The 1559 Book of Common Prayer
The 1559 Book of Common Prayer was the Elizabethan revision of the Book of Common Prayer and one of the formative texts of post-Reformation Anglicanism. It restored public worship in English after the reign of Mary I and became the authorized prayer book of the Church of England under Elizabeth I. Although closely related to the 1552 prayer book, the 1559 book made several notable changes that shaped Anglican liturgy, especially in the Communion service and in the ceremonial assumptions of parish worship.[1]
Historical context
The 1559 prayer book appeared at the beginning of the Elizabethan Settlement, when the Church of England was re-established as a reformed national church after the Marian restoration of Roman obedience. The Act of Uniformity 1559 required the use of the prayer book in public worship and gave it civil as well as ecclesiastical force.[2]
The book was not a wholly new composition. Its main structure followed the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, which had presented a more explicitly reformed order than the first English prayer book of 1549. Elizabeth's revision retained the daily offices, the litany, the Communion office, baptismal rites, marriage, visitation of the sick, burial, and the ordinal pattern inherited from the Edwardian books. Its importance lay less in literary novelty than in its role as the settled liturgical standard for the restored English church.
Liturgical character
The best-known alteration in the 1559 Communion office concerned the words used when administering the consecrated bread and wine. The book combined the 1549 form, which spoke of the body and blood of Christ preserving the communicant, with the 1552 form, which emphasized reception by faith. This combined formula allowed the rite to be received by clergy and laity with differing emphases on eucharistic doctrine, while still remaining within the reformed framework of the English formularies.
The 1559 book also omitted the Black Rubric, which had appeared in 1552 to explain that kneeling at Communion did not imply adoration of the sacramental elements. Its omission did not remove the practice of kneeling, but it changed the way the book handled a sensitive doctrinal and ceremonial issue.
Another important feature was the ornaments provision, commonly associated with the later Ornaments Rubric. It referred to the ornaments of the church and ministers as they stood by authority of Parliament in the second year of Edward VI. The interpretation of this rule became a matter of later controversy, especially among those debating the continuity of pre-Reformation ceremonial in Anglican worship.
Later reception
The 1559 book remained in use through the reign of Elizabeth I and helped define the worshipping life of English parishes for more than four decades. Its stability was significant for the formation of Anglican identity, since the regular use of Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, the litany, and Holy Communion gave English Protestantism a common liturgical grammar.
The accession of James I led to the 1604 revision, produced after the Hampton Court Conference. That revision was modest when compared with the changes of the mid-sixteenth century, and much of the Elizabethan book's substance continued. The later 1662 prayer book, which became the classic standard of the Church of England and deeply influenced Anglican provinces worldwide, stood within this same sequence of revision and reception.
In Anglican history the 1559 prayer book is therefore remembered as both a political settlement and a liturgical text. It did not resolve every theological dispute within the English church, but it provided a durable form of common prayer that helped hold together a reformed episcopal church with a strong inherited pattern of public worship.