Common Prayer – The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England

"Common Prayer" explores the relationship between prayer and poetry in the century following the Protestant Reformation. Ramie Targoff challenges the conventional and misleading distinctions between the ritualized world of Catholicism and the more individualistic focus of Protestantism. Early modern England, she demonstrates, was characterized less by the triumph of religious interiority than by efforts to shape public forms of devotion. At the heart of this argument lies an original and daring approach to understanding the origins of devotional poetry. Targoff shows how the projects of composing eloquent verse and improving liturgical worship came to be deeply intertwined; how new literary practices became a powerful means of forging common prayer, and controlling private and otherwise unmanageable expressions of faith.