distinguished Professor in the honours program of Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco. Texas. He was previously the Clyde Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, where he almost became an institution in his own right, spending thirty years in the post. He has been compared to CS Lewis: a fair comparison, given his interests in classical literature and religion. He has, in fact, written on Lewis, with particular reference to his children’s books, in his 2006 opus, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. Nonetheless, Jacobs brings a contemporary perspective to his work, as is apparent from the book under consideration here, The Book of Common Prayer - a Biography. It is his thirteenth published book and it forms part of Princeton’s series Lives of Great Religious Books. There are already nine books in the series, with the promise of another dozen or so to come, covering the principal religions of the world and including works as disparate as The Book of Mormon and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

The subject matter has been discussed by several other works, notably Sussex University’s Professor Brian Cummings’s comparative study The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (OUP, 2010). One might suspect that the present work is in some measure Princeton’s response to the Oxford opus: the two works, however, similar though they superficially appear, serve different purposes, Cummings’s book being largely a study of the earliest versions of the texts while Jacobs takes a more straightforwardly historical approach, covering more ground in less detail. He traces the BCP’s origins from its beginnings in Tudor England to its transportation to the colonies and its recent history, with particular reference to its adaptation and development in the USA.

Although this is a scholarly work that will be of interest to church historians and students of Theology and Religious Studies, it will also be appreciated by laymen of similar interests. As a lapsed Anglican with a deep interest in Shakespeare and his life and times, I found it a joy to revisit Archbishop Cranmer’s beautiful prose. What was it about this era, that it could come up with the wondrous works of the Bard of Avon, the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and his contemporaries, the King James Bible – and the BCP? Or to give it its full title in 1662, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church according to the use of the Church of England together with the Psalter or Psalms of David pointed as they are to be sung or said in churches and the form and manner of making, ordaining, and consecrating of bishops, priests, and deacons.

Consciously or unconsciously, Cranmer utilised techniques that creative writing students of today struggle to do half as well – repetition, balanced antithesis, metaphor – all these and more Cranmer called into service, setting a high bar for later writers of devotional texts. It matters not what Christian denomination one follows: the solemnisation of marriage invariably begins with ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together…’ or something similar that closely echoes Cranmer’s words. Modernised versions of Cranmer’s text, or modern efforts to rewrite the Latin of the Mass into English, such as those that followed the Second Vatican Council, fail miserably when compared to the beauty of Cranmer’s work. Alan Jacobs makes us very aware of our debt to Cranmer.

The Book of Common Prayer – a Biography is well set out, easy to follow, well-referenced and indexed and pleasing to look at. The only thing I did not like about this book was its ’handle’. It’s a good size and looks attractive, but the dust jacket feels like some nasty synthetic fabric, even though it is definitely paper! However, dust jackets are easily removed or covered by some other material, and it certainly wasn’t enough to make me set the book aside.

The author runs a Tumblr blog for the book at  http://bookofcommonprayer.tumblr.com/

This is a five-star book. Thank you, Professor Jacobs, and thank you, Princeton University Press.

Alan Jacobs The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography



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