| Abstrakt: |
Special prayers, and masses and processions with a special intention, were well established in English tradition before the Reformation as weapons against adversity, and appear to have been increasingly encouraged under Cranmer’s influence until the Edwardian Articles and Injunctions put paid to processions and sounded a note of caution also about fasting. The English Litany, conceived as a procession in 1544, became a static observance from 1547 but in either mode was (and is) a treasury of supplications against most conceivable adversities. The successive Books of Common Prayer went further than the pre-Reformation service books in furnishing prayers for use in times of dearth and famine, war and tumult, plague and sickness and for a time obviated further special prayers and ceremonies. But scarcely were the 1559 Prayer Book and Act of Uniformity promulgated than the staple ingredients of the former and the minimum requirements of the latter for church attendance on Sundays and feast days came to be seen as inadequate to meet spiritual needs in a crisis. Church and state authorities began regularly to print and distribute special prayers to supplement the Prayer Book, tailored to each emergency: both prayers of supplication while a crisis lasted and prayers of thanksgiving when it was over. |
