The Elizabethan Prayer Book (1559)

Historical background

Mary I (1553–1558) restored the Latin Mass and papal authority. When Elizabeth I succeeded in November 1558, her first Parliament passed an Act of Supremacy and an Act of Uniformity (1559) restoring a Protestant Church of England. The Act reimposed the 1552 book, with specified alterations, from June 1559. The bill passed the House of Lords only narrowly, against the opposition of the Marian bishops.

What changed

The text is essentially that of 1552, but with changes that softened its edges. The words of administration at Communion combined the 1549 sentence (“The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life”) with the 1552 sentence (“Take and eat this in remembrance…”), allowing both a real-presence and a memorialist reading. The Black Rubric was omitted. The petition in the Litany against “the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities” was removed. The Ornaments Rubric directed that the ornaments of the church and ministers be those in use “in the second year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth.”

Notable and controversial

The Ornaments Rubric became one of the most disputed sentences in Anglican history: it could be read as requiring the vestments of 1549, while the Queen’s Injunctions and the later Advertisements (1566) of Archbishop Parker enforced only the surplice, leading to the Vestiarian Controversy with Puritan clergy. Puritans also objected to the ring in marriage, the sign of the cross in baptism and kneeling at communion. Roman Catholic recusants were fined for non-attendance. The book was used for over forty years and shaped the English language of the period.