THE PRAYER BOOK SOCIETY IN AUSTRALIA
(Victorian Branch) Incorporated
Chairman
Please address all correspondence to:
Mr A.C. Bailey
The Prayer Book Society
Unit 6 205 Burke Road
1/14 Glencairn Avenue
GLEN IRIS 3146
CAMBERWELL 3124
Tel. (03) 9835 2403 (preferred) or (03) 9509 3781)
Reg. No. A0013178F
ABN 39692277220
Website: www.prayerbook.org.au
NEWSLETTER – AUGUST 2015
NEXT MEETING
SATURDAY 15 AUGUST 2015
Where:
All Saints’ East St Kilda
Near the corner of Dandenong Road and Chapel Street
There is limited parking at the rear of the church
Trams No. 3, 64, 78 and 79 pass the church
11.00 a.m.
HOLY COMMUNION WITH HYMNS
Celebrant and Preacher: The Revd. Ian Hunter SSC
Locum Tenens, All Saints’ East St Kilda
12.15 p.m.
BYO LUNCHEON
Tea and coffee provided
1.00 p.m.
Address by our Founding Chairman, Mr Henry Speagle, OAM on the
subject of his soon-to-be-published book about the Collects in the BCP,
Pools of Peace
All members and those interested are welcome
Bookstall with latest publications available
We look forward to seeing you and your friends
CHAIRMAN’S LETTER
18 July 2015
Dear Friends,
It is good to be able to write to you again in order to give you some idea of our programme for the rest of the
year 2015.
To bring you up to date: at the last meeting, on 9 May, the Hon John Batt, a most helpful member of the
Society, gave us a very interesting talk on ‘Recent books I have read related to Cranmer and The Book of
Common Prayer’. This talk was not without humour and had been prepared in his usual very thorough way and
provided a most interesting commentary, which in turn gave rise to some interesting questions from members
and parties who were present. In addition, I had been asked as your Chairman to prepare what had been
suggested as my spiritual autobiography. Some members found it not only interesting but rather amusing in
parts, which was exactly how I had intended.
On this occasion we met in the Vicarage as the normal meeting room was being refurbished and redecorated. I
may say that the result is an enormous improvement over its earlier ‘look’.
I want to thank the parish very much for the use of the Vicarage on this occasion. We return to the Parish Room
for the next meeting, on 15 August, details of which appear on the front page of this Newsletter. We hope for a
good turnout of our members and friends as we are being addressed after the usual BYO lunch (tea and coffee
provided) by our Founding Chairman, Henry Speagle, OAM, on the subject of his soon to be published book
about the Collects in the BCP, namely Pools of Peace, which will undoubtedly prove to be of great interest to us
all. There is likely to be a ‘Book Launch’ for this work later in the year (date to be decided). Full details will be
given in a later issue of this Newsletter.
Our next already fixed meeting will be on Saturday 21 November 2015, commencing with Holy Communion
with Hymns at 11 a.m. Our celebrant and preacher on that occasion may well depend on whether there will be
by then be a new Incumbent at All Saints’, but this will emerge in time. After the usual BYO lunch, at 1.30 p.m.
an address will be given by the Very Reverend David Richardson, OBE, former Dean of both Adelaide and
Melbourne Anglican Cathedrals and until recently Emissary in Rome to the Papal See from the then Archbishop
of Canterbury, now Lord Williams of Oystermouth. Dean Richardson was also the Director of the Anglican
Centre in Rome. He has also been a Canon of Canterbury in the United Kingdom.
It promises to be a very interesting and informative afternoon. Dean Richardson is now, to our delight, a
member of the Council of our Society.
You may remember that not so long ago, in August 2014, Bishop Peter Elliott, from the Catholic Archdiocese of
Melbourne, spoke to us about the Ordinariate and its relationship with some of the usage of the BCP. Since then,
as is known, Fr Ramsay Williams, formerly Vicar of All Saints’, East St Kilda, has become a Priest as part of
the Ordinariate. He is, I understand, willing to talk on some differences to the arrangements for the Ordinariate
which have been made by Pope Francis recently if we are prepared to listen to Fr Williams and to discuss these
and other matters after a short talk by him.. I have not yet been able to put this proposal to All Saints’ parish, but
if we were provided with any necessary protocol to enable Fr William to talk to us, I believe that it would
behove us to listen. The date could well be some time in September 2015.
I have to report with sadness that the Revd Dr Norman Curry died last week and that his funeral will take place
next Tuesday at Holy Trinity, Kew. For many years he was a member of this Society. We send our condolences
as to the life of another faithful member. He was for many years a Minor Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral and State
Director of Education for Victoria.
With very best wishes and thanks to all of you. The remainder of the year promises to be both interesting and
full for us all.
Yours sincerely,
Anthony C. Bailey
Chairman
RECENT BOOKS ON THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
An Address to the Prayer Book Society on 9 May 2015
by The Hon J M Batt
I propose to concentrate on two recent books, but I shall first mention briefly some other noteworthy recent
books:
. Judith Maltby's Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (1998), a social history of
the early prayer books;
. David Griffiths' Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer 1549-1999 (2002), which gives a full account of
the Book's thitherto impenetrable printing history;
. The Oxford Guide to The Book of Common Prayer: A worldwide Survey (2006), much used by the author of
my second principal book;
. Celebrating 350 Years: the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, being the November 2012 number of St Mark's
Review, which contains 14 essays on all aspects of the Book, including Holy Communion and present Australian
usage of the Book;
. A Celebration of The Book of Common Prayer (2013), being selected addresses by Bishop Renfrey edited by
Henry Speagle OAM, recently reviewed by the Hon. Clive Tadgell AO for the Society. [This review appeared in
the February 2014 issue of this Newsletter.]
And there is Henry's book on the Collects, still in course of publication, I believe. I have brought a list by the
Revd Dr John Bunyan of further books as at 2012.
The two books I shall discuss are Brian Cummings (ed.): The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559
and 1662 (Oxford, 2011) and Alan Jacobs' The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton, 2013).
Neither of these men is a theologian, a liturgiologist or a church historian, but each is a distinguished professor,
of English in one case and of humanities in the other, and their wide research is apparent. Jacobs says that he has
frequently heard the BCP intoned by two priest friends.
If you want the rare text of the 1559 Book, you buy Cummings's book. In any event, it is, in my view, excellent,
though it takes a little getting used to. It has been very favourably reviewed and is the book Dr Bunyan
recommends from his list. It is beautifully printed and a pleasure to handle.
In his Introduction Cummings says that the very familiarity of the Prayer Book works to conceal its true
significance. Sometimes its ubiquity can make it seem bland. Paradoxically, it is its fans who have been most at
fault, in claiming for its prose a kind of stately majesty which hides its urgency and nervous energy or in
admiring in it a universality which preserves the past in amber rather than allowing its vibrant and often
controversial history to appear in full. The aim of the edition is, not only to make available to the general reader
with all necessary aids a true classic among the world's classics, but also to bring alive a new conception of that
book, adding to its complexity, mystery and wonder.
There are two primary misconceptions that his book confronts. The first is that The Book of Common Prayer is a
narrowly religious book. It is rather, says Cummings, a set of words to accompany everyday life, its pain,
pleasure and sorrow, as well as a means to worship a creator. Not merely a book of prayer, it is a book of ritual
and performances: in the process of presenting a religious book to the common reader, religion is revealed to be
much bigger, less sanctimonious, than many secular readers assume.
The other misconception which Cummings's book works to transform is that The Book of Common Prayer is a
single book. For a start, the latter is one of the most reprinted books in history, with a highly complicated textual
history. Further, its secondary purposes have not been constant: it was an engine for revolutionary change at first
but later a means of conservation and cultural recuperation. His book, Cummings says, seeks to present The
Book of Common Prayer as ‘something volatile and dynamic, a moving object in time’, containing ‘a whole
history within it’.
The principle of Cummings's book is to present the text in three different states - 1549, 1559 and 1662. 1552 is
omitted because it had too short a life and the 1604 edition is mentioned only passingly in two places.
Cummings gives a snapshot at the three dates, but, as shown for example by the fact that by Whitsun (9 June),
1549 there had already been four differing editions, he had to make a reasoned choice of one edition over others
at each of the three dates. The texts are not facsimiles, but are in roman type except for some headings, and are
largely in original spelling. Nor are the texts set out in parallel as Brightman did in his The English Rite (1916),
but in their chronological order. The text given of the 1662 Book is comprehensive. It naturally includes the
Psalms and the Ordinal as these became part of the Book in the 1662 version. On the other hand, the texts of the
1549 and 1559 Books omit certain items found in 1662 for space reasons. These include the essay ‘Of
Ceremonies’, the calendar, the collects, and the epistles and gospels. The last two, therefore, do not appear in
Cummings's book in the Great Bible version, but only in that of the KJV. Cummings claims that his book
presents the divine services compiled for the 1549 and 1552 texts. An Appendix gives the Black Rubric of 1552.
Another Appendix has the State Prayers, Articles of Religion and the Table of Kindred and Affinity, though
they were never strictly part of The Book of Common Prayer. A chronology, a bibliography and a glossary of
older meanings and spelling oddities are included in the book. It ends with a succinct and helpful index and
concordance of services and orders.
Towards the back of Cummings's book, after the three texts and the two Appendices, are succinct, highly
informative, explanatory notes to passages or words in each of those texts in order, the existence of a note being
indicated in the text by a degree sign. To assist in the not too easy task of navigating the book the pages of
annotations are usefully headed with the section of text under annotation and the year of the edition from which
it comes (e.g., Matrimony 1559). In addition, the notes to specific passages or words have, again usefully, a
marginal reference to the page of text where the passage or word is to be found. The secret to using the notes is
to realise that the notes are cumulative, in the sense that something that has been annotated under, say, the 1549
text will not, if it appears in the 1559 or 1662 text, or both, be further annotated unless an addition or
modification is required. One may therefore need to look at annotations to two or even three of the Books of
Common Prayer.
The annotations have a brief historical introduction to each such Book as well as a brief introduction to most
sections of each Book (such as the Preface and the various services).
It is not possible to summarise the 35 pages of the Introduction in which Cummings traces, with his own acute
observations, the Book's creation and history to present times, which are well known to this audience. Suffice it
to say that he does so under these headings: (i) medieval liturgy and the Reformation (ii) ; the content of
Cranmer's Book, in the course of which he expresses the view that Cranmer's best work was often in
recomposing, not composing ; (iii) the Elizabethan Book: ritual and performance; (iv) The Book and the
Restoration of 1660; and (v) The Book of Common Prayer, past and future.
I thought that there was a major error about the words of administration of the bread at p. 772, but I now see that
the note can be read in a way that is free of error.
To sum up, this is a book any serious student of The Book of Common Prayer should have.
Jacobs' Biography is one of Princeton's Lives of Great Religious Books, a series of short volumes intended to
recount for the general reader the history of important religious texts from around the world, such as The Dead
Sea Scrolls, The Book of Genesis, Calvin's Institutes, Augustine's Confessions, the Bhagavad-Gita, Confucius's
Analects, C S Lewis's Mere Christianity, and Aquinas's Summa. The books are designed to examine the
historical origins of the texts of great religious traditions and trace how their reception, interpretation, and
influence have changed - often radically - over time. The pre-supposition is that all great religious books are
living things whose careers can take the most unexpected turns.
Jacobs' book amply satisfies those criteria. The text and notes occupy only some 230 pages; so it cannot be
exhaustive. But in them he shows how The Book of Common Prayer - from its beginnings as a means of social
and political control in the England of Henry VIII (in the form of precursor books or documents) and Edward VI
(directly) to its world-wide presence today - became a venerable work whose cadences express the heart of
religious life for many, as they have done for many more in the past. Jacobs tells of the Book's variable and
dramatic career in the complicated history of English church politics, including celebration, protest and
ejectment. He says that, if for seventeenth-century prayer-book exiles like John Evelyn the Book had become
venerable, a century later it might better be described as musty; but, he says, the next century would show that
there was a good deal of life in it yet. The Victorian era, he thinks, was probably the high tide of prayer-book
worship, for then more Anglicans than at any other time knew the Book and owned their own copies. He spends
a considerable time on (i) first, the Tractarians or Anglo-Catholics, whose researches into early liturgical history
showed many ways in which the Prayer Book might have been, and could still be (scil., by revision), different,
though Newman in Tract 3 cautioned against ‘the temper of innovation’, which once given its head cannot
subsequently be restrained; and (ii) secondly on the Ornaments Rubric and J.M. Neale and the Ritualists, who,
he considers, played down Cranmer's work. He observes pithily that rubrics are concerned with ‘bodies and
objects’, such as posture and candlestick placement. Both groups, he suggests, had some responsibility for the
Prayer Book’s ultimate decline. To these causes he adds (iii) changes in the English language and in the ability
to understand 16th- and 17th-century English, leading to the venerability of the prayer book being sacrificed to
greater comprehension via revision; (iv) World War I, which many chaplains at the Front found showed up an
ironic dissonance between the beautiful language and highly penitential nature of the prayer book and the
horrors of the battlefield, as well as an absence of needful prayers for the dead and of provision for pragmatic
reservation of the sacrament, matters previously considered Romish: and (v) Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of
the Liturgy in 1945, which Jacobs considers was written to repudiate Cranmer's work and to put Anglican
Eucharistic liturgy on a ‘correct’ footing.
Jacobs devotes a considerable part of his book to showing that, as time passed, new forms of the Book were
made to suit the English-speaking nations: first in Scotland, then in the new United States, and eventually
wherever the British Empire spread. He demonstrates how one Book has become many. But the diversity was
destabilizing for members of the Church of England. He contends that the episcopal consecration of Samuel
Seabury was especially important, for such members knew that they had cousins across the seas with a different
lex orandi. With the diversity of liturgies Anglicans no longer had any truly ‘common’ prayer.
Jacobs traces the movement in England in the 20th century for revision of the Prayer Book arising from factors
already mentioned together with the scholarship that showed that there were errors not only in Coverdale's
translation of the Psalms, for he knew little Hebrew, but also in the KJV, both of which were used in the 1662
Book. The attempted revision was thwarted by Parliament in 1928. But Alternative Services were proposed in
the late 1970s and Prayer Book Societies were formed in opposition not only in England, but also in Canada,
USA and Australia.
Finally, confining himself to England and North America, Jacobs shows that, with the arrival of Common
Worship and the 1979 American book, each of which is modular (dyslogistically called ‘liturgical Lego’), that
is, with its several rites for certain services and choice of prayers within each rite, we no longer have Cranmer's
‘one use’ within a parish, let alone within a country. If earlier liturgical activity removed ‘common’ from
Anglican prayer, modularity, says Jacobs, removed the ‘book’ and made for instability, for parishes could not
afford to buy the books of options and used photocopies and slides.
Cranmer's Book and its direct successors were, Jacobs says, enormously adaptable, but not infinitely so, and, by
inference, the present books are not true successors. The Books of Common Prayer, whilst they will forever be
regarded as historical documents of the first order and prose masterpieces, were meant to be living words in the
mouths of those with a living faith and cannot live unless sufficient believers say their words.
I record two views of Jacobs that do not fit elsewhere into my review of his book. First, the ‘Zwinglian’
understanding of Holy Communion in the 1552 Book was by that time Cranmer's own view. Secondly, whilst
nothing defined the Church of England more specifically or practically than use of The Book of Common
Prayer, the Book is not mentioned in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral as a necessary component of
Anglicanism. (He does not mention s.4 of our National Constitution.)
Jacobs' book is compact, lucid, often illuminating, sometimes arresting and throughout easy to read. For a
newcomer to the subject it would be a very good introduction to the making, history and present status of The
Book of Common Prayer.
The book contains a brief Appendix on The Book of Common Prayer and its printers, largely based on Griffiths'
above-mentioned book. I have to confess that, until I read Jacobs' book, I did not know that after Cranmer's
execution Edward Whitchurch, one of the two printers of the 1549 and 1552 Books, married his widow,
Margaret.
HOW I CAME TO KNOW AND LOVE
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
(4)
By Ian Manning
This, the fourth in our series of personal reminiscences on The Book of Common Prayer, is of particular interest
because its author has made a rather different spiritual pilgrimage from those of most other members of our
Society.
John Willis
In the February 2015 issue of this Newsletter Dr John Bunyan of Sydney told the story of how he came to know
and love The Book of Common Prayer. In brief, as a born Anglican, he was brought up to it. As a born and
indeed baptised Baptist, I wasn’t. My Baptist upbringing was, I suppose, typically Australian middle-class, but
there were subtle differences from an Anglican education. For example, I learnt early on that Dr Bunyan’s
seventeenth-century namesake was the greatest of all British saints, closely followed by William Carey. Though
I now practise as an Anglican, my Baptist heritage was sufficiently strong to ensure that I made the pilgrimage
to William Carey’s grave at Serampore, not far north of Calcutta. It also happens that my great-grandparents
came from the same part of England as these two saints, so I am indeed a Baptist born of Baptists.
In 1959, when I was 17, my father took long-service leave and it was my good fortune to join him and my
mother on a round-the-world ticket which included a visit to England. On the one hand, this taught me that I am
not English – I learnt to understand the misty mood-music of Vaughan Williams without empathising with it.
Accordingly, I am not one of those who love The Book of Common Prayer as an expression of English identity.
On the other hand, I went to Evensong at various English cathedrals and this converted me.
After we returned to Australia I continued to attend the Baptist church in which my parents had brought me up
until disaster struck in the form of a new organist much addicted to popular evangelical choruses. As a
schoolboy I had delighted in rewriting these choruses as commercial jingles (‘standing somewhere in the
grocer’s you’ll find Kellogg’s’), but now, compared with Coverdale’s words and Anglican chant, they were
simply appalling. A Baptist upbringing fosters a certain independence of mind – we were, after all, our own
interpreters of the Word and could and did disagree with the clergy or, in this case, with their choice of organist.
Accordingly I shifted to the local Church of England, which happened to be Holy Trinity Surrey Hills. Not only
were the music and words better; it was closer. I quickly became habituated to Morning Prayer and Evening
Prayer, but it took me a while to get used to the long kneeling required for Holy Communion.
In 1965, as a callow university graduate, I had the luck to join the teaching staff at Madras Christian College,
staying there for four years. I became a member of the Church of South India and as a lay preacher took evening
prayer once a month in each of St Stephen’s Pallaveram and the Garrison Church at St Thomas Mount. Madras
Christian College was Church of Scotland in origin but incorporated an Anglican component including a chapel
named after Bishop Heber of Calcutta. It was here that I came to know and love the Church of South India
liturgy, which in its English form was a gift to the church by several saintly old missionaries, one of whom, Dr
Macphail from Edinburgh, was living in the College when I first arrived there. The CSI liturgy was a
rearrangement of the Book of Common Prayer service which retained the original language but included some
new collects by Dr Macphail which were as thoughtful and compact as those written long before by Archbishop
Cranmer.
In India, too, I encountered Hindus, particularly South Indian Brahmins. Though the Hindu religions are
inexcusably non-egalitarian, at their best I found the Brahmins to be learned people notable for their religious
devotion and their disdain for worldly possessions – quite a contrast with the people who occupy top social rank
in Australia or for that matter the British aristocracy. I also encountered marriage ceremonies and temple
worship. Nowadays The Book of Common Prayer is commonly regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned but its
conservatism is as nothing compared with Hindu worship. The old Sanskrit and Tamil texts are frequently
obscure, sometimes extravagantly devotional, and never either edited or reformed. Both chanted and sung, these
texts create a worship which resonates back through the generations, whether performed in the open air or under
low ceilings in dim, bat-infested temples. I also learned that this archaic worship provided the basis in
experience for speculative theologies which have proliferated but never been turned back to reform the worship
itself. I am not and cannot be a Hindu – that privilege is reserved for those who are born as such – but I learned
that devotion is at the heart of religion and should never be compromised in the interests of theological structure,
relevance or evangelism.
In Christianity, the heart of devotion is to know the crucified and risen Lord, both individually and as a
community – a community which includes not only the faithful remnant on earth but the cloud of witnesses who
have gone before. Not only does the Book of Common Prayer provide language with which to meet the Lord; its
diction reminds us of those who have gone before but are still with us. Having adopted the The Book of
Common Prayer as my devotional standard, I find myself free to entertain whatever intriguing speculations
theology may provide. Like a good Hindu, traditional worship gives me the security to teeter on the edge of
atheism as I search for words to describe that which cannot be defined, limited or known other than as a
mysterious person – or, as Christianity would have it, three persons. Like Dr Bunyan, I remain a liturgical
conservative, by that very anchor able to live unworried by the flux of ideas. Again like him, when I visit my
second country, which is not England but India, I join Indian Christians in Cranmerian liturgy and my faith is
strengthened.
When AAPB was published I was living in Canberra. I considered it and decided that I did not want to learn it
off by heart – if prayer had to be contemporary, better that it be extempore until such time as we find a worthy
contemporary voice. When the clergy insisted that all services should be AAPB they assured us recalcitrants that
we would soon get used to it, but of course my upbringing was such that I did not have to believe them. I
accordingly reverted to being a Baptist. The music in the Canberra Baptist Church was good and the extempore
prayer thoughtful, though it took a while to get used to the way in which the children’s address every Sunday
morning was illustrated by objects drawn from a Kellogg’s packet.
On return to Melbourne I resumed Anglican membership, joining a congregation which uses The Book of
Common Prayer. There is no Morning Prayer but there is still Evening Prayer and the liturgy is that which for
generations has succeeded in the moulding of saints.
There is a Hindu theory that we live in kaliyuga; an age in which change is generally for the worse. I earn my
living as an economist, professionally obliged to celebrate our risen material standard of living, but my
profession also obliges me to acknowledge the deficiencies of the accounting standards by which we measure
material prosperity. There is no accounting for the busyness which crowds out knowledge of the Lord and no
accounting for the advertising slogans which debase our language and our minds; there is no easy remedy for
the expectation of instant rewards, for the unwillingness to invest time in devotion. I am as much caught up in
this as any other Australian and so cling to The Book of Common Prayer as a remnant of an age in which people
were less distracted and, like the contemplative missionaries who produced the liturgy of the Church of South
India, better able to lead us into common worship.
REMINDER BY THE EDITOR:
I am still eagerly waiting for the next contribution to this series on ‘How I came to know and love The Book of
Common Prayer’. What about it, members? Why not contribute a few thoughts on this topic? Let me know as
son as possible.
LIBER PRECUM PUBLICARUM
The Book of Common Prayer in Latin
Monday, 22 January 1549, and 9 June, Whitsunday of the same year, are the dates which are historic in the
history of The Book of Common Prayer (BCP). It was on the first of these dates that King Edward VI’s
Parliament passed the first Act of Uniformity, which was significant as a statute substituting a single, uniform,
and vernacular book of service for the several ‘Uses’ (York, Salisbury/Sarum, Hereford, Bangor and Lincoln) of
the English Church and for the Latin service-books belonging to them. The second of these dates was appointed
as the last day on which the new Book of Common Prayer should have been brought into use throughout the
whole kingdom.
However, at the very end of the Preface of this first Book of Common Prayer is the following passage:
Though it be appointed in the afore written preface, that al things shalbe red and sog in the churche, in the
Englishe tongue, to thende yt the congregacion maie be therby edified: yet it is not meant, but when men
saye Matins and Euensong priuatelye, they maye saie the same in any language that they themselues do
understand. Neither that anye man shalbe bound to the saying of them, but such as from tyme to tyme, in
Cathedrall and Collegiate Churches, Parishe Churches, and Chapelles to the same annexed, shall serue the
congregacion.
The same words up to and including ‘they themselves do understand’ occur in the 1552 Book of Common
Prayer and also in the 1559 BCP. However in subsequent editions of the 1559 book these words (and the two
paragraphs following, to do with all Priests and Deacons being bound to say daily, the Morning and Evening
prayer, either privately or openly; and that the Curate who ministers in every parish Church or Chapel, shall say
Morning and Evening prayer in the Church or Chapel and shall toll a bell a convenient time before he begins
‘that such as be disposed may come to heare Goddes woorde, and to pray with him’) were subsequently
separated from the Preface and were put in italics. In the 1662 BCP they occur in the Preface.
Although the above indicates that the Preface permits the private recitation of Mattins and Evensong in any
language known to those who say this Office, in 1560 Queen Elizabeth authorised the issue of a Prayer Book in
a Latin form, the use of which was granted, by Royal Letters Patent, ‘as well to the Dean and Society of Christ
Church in our University of Oxford, as to Presidents, Wardens, Rectors, Masters and Societies of all and
singular Colleges of Cambridge, Oxford, Winchester and Eton’. That is, not just Mattins and Evensong, but the
whole of the BCP. This Latin Prayer Book of 1560 diverged somewhat from the English form with some
reference to the 1549 BCP and to pre-Reformation usage. It has been suggested that this Latin Prayer Book was
unpopular at Cambridge ‘being opprobriously termed, “the Pope’s Dreggs” ’. Latin versions nearer to the BCP
were issued in and after 1571. The 1662 BCP was first translated into Latin by Jean Durel in 1670. Other
translations were made in 1713, 1821 and 1865. None of these were official, and they are of varying quality.
The translation most highly regarded is that by A. Gulielmo Bright and Petro Goldsmith Medd in 1865.
It seems that there were three basic reasons why The Book of Common Prayer was translated into Latin. The
first was to better communicate the liturgy to those on the Continent who might wish to study it; the second was
for use in colleges and universities, where it was expected all would know Latin; and the third reason was for
use in Ireland by priests who knew Latin but not English.
To give a small example of the Latin translation, here follows the beautiful Third Collect from the Order for
Evening Prayer (‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all
perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ’): Illumina, quaesumus
Domine Deus, tenebras nostras; et totius huus noctis insidias tu a nobis repelle procipitius. Propter unicum,
Filium tuum, Salvatorem nostrum, Jesum Christum. (From the 5th edition [1910] of the translation by Bright and
Medd.)
Sources:
Edward Radcliff, The booke of common prayer of the Churche of England: its making and revisions 1549 –
1661, SPCK, 1949.
justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Latin
Editor’s Note: Our thanks go to Max Boyce for contributing this article.
Please note that the address of the Registered Office of the Society has changed –
see the front page of this Newsletter
The Editor of this Newsletter is Dr J.B. (John) Willis
211 Orrong Road, East St Kilda, Victoria 3183, Australia
Phone: (03) 9527 6927 e-mail: johnwillis3@bigpond.com