Content area
Full Text
My thanks to Joanna Snelling, Librarian at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and to Alan H. Nelson, Professor Emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, for their kind assistance with this project.
In 1844 William Pickering printed a splendid copy of what the title-page calls The Book of Common Prayer commonly called the First Book of Queen Elizabeth printed by Grafton 1559. Over a century and a half later, in 2011, Oxford University Press issued The Book of Common Prayer: the texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 for which its editor, Brian Cummings, chose the Grafton Prayer Book as his copy-text, even as he remarks that 'The imprint of 1559 bearing the name of Grafton is an oddity, since he lost his licence to print in 1553 and later in 1559 gave up his press and type (some to his son-in-law Richard Tottel).' 1Unfortunately, Pickering offered no rationale for his choice of the Grafton text, but both he and Cummings represent exceptions to the consensus among both historians and bibliographers that the 1559 Book of Common Prayer printed by Richard Jugge and John Cawood was the real thing that was authorised by the 1559 Act of Uniformity, passed by parliament on 28 April 1559, while Grafton's was an imposter. As similar as the earliest 1559 Prayer Books are, the question of authority would seem to be unimportant, except that, in this case, the genesis of the first Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, as well as its relationship to its two Edwardian predecessors, is intimately bound not only to the history of Elizabethan Protestantism but also to the history of Anglicanism. Many historians of both England's Church and State are still heavily invested in a narrative of the Elizabethan settlement of religion as a compromise between Catholic and Protestant versions of the Church, a via media. In this narrative the Book of Common Prayer, finally agreed upon at the eleventh hour in late April 1559 (and printed by Jugge and Cawood), represents a compromise between the more 'Catholic' 1549 Book of Common Prayer favoured by the queen and a 'draft-book' that 'was more favourable to Puritan opinions than was agreeable to the Queen or her Secretary [William Cecil]'. 2Even though this narrative has met with...