The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most important and influential books inEnglish history but it has received relatively little attention from literaryscho... » 

The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most important and influential books inEnglish history but it has received relatively little attention from literaryscholars. This study seeks to remedy this by attending to the Prayerbooksimportance in Englands political intellectual religious and literaryhistory. The first half of the book presents extensive analyses of the Book ofCommon Prayers involvement in early modern discourses of nationalism andindividualism and argues that the liturgy sought to engage and textuallyreconcile these potentiallycompeting cultural impulses. In its second halfLiturgy and Literature traces these tensions in subsequent works by four majorauthors Sidney Shakespeare Milton and Hobbes and contends that theyoperate within the dialectical parameters laid out in the Prayerbook decadesearlier. Rosendales analyses are supplemented by a brief history of the Bookof Common Prayer and by an appendix which discusses its contents. «