Chapter 26
Chasing the Lady
Revealing, Reforming, and Restoring the Virgin Mary in the Eucharist during the English Reformations and beyond
Everyone sees and hears Mass every day; they say numbers of Paternosters in public; the women carry long rosaries in their hands; those who can read take the Office of Our Lady with them and say it in church with a companion, verse by verse, in a low voice, just as monks do; yet they always hear Mass on Sunday in their parish church … neither do they neglect any practice that betokens a good Christian (Cuming 1982: 1).
Introduction
The observation in the quote above, believed to have been made by a member of the Venetian Consulate, not only gives a snapshot of religious life in England on the eve of the Reformation, but also reveals the centrality of Marian devotion within it and the synergy between public worship and private devotion. This devotion would be re-inforced by image, pilgrimage, drama, and devotional writings, but because one of the unusual features of the English Reformation was its emphasis on the use of liturgy in spreading its beliefs (Jeanes 2012: 22), it will be fruitful to consider Mary’s place within the Eucharistic liturgy before and after the Reformations in England.
In this chapter, we will examine the place of Mary in the Sarum Mass: its Euchology, the calendar, and some of the Marian images that appear within the sequences. We will then explore how the chief architect of the English Reformation, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, situated Mary within the Eucharistic liturgy and consider some subsequent developments.
The Sarum Rite
Euchology
The Eucharistic liturgy was the preserve of the Church and, over the centuries in the West, had become standardized into the Roman Rite. It is true that local variations did exist: Cranmer, in his preface to the Book of Common Prayer 1549 (and succeeding editions), identifies five ‘Uses’ then current in England: Sarum (Salisbury), York, Hereford, Bangor, and Lincoln. Nevertheless, the main features of all the English ‘Uses’ were adopted, more or less, from Roman sources.
Mary is prominent in several places in the late medieval Mass. During the entrance rites, the priest recites the Ave Maria which, in translation, would have been: ‘Hail, Mary, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’ The extended version containing the words, ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners.’ was available from 1508 and the Franciscan ending, ‘Now and in the hour of our death.’ from 1525.1
At the Confession, the priest confesses to God, Mary, the saints, and to his fellow ministers:
I confess to God, to blessed Mary, to all the saints, and to you, that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, by my fault: I pray holy Mary, all the saints of God, and you, to pray for me.2
As the augmentation of existing liturgical texts was tolerated more readily than the introduction of new texts, troping provided religious poets and theologians with an important outlet for their thinking. Troped texts became immensely popular especially in Italy and England, and they came to be regarded as a regular part of the liturgy. From a textual point of view, the chief function of the trope was to explain or enlarge on the meaning of the base text. The Sarum troped Gloria, sung at the daily Lady Mass and on Marian feast days, is a case in point:
Glory be to God on high …
O Lord, the only-begotten Son, Jesu Christ, Spirit, and kind comforter of orphans; O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, First born of Mary virgin mother, Thou that takest away the sins of the world receive our prayer, To the glory of Mary. Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us.
For thou only are holy, sanctifying Mary, Thou only art the Lord, governing Mary, Thou only art most high, crowning Mary, Jesu Christ, with the Holy Ghost, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.3
The Preface for the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary praises her as the one who remains a virgin:
… the blessed and glorious ever Virgin Mary ought we with exulting souls to praise, to bless, and to proclaim. Who by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost did both conceive thy only–begotten One, and in the abiding glory of virginity did shed upon the world the eternal light, Jesus Christ our Lord.4
In the Canon of the Mass, Mary leads a list of twenty-four saints: ‘in the first place, of the glorious and ever virgin Mary, mother of our God and Lord Jesus Christ;’.5
Finally, during the Lord’s Prayer, Mary’s intercession is invoked to, ‘Graciously give peace in our days …’6
The Calendar (see the Table of Feast Days of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
The Sarum Missal provided for all the Marian feasts, in order of rank: the Assumption (15 August); the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September); the Visitation (2 July); the Purification (2 February); the Conception (8 December); the Annunciation (25 March); the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (21 November); the Compassion of the Virgin (possibly celebrated from Passion Sunday to Good Friday).7
Liturgical texts are also provided for the daily Lady Mass8 with seasonal variations for: Advent to Christmas, Christmas to the Purification, and from the Purification to Advent again. Although some of the material is common, this still presents us with a substantial body of liturgical texts.
Images of Mary within the Sequences
The sequence is an extended trope to the Alleluia, and with relatively few exceptions (one being the Marian anthems after Compline) it remained attached to the Alleluia. In effect, the sequence became a hymn before the Gospel reading in which the author had an opportunity to introduce material that was not directly associated with the Scriptures and employ popular Marian images. The sequence, therefore, played a significant role in presenting Marian typography, reinforcing Marian doctrines and authenticating their use by placing them within the Eucharistic rite itself.
The last part of this section will be organized around three major feast days corresponding to three headings that relate to a Marian theme:
As we shall see, all three themes and feasts are interrelated and reinforce each other.
The Crib
Huizinga (1996: 239) describes a ‘symbolic mode of thought’ that characterized late medieval culture. This mode of thinking is defined by a tendency to distil inexpressible truths into tangible images that act as a doorway into the mysterious world of the divine. It is not straightforward parallelism whereby a symbol merely represents an idea or figure. Rather, it is an approach in which symbol and meaning collapse into one another—in which symbols, as the only accessible forms of the ineffable, become directly identified along with that which is symbolized. Of course, the consecrated bread and wine were, in themselves, defining examples of this correspondence between sign and thing signified.
The Annunciation sequence is an example of this thought form:
Hail, virgin such as ne’er was known!
who by the bush wast erst foreshown,
which unconsumed did shine.
Although the sequence interweaves an extended form of Gabriel’s salutation (its base text), it quickly moves to proclaiming Mary as unique and foreshadowed in the Old Testament by the burning bush. This is a favourite image as it shows the presence of God within Mary but, like the bush that was on fire but not consumed, left her humanity intact.
Hail thou rose most fair to see!
hail, thou rod of Jesse’s line!
The sequence uses the biblical image of the Rose of Sharon (Song of Songs 2:1); the rose, as the queen of flowers and the loveliest in the garden, became associated with Mary. Further, Matthew’s genealogy ends the family tree (rod) with Mary as a direct descendant of Jesse and his son, David. The Church conferred on Matthew’s text, read during the Christmas Vigil Mass, a strong Marian emphasis which was depicted by the ‘Jesse Tree’ often found in a window or on a wall of a church.
The Lily represents pure love (Song of Songs 2:2) which finds its ideal in Mary. Its white petals suggest the purity and innocence of Mary who was born without sin. The Lily’s straight stem and funnel-shaped flower, which opens at the top, evokes Mary’s full acceptance of the will of God and her participation in the plan of salvation. This allegorical method was captured pictorially in the uniquely English iconography of the Lilly-Cross, where Christ is portrayed crucified on a Lilly. It reinforces the belief that the Crucifixion and the Annunciation (25 March) took place on the same date. The Lilly-Cross reveals the medieval mind by combining in one mystical image the incarnation, the Virgin’s purity and the sacrifice of Christ.10
This allegorical method also enabled an exegesis of biblical material which ‘revealed’ the hidden meaning beneath the written word as opposed to a more historical and literal approach to the text. With this exegetical approach, Scripture became a quarry from which to mine Mariological inferences which would profoundly influence liturgy and devotion throughout the Middle Ages in the West (see Warner 2013: 62ff). The legitimacy of this allegorical method would come under intense scrutiny with Renaissance Humanism’s desire for philological purity and the Reformers’ theological method.
The Annunciation is not only a celebration of God’s action in entering the world to save humanity in the conception of Christ, but also of Mary’s free acceptance to be the Mother of God. Mary, then, is seen not merely as an instrument or vessel through which God’s plan was processed, but rather as a participant who actively consented to bring about the salvation of the world. Irenaeus had already developed this theme by contrasting Eve’s disobedience with Mary’s free obedience: the former bequeathing death whilst the latter brought life (see Reynolds 2012: 55–6). This is reflected in the popular word play of Eva and Ave (See Warner 2013: 61f) found in the second sequence used at the daily Marian Mass:
An excellent and kindly word
is in that lowly chamber heard;
Eva the angel doth discard,
and Ave saith instead.11
The Cross
It has already been noted that Mary participated in the work of salvation through her divine maternity. The idea also developed that by remaining faithful to Christ, particularly in her suffering during Christ’s Crucifixion, Mary continued to contribute to the salvation of the world. The Compassion of Mary at the Cross was one of the most popular subjects in late-Medieval devotion. As Rubin (2009: 243) remarks, the Sorrowing Mother ‘overwhelmed the content and character of European devotional life’ (see also Duffy 1992: 260f). This affective devotion mirrors a general desire on the part of the devotee to interact with Mary’s story and her feelings as they run parallel with her son’s life. Although initially a private devotion, the Compassion of Mary began to be observed liturgically in the West from the early fifteenth century.
The feast, Missa Compassionis sive Lamentationis beatæ Mariæ Virginis, first appears in the printed Sarum missal of 1497 and is included in about half of the editions until 1526 when it appears in all editions until its final issue in 1557 (Pfaff 1970: 97). In England, it was probably celebrated on the Friday before Passion Sunday (Pfaff 2009: 540).
As the sequence progresses through the stanzas, the voice shifts in person: it begins in the third person and is punctuated by the first person. The reason may be because the Compassion was originally a private devotion which was transplanted into a public, liturgical setting. When it describes the death, deposition, and burial of Jesus, it becomes commentary-like and resonates with the Stabat Mater: ‘Thus the mother standeth mournful’,12 and the Pietà: ‘O mournful sight, the mother seated half-dead clasping to her bosom the stripped and life-extinguished corpse.’
The sequence also contains:
‘Is that the favour thou broughest [sic] unto me,
O Gabriel, when thou saidst to me,
Hail, Mary, full of grace?’
The irony here is palpable and once again highlights the importance of the Annunciation in the understanding of Mary’s role within the salvation story: at the Cross and by the Crib. The reversal of fortune is emphasized with, ‘when now instead of grace to me, there cometh grief and suffering’. In this turn of events, the uniqueness of Mary is highlighted with the words, ‘Amongst all women thou didst call me blessed: all may now behold me mourning and afflicted’. This sentiment is strengthened by the use of the Simeon motif which inspired theologians, artists, and poets throughout the medieval period to interpret the prophecy in Luke 2:35 to Mary at the Cross: ‘A sword shall pierce through your own soul also’ (see Warner 2013: 10, 213, 216). ‘Joyfully, mother, thou didst conceive, and wast not sensible of pain. … Now thou hast paid with usury for the pains thou didst then escape, …’ highlights the belief that Mary gave birth without pain as she conceived without sin, but suffered pain at the Cross with the death of her son. The idea that Mary did not suffer pain during childbirth is a recurring theme in the Votive Mass on behalf of women labouring with child.13
With the rise of the mendicant orders, particularly the Franciscans in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, meditations on Mary’s compassion at the foot of the Cross moved to a wider audience. This devotional theme was given particular impetus, as Duffy (1992: 259) suggests, ‘in the face of the successive waves of the plague sweeping through Christendom’.
The Crown
The feast of the Assumption was the highest-ranking of all Marian feasts and was celebrated with a vigil on its eve and an octave thereafter. Mirk (2011: 206), writing in the fifteenth century, explained that after Mary’s Assumption, Jesus, ‘coronet hur quene of heven and emperas of helle and lady of alle þe worlde’. She had influence over demons and special powers of protection.
As a merciful mother, the protection of Mary became important for a number of reasons. One is to do with the worldview that the universe was populated with demons that were waiting to drag the lapsed Christian off to hell—particularly during the final hours of life. Doom scenes painted on chancel arches in parish churches constantly reminded worshippers that they were in the midst of a cosmic battle between good and evil and that their life hung in the balance. In some iconography Mary would be seen ‘tipping the balance’ in the ‘Weighing of the Souls’ by placing her Rosary in favour of the believer (see Duffy 1992: 319).
As the preoccupation with purgatory grew, the need for protection against, or rescue from, the devil increased. The myracles of oure blessyd lady, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 and 1514, and the Golden Legend, produced eight times by English printers between 1483 and 1527, had numerous stories of Marian intervention. The best known is the story of Theophilus who sold his soul to the Devil and petitioned the Virgin to help him rescind the contract. So, using this story, a sequence for the daily Lady Mass reminded the worshipper of Mary’s ability to rescue the lost soul from hell:
Thou art the mother, too, of pity
Theophilus thou didst reclaim
Out of the pit of guilt and shame [.]14
Arguably, another reason for seeing Mary as guardian was that the earthly courtly procedures were projected onto the heavenly realm where the King and his Queen-mother would receive the fealty of their devotees in return for their protection. This image is expressed in the sequence for the Nativity of Mary:
For thou, terrestrial queen, all power dost hold,
With thy Son, ruling over all for ever …
For near thy Son installed, at his right hand
Thou sitt’st, in virtue and in wisdom shining.15
This proximity of Mary to Christ is exploited in the closing lines of the sequence for the Assumption where Mary is seen as Mediatrix:
Jesus Himself, to welcome thee his mother,
Came with the angels forth, and set thee up
With him for ever in his Father’s seat.
With God now reigning, mercifully pardon
Our evil deeds, and ask for us all good.
O graciuous mediatrix, next to God
Our only hope, commend us to thy Son,
That we in highest heaven may Alleluias sing.16
Coulton (1923: I.151) remarked, ‘it is difficult to see how the ordinary medieval worshipper can have avoided the conclusion that, for practical purposes, Mary mattered more to him than Christ’. This may be an exaggeration, but, as we have seen, Mary was embedded in the liturgical texts on the eve of the Reformation in England just as she was more broadly present in the symbolic and social worlds of late-medieval Christians.
Cranmer and Beyond
When considering Cranmer’s liturgical reforms, Duffy (1992: 464) maintains that they represented a radical discontinuity with the past, and purposefully set themselves ‘to transform lay experience of the Mass, and in the process eliminated almost everything that had till then been central to lay Eucharistic piety’. Change there certainly was, and much of it must have appeared to be drastic. However, Cranmer did not have a clean slate upon which to shape his reformed rites. He, like Luther, worked with the liturgy that he inherited and saw his task as purifying the texts rather than replacing them (Brightman 1921 and Cuming 1983 show that, at a textual level, Cranmer’s work, although translated, was based on the Sarum rite). As MacCulloch (2016a: 328) remarks about Cranmer’s first vernacular service, the 1544 Litany, ‘like all Cranmer’s compositions, it is an ingenious effort of scissors and paste out of previous texts … the bulk comes from the Sarum rite which had become Cranmer’s preferred text among the uses of medieval England, but Sarum’s invocation of saints were drastically pruned away, and only Mary was mentioned by name’. So, Cranmer (1549: 4) could maintain, ‘that here you haue an ordre for praier (as touchyng the readyng of holy scripture) muche agreeable to the mynde and purpose of the olde fathers, and a greate deal more profitable and commodious, than that whiche of late was used’.
Euchology
In the first Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549, the commemoration within the Eucharistic Prayer reads:
And, here we do geue unto thee moste high praise, and heartie thankes, for the wonderfull grace and vertue, declared in all thy sainctes from the begynning of the worlde: And chiefly in the glorious and moste blessed virgin Mary, mother of thy sonne Jesu Christe our Lorde and God, and in the holy Patriarches, Prophetes, Apostles and Martyrs, whose examples (o Lorde) and stedfastnes in thy fayth, and keepyng thy holy commandmentes, graunt us to folowe. (Cranmer 1549: 202–3)
The sources are Sarum and possibly the Liturgy of St Basil (Brightman 1921: 690). However, for the purposes of this study, if Cranmer used Basil then he firmly omitted Basil’s semper virgo and, by breaking the phrase ‘Mary, mother of thy sone, Jesu Christe, our Lorde and God’ emphasized the Christological nature of the term Theotokos. Three years later, in the second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552, Cranmer (1552: 168) removed the whole paragraph.
This Christological refocusing is further seen in the collect for the Annunciation. What is really striking is that Cranmer deliberately chooses the Sarum postcommunion prayer17 in preference to the Sarum collect thereby omitting any reference to Mary by name and her intercessory role. The Prayer Book collect reads:
We beseche thee, Lorde, powre thy grace into our heartes; that, as we haue knowen Christ, thy sonnes incarnacion, by the message of an Angell, so by hys crosse and passion, we maye be brought unto the glory of his resurrecion; Through the same Christ our Lorde. (Cranmer 1549: 169)
Whereas the Sarum collect has:
O God, who wast pleased that thy Word should take flesh in the womb of the blessed virgin Mary, through the message of an angel; grant unto us thy suppliants that as we believe her to be truly the mother of God, so we may be aided by her intercession before thee.18
The Sarum Missal has three masses during Christmas: ‘at Cock-crow’, ‘at Daybreak’, and ‘at the Third Mass’:
At Cock-Crow:
O God, who has caused this most holy night to shine with the illumination of the true light; grant, we beseech thee, that as we have known the mysteries of this light on earth, we may also attain the full enjoyment of it in heaven, …19
At Daybreak:
Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, unto us on whom is largely shed the new light of thy incarnate Word, that as by faith it enlightens the mind, so also it may shine forth in action.20
At the Third Mass:
Grant, we beseech thee, almighty God, that we who are held in bondage by the old yoke of sin may be set free by the new birth in the flesh of thy only-begotten Son.21
The Prayer Book collect for Christmas, which first appeared in 1549 for the Second Communion, reads:
Almyghtye God, whiche haste geuen us thy onlye begotten sonne to take our nature upon hym, and this daye to bee borne of a pure Vyrgyn: Graunte that we beyng regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, maye dailye be renued by thy holy spirite; through the same our Lorde Jesus Christe, who lyueth and reygneth &c … (Cranmer 1549: 39)
While Cranmer’s collect does not mention Mary by name (but neither do the Sarum collects) it does have a firmer Christological focus and clearly resonates with the traditional understanding of the incarnation. Secondly, although Mary’s significance as a ‘pure Virgin’ can be determined by the Incarnation, we should note that the language strongly resonates with the King’s Book of 1543 giving it a definite Mariological interpretation (Lloyd 1858: 232).
Why did Cranmer reject all three Sarum Christmas collects in favour of his own composition? I believe that with first-hand experience of the Radical Reformation, Cranmer, combating the celestial flesh doctrine, drew close to having to affirm a form of Immaculate Conception and that this is seen liturgically focused in the Collect and Preface for Christmas Day.
All three Sarum Christmas collects are open to a less than orthodox interpretation. The phrase in the Sarum collect of the Third Mass, from which the Prayer Book Epistle and Gospel readings are taken, ‘… the new birth in the flesh …’ is less explicit and bodily than ‘born of a pure Virgin’. Cranmer grounds his collect in classical Christology and safeguards it from any interpretation regarding the celestial flesh doctrine which developed during the Radical Reformation. This doctrine tried to preserve the sinlessness of Jesus by insisting that although Jesus was begotten and carried ‘in’ Mary’s womb, he was not born ‘of’ her—Jesus did not derive his flesh from Mary, but, mystically, from heaven (see Peters 2003: 218–21; MacCulloch 2016b: 46–52).
Cranmer’s insistence on classical Christology is further exhibited when we consider the Prayer Book Preface for Christmas:
Because thou diddeste geue Jesus Christe, thyne onely sonne, to bee borne as this daye for us; who by the operacion of the holy ghoste, was made very man, of the substance of the Virgin Mari his mother, and that without spot of sinne to make us cleane from all synne. (Cranmer, 1549: 201)
The ten Prefaces found in the Sarum Missal were reduced to five in 1549. The Prefaces for Easter, Trinity, and Ascension are based on the Sarum rite, whilst Whitsun recounted the biblical narrative from Acts. The Christmas preface was new for 1549 and is purposefully theological. Brightman (1921: 684) gives the source of the Christmas Preface as The King’s Book:
the incarnation was not wrought by the seed of man, but by the Holy Ghost in the said most blessed virgin, without any motion of concupiscence or spot of sin [emphasis added], and was accomplished without any violation or detriment unto the virginity of that blessed virgin St. Mary, who, both in the conception and also in the birth and nativity of our Saviour Jesu Christ, her child, and ever after, retained her virginity pure and immaculate, and as clear without blot as she was at the time that she was first born.
(Lloyd 1858: 232; in passing, we should note the belief in Mary’s virginityante partum, in partum, and post partum)
As Cranmer was closely involved with The King’s Book (and its predecessor, The Bishops’ Book, published in 1537), I believe that the Christmas Preface, as the Christmas Collect, is the work of Cranmer. Why did he do this? When considering the two Prefaces for Christmas in the Sarum rite, outside and within the Canon of the Mass, it becomes clear that, in the face of the celestial flesh doctrine, Cranmer wanted again to emphasize a more orthodox understanding of the incarnation without having to assent to the ‘immaculate virginity’ of Mary.
Sarum Christmas preface outside the Canon of the Mass:
Because by the mystery of the incarnate Word, the new light of thy brightness hath shone upon the eyes of our mind, so that while we acknowledge him to be God visibly, we may by him be caught up into the love of things invisible.
Sarum Christmas preface within the Canon of the Mass:
In communion with and celebrating the most holy day on which the immaculate virginity of the blessed Mary, brought forth a Saviour for this world.22
Consequently, Cranmer composed a new Christmas preface reinforcing Catholic teaching regarding the Incarnation while avoiding explicitly supporting the Immaculate Conception liturgically.
Since the fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster in 1536, MacCulloch argues that, ‘throughout his career as Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer was at the forefront of efforts to counter the ideas and activities of the Anabaptists’ (MacCulloch 2016a 146). As part of the Commission set up in 1549—note date—to combat the threat of heresy, Cranmer was personally and deeply involved in the prosecution of the first of only two heretics burnt during the reign of Edward. The motivation was Jane Bocher’s denial that Jesus took flesh from the Virgin Mary. As MacCulloch says about Cranmer and the Reformers’ equivocal feelings about Mary:
On the one hand they saw it as a major work of piety to demolish and demystify the cultic and devotional world of which she was the centrepiece. On the other, they needed her as a bastion to defend the Catholic faith against the more militant forces which the Reformation had unleashed. (MacCulloch 2016b: 32)
The English Reformers continued to maintain the agreed doctrine of the early Ecumenical Councils concerning Mary: they accepted her as Theotokos, they accepted her as ‘Ever-Virgin’, they were reluctant to say that Mary was a sinner and yet they wanted to preserve the uniqueness of Christ’s sinlessness and the universality of humanity’s sinfulness. (See Williams 2007) Lastly, in the Collect and Preface for Christmas Day, we find Cranmer attempting to establish a middle ground between the then contested doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and the Radical Reformers’ view of Christ’s flesh.
Calendar (see Table of Feast Days of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
The 1549 Calendar saw the non-biblical saints excluded. However, even with the Christological refocusing mentioned above, two feasts maintained their Marian title: ‘The Purification of St Mary the Virgin’ and ‘The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary’. They survived because of their clear biblical and Christological focus, but it is worth noting that Mary is always described as ‘the Virgin’.
In 1559, a Table of Proper Lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer on Sundays and holy days was added, and, in its listing, 25 March is called the ‘Annunciation of our Ladye’ (Cranmer 1559: 25).
In 1561 more non-biblical saints were restored to the 1552 Calendar as ‘Black Letter Days’—the saint is acknowledged but not given any liturgical texts or biblical readings. With these returned three Marian feasts: the Conception on 8 December, the Visitation on 2 July and the Nativity on 8 September: the Assumption remained excluded.
The Ecclesiastical Commission introduced the 1561 Calendar in response to a letter by Queen Elizabeth which asked it ‘to peruse the order of the said Lessons throughout the whole year, and to cause some new Kalendars to be imprinted, whereby such chapters or parcels of less edification may be removed, and other more profitable may supply their rooms …’ (Procter and Frere 1914: 109). According to Procter and Frere, Elizabeth’s letter had little impact on the lectionary, but the Calendar exploded with commemorations. Why should this be?
It is hard to determine how Queen Elizabeth wanted to shape the Church of England as her actions and signals, particularly in the early years of her reign, were unclear. Some scholars would argue that she would have preferred the 1549 Prayer Book, but, having to rely on Protestant sympathizers for leadership in her Church, she was left with little option but to accept the 1552 rite, albeit with small, but significant, modifications in a less Reformed direction.23
Using a clause in her Act of Uniformity, Elizabeth authorized in 1560 the Liber Precum Publicarum, a Latin version of the Book of Common Prayer for use at Eton, Winchester, and in the college chapels of Oxford and Cambridge. The editor, probably Walter Haddon, employed a Latin version of the 1549 Prayer Book initially prepared by Alexander Alesius in 1551. Streatfield accused Haddon of following Alesius ‘blindly’ (Streatfield 1964: 3), but the original contained in the British Library (STC 2nd ed. 16423) shows that this is not the case regarding the Calendar. Haddon emphatically does not follow Alesius at this point and rejects not only the 1549 Calendar but also the 1552 and the 1559 Calendar of which the latter is claimed to be its translation. The 1560 Calendar not only gives a commemoration on almost every day of the year (Clay 1847: 317–22) but returns the Conception, the Visitation, the Nativity, and even the Presentation of Mary on 21 November: the Assumption was not included. Perhaps on this, and other accounts, the Latin Prayer Book of 1560 was not well received by some—‘the Pope’s dregs’ as it was later called (Procter and Frere 1914: 124).
Amongst the membership of the Ecclesiastical Commission tasked with reviewing the 1559 Calendar were Archbishop Parker and Walter Haddon. Haddon, as we have seen, was the compiler of the Latin Prayer Book which Parker, still seemingly committed to its contents, tried to impose on Corpus Christi College and Gonville Hall, Cambridge as late as 1568. Astonishingly, in less than four weeks, 22 January–15 February, the Commission had prepared and published the new Calendar. It is this Calendar of 1561, influenced by the Calendar of 1560 which first re-introduced the Conception, the Visitation, and the Nativity of Mary with Walter Haddon as its common factor, that became the Calendar in all subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer.
Sequences
In 1543 Cranmer informed Convocation of the King’s desire to examine, reform, and revise all service books. Up until then, liturgical revision had consisted of amending the text by the deletion of the Pope’s name and the remembrance of St Thomas Becket. This time, however, the plan was not just to modify the original text but to produce new texts with the specific aim of removing non-scriptural elements:
all apocryphas, feigned legends, superstitious orations, collects, versicles, and responses: that the names and memories of all saints, which were not contained in the Scriptures or authentic doctors, should be abolished and put out of the same books and calendars: and that the service should be made out of the Scriptures, and other authentic doctors. (Dixon 1895: II.315)
The Royal Injunctions following the Commissioners Visitation at Canterbury Cathedral in 1547 recommended the suppression of the sequence (Frere 1910: 142). Stanley Morrison (2009: 54) explains this by saying, ‘Professional musicians habitually disregard the purpose of worship. Cranmer saw the necessity of keeping the choirmaster on a leash.’ This is both unworthy and inadequate. Cranmer was following in the footsteps of Luther and Zwingli when he suppressed the use of the sequences in his cathedral and then omitted them from the 1549 Prayer Book.24 He was well aware of the power of the sequence to convey doctrine and images that were contrary to Scripture as they contained, ‘… apocryphas, feigned legends, superstitious orations … ’.
The sequences reflected the medieval religion in which they were created, a religion whose magnificent hagiographies and symbolic exegesis were attacked with ever-increasing vehemence during the Reformation. The removal of the sequences from the Eucharistic rite was a form of iconoclasm which was just as powerful as that happening in churches up and down the land.
Recent Developments
Not until the seventeenth century did theologians, such as the Caroline Divines, again become creative in their reflection on Mary as a type of the Church’s delight in God’s Word and of the Church’s obedience to God’s Spirit (see Allchin 1993). This legacy would be exploited by the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century and the Catholic Movement in the latter part of the twentieth century (see Morris 2004).
In the Prayer Book of 1662, ‘Blessed’ was inserted into the title of the Annunciation on 25 March with the Purification given a Christological title—‘The Presentation of Christ in the Temple’. A reference to Mary within the Prayers was avoided because the editors, at this point, purposefully chose to follow the Scottish Liturgy of 1637 rather than the 1549 rite (Cuming 1961: xxiii, 151).
The Alternative Service Book of 1980 made 8 September a Festival and Greater Holy Day of The Blessed Virgin Mary, gave the Visitation a set of readings as a Lesser Festival, made Mary a subject of the Collect of Advent 4 and gave a Proper Preface for the Annunciation. In the third Eucharistic Prayer, the phrase, ‘born of the blessed Virgin’, based on the Apostolic Tradition usually attributed to Hippolytus, first appears in modern times.
The Common Worship calendar raises the Purification and the Annunciation (understood as feasts of Our Lord) as Principal Feasts, restores 15 August as the Festival of The Blessed Virgin Mary with a collect resonating with the glorification of Mary as well as our own:
Almighty God,
who looked upon the lowliness of the Blessed Virgin Mary
and chose her to be the mother of your only Son:
grant that we redeemed by his blood
may share with her in the glory of your eternal kingdom.
Common Worship also raised the Visitation to the status of a Festival and made both the Birth and Conception of Mary Lesser Festivals. The parents of Mary, Anne and Joachim, mentioned in the Protoevangelium of James, are given 26 July as a Lesser Festival. The phrase, ‘born of the blessed Virgin’ is again found in Eucharistic Prayer B and Mary is mentioned by name in Prayer G.
Common Worship: Festivals has full liturgical texts for the Annunciation, the Visitation, and a votive for The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Common of the Saints. The latter means that, for the first time since the Sarum rite, the possibility of a stand-alone, votive Mass, with Collect and Readings, for Mary is provided (Common Worship: Festivals, Anon. 2008: 268–76).
Conclusion
The austerity in the Prayer Book speaks volumes about the extent to which, in the sixteenth century, Marian devotion was cauterized by the climate of reaction to the ubiquitous Marian piety of the late Middle Ages. From 1552, except for the Creed and Preface for Christmas Day, Mary is not mentioned by name in the Eucharistic rite. However, in the face of the celestial flesh doctrine of Radical Reformation, Mary’s essential role in the Incarnation had to be liturgically reinforced by Cranmer’s composition of the Collect and Preface for Christmas Day. The Cross and the Crown had vanished leaving only the Crib.
With the return of the Conception, the Visitation, and the Nativity in the 1561 Calendar, joining the Purification and Annunciation, a rudimentary Marian liturgical cycle can be traced, which left room for Marian piety to develop in later centuries.
Today’s provision of authorized Marian liturgical texts in the Church of England is a resource which is now widely used beyond the bounds of Anglo-Catholicism and Anglicanism.