Common Prayer, by Ramie Targoff

Preaching at St. Paul's Cross in London in 1625, John Donne responded to Puritan critics of the Church of England: "If I come to extemporal prayer, and extemporal preaching, I shall come to an extemporal faith, and extemporal religion; and then I shall look for an extemporal Heaven, a Heaven to be made for me." Donne continued: "Let us not pray, not preach, not hear slackly, suddenly, unadvisedly, extemporally, occasionally, indiligently."

Donne's protest against an ad hoc kind of Christianity for producing a  self-centered and privatized form of religion led to the accusation that the establishmentarians wanted to stifle the nonconformist freedom to cultivate an inward personal piety, and to replace it with a stiff and unfeeling adherence to the Book of Common Prayer. Ramie Targoff, a professor of English at Yale, shows what is wrongheaded about such a view, and in so doing she offers important help, albeit unintentionally, for the contemporary church in making the link between formal worship and well-formed Christian lives.

Targoff is one of the New Historicists. She wants to uncover the radically particular historical circumstances, often political and religious, that helped shape literary texts. The Book of Common Prayer, a work that has influenced worship in the Anglophone world perhaps more than any other, did not drop pristinely from the skies. Nor was it merely Thomas Cranmer's clever theological compromise between Romanists on the right and Calvinists on the left. It was the product, instead, of the Church of England's deliberate insistence that carefully scripted public worship decisively shapes and transforms Christian worshipers.